I can’t remember when I first read Ian Rankin, or if I’ve even read all of the Rebus series for that matter. I just know that I can always pick up one of his books and find a great plot matched with interesting characters. The implication in Exit Music, the last Rebus novel, was that the detective was about to retire. Rankin moved to another great series that involves Malcolm Fox of the The Complaints department (the UK’s version of IAB).

To my surprise, Rebus is appearing in another book, Standing in Another Man’s Grave, out now. John Rebus now works as a civilian in the cold case department. Nina Hazlitt asks him to investigate the disappearance of her daughter ten years ago, as well as two other women who disappeared along the same highway, the A9, in the last decade. He’s reunited with his former partner Siobahn Clarke, and Malcolm Fox makes a cameo, investigating Rebus as he applies to be let back on the force. The ending leaves us to believe that this is not the last we’re seeing of John Rebus, and I for one am glad.

I always wonder how women get sucked into cults. What’s can lure a woman to do things they normally might never consider, say marrying fifty other women in a polygamous relationship with one man? Amity & Sorrow, Peggy Riley’s debut novel addresses this very question as Amaranth flees the cult she had been a part of since the beginning. Charismatic cult leader Zacariah had sought to take their daughter Sorrow as a new wife, and Amaranth made the decision to flee with her two daughters. She drives for four days straight before crashing the car in Oklahoma. There she tries to figure out how to navigate the outside world. Her daughters, raised their whole lives in a small enclave, have an even harder time. Sorrow believes she’s the Oracle, meant to bring a new messiah into the world. She longs to be back with her father and embarks on a self-destructive mission to return to the cult. Amity, younger and more naive, tries to watch out for her sister and figure out her role in the new family structure. The whole book is disturbing, claustrophobic almost with a creepy ending. Peggy Riley has written a memorable first novel.

I don’t often reread things. There are so many good books out there waiting for me, I never feel like I have time to go back to something read once already. There are exceptions of course, like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Peter Hessler, with his newest book of essays, has become another.

The other day I spotted an ARC in the office of Peter Hessler’s Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West. When I realized it was a compilation of essays previously published in The New Yorker, I was briefly disappointed. Still, I flipped through and started reading an essay I hadn’t caught the first time around. Then I kept on reading, even the ones I had read in the magazine. I found that it made me appreciate what a fine writer Hessler is. His profile of Yao Ming brought him off the court and turned him into a flesh and blood person for me. ‘Wild Flavor’ reviews two restaurants that specialize in rats. He doesn’t go the route many travel writers go, with the ‘look how different our cultures are, I’m eating something weird” route. He tries to understand why rat is considered a delicacy and makes an effort to eat and enjoy it.

I ended up reading the entire collection, enjoying it the entire time. Hessler’s book has reminded me that there are reasons people go back to books they love; for me, it was to enjoy the essays in a completely new way.

When you first begin reading John Kenney’s debut novel Truth in Advertising, you might mistake the narrator for yet another one of those twentysomething lost-in-the world voices. Finbar Dolan might be lost, but he’s almost forty. A copywriter at an ad agency, he finds himself on the sets of commercials discussing baby diapers while trying to navigate the minefield of his family life. We learn in bits and pieces that his entire family is unraveling, that his abusive father is dying in a hospital, that his mother committed suicide when he was twelve, that no one in the family talks about it, that they don’t even talk to each other all that much.

The first thing most people asked me upon learning I was in culinary school was what restaurant I aspired to work in when I was done. I spent the whole year telling people that I had no desire to work in a kitchen professionally. Okay, almost no desire. Who doesn’t dream of running their own kitchen one day? After spending a lot of time doing stages (fancy name for an unpaid internship also called a trail) at various restaurants around town, I know it’s not for me for a variety of reasons.

If you want to understand how demanding a kitchen can be, read Scott Haas’s new book Back of the House: The Secret Life of a Restaurant. The food writer and clinical psychologist spent eighteen months in the kitchen of James Beard Award-winner Tony Maws of Craigie on Main, here in Cambridge. Maws began with a smaller restaurant called Craigie Street Bistrot on a side street in Cambridge with a constantly changing menu. Both a neighborhood restaurant and a place for real invention, it and Maws gained a reputation for imaginative and creative food. In 2008, Maws moved into a larger space in Central Square, Cambridge with a bar, more seats, and an open kitchen, renaming it Craigie on Main. Its reputation has only gotten better.

I’ve been lucky enough to eat there several times, both at the older location and the new. Mr. Bookdwarf and I treated ourselves to the ten course tasting menu once for a birthday. I’ll never forget the chef himself coming out with a stuffed pig trotter served on a bed of grains. Mind blowing. We were just starting to explore food and though the check set us back a bit, we regretted nothing. This was before the days when food-bloggers were photographing each plate, but I remember most of those dishes with startling clarity. In 2009, we got engaged at the bar in Craigie on Main, and held the rehearsal dinner there the night before the wedding. Another indelible image: Mr. Bookdwarf and his grandmother sharing an entree for two that consisted of a half a roasted pig’s head.

So Haas’ book holds both professional and personal interest for me. Maws gave Haas unlimited access to himself and his crew. Maws has a reputation around town for what I’ll call his intensity in the kitchen. We witnessed it once: We were eating at sat  at seats overlooking the open kitchen, which was bustling quietly until someone made a mistake. Maws sounded like he was trying not to scream. We heard only “Don’t … you… EVER….” before he stormed into the back. The line cook and the ring-side diners all seemed shaken, but the quiet bustle returned and the meal went on.

Haas gets to the roots of this intensity: For Maws, perfect execution every time is an absolute necessity and obsession. He has only the one restaurant, no cookbook, no brand-diffusion line. Chef, after all, is French for chief. Being the boss means having your name on the door and your reputation on the line when something goes wrong. Maws trusts no-one else to get things done right every single time, and so he spends his entire life in the restaurant. Over the course of the book, Haas sees Maws try to step back and delegate slightly more, trust his lieutenants to do the work, and allow them to make and recover from and learn from mistakes. Still, the entire Craigie ethos is one of absolute lack of compromise  from ingredient to table. This is, after all, a man who refuses to serve tomatoes out of season. In New England, that means that there are tomatoes on the menu only during August and September. Craigie is a rarity in the restaurant world: Innovative, completely its own animal, and still formal and restrained.

Haas shows us the kind of fanatical person, and the kind of intense work, it takes to make a restaurant like that happen, and keep happening, every day for decades.

When someone asks me if I want to be a line cook, I’m going to tell them to read Haas. I love food, I love cooking, and I love the restaurant world. But it takes a special kind of insanity to make it into your living.

Michael Moss, the New York Times reporter Pulitzer prize winner reporter, has written an eye opening book, Salt, Sugar, Fat: How Food Giants Hooked Us, which continues his investigations into the processed food industry. From the creation of Lunchables to the pushback from industry giants against regulations on salt and sugar, Moss covers it all and more. You’ll learn about the bliss point of sugar, the rise of cheese in the American diet, and that Cargill turns out 1.7 billion pounds of salt a year for use in food. 1.7 billion! This book is comprehensive and I can’t stop quoting bits of it to Mr. Bookdwarf. You’ll never grocery shop the same way again, I promise. Consider this news report that came out today.