Titles starting with M from 20th Century Books

A budding friendship, an elaborate art heist scheme, and lots of adventure make up this engaging middle grade novel by the author of SHAKESPEARE’S SECRET. Marvin, a talented beetle who lives with his family under the Pompaday’s kitchen sink, and 11-year-old James Pompaday become friends when Martin creates an incredible drawing with James’s pen-and-ink set. But when James’s mother discovers the illustration and thinks it was done by James, the pair is off on a crazy adventure involving the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Albrecht Durer, and catching a thief. Both a meditation on art and a thoughtful character study, this is a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2008.

When Meer Logan is shown a 19th-century photograph that resembles the drawings she drew as a child, she realizes that she has been having memories of her past lives. Soon she is drawn into a knotty plot involving Ludwig Van Beethoven and a magical "memory flute" that is coveted by both the FBI and a gang of vicious thieves. M. J. Rose's THE MEMORIST offers up both tantalizing supernatural conceits and old-fashioned thrills, and is a worthy follow-up to THE REINCARNATIONIST.