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For laughing out loud, crying inside or heart-pounding excitement, here are three books to complement your lazy days in the sun.

Life's a Beach by Claire Cook

Claire Cook is one funny woman, which you already know if you read Must Love Dogs. In Life's a Beach, her new summer release, 41-year-old Ginger Walsh, tired of the corporate world and of traveling, is now living in her parent's FROG (furnished room over garage) with a cat named Boyfriend. Ginger's sort-of boyfriend, Noah, is a glassblower who has great moves in bed but has made no move to commit. And neither, frankly, has Ginger. She's too busy trying to become an artist (making jewelry from beach glass).

The fun begins when Ginger agrees to baby-sit her nephew, who has landed a starring role in a movie set in their home town on Cape Cod. Cook herself was on the set of Must Love Dogs as it was being filmed. That's when she decided a movie set would provide great fodder for her sense of humor. Her nephew, preparing for the scene where he loses his arm to a shark, is Cook at her best.

Add to that mix Ginger's dump-addicted dad, who uses Ginger's shower to hide his finds from Ginger's Karma Sutra t-shirt-wearing mom; her mom, who has decided to sell the family home, much to the horror of Ginger and her dad; and a sister obsessed with turning 50.

Some reviews will say Clare Cook's Life's a Beach is essentially about family, especially about the relationship between two sisters. Others will say it's about finding and then having the courage to follow your dream. And it is about all of that, but certainly not in any profound way. Aboutness is not what Cook is "about." Instead of using humor as the vehicle for insight into life's situation, Cook uses life's situations as a vehicle for her humor. And she's mastering that in much the way Seinfield mastered having a show "about nothing."

A warning: If you are one who gets embarrassed laughing aloud while reading a book in public, be careful when reading this one. It's the beach read of the summer.

Recipes for a Perfect Marriage by Morag Prunty

Prunty's novel is told in alternating narratives. Tressa, a modern-day New York woman and a successful food writer, is sure she has married the wrong man. She makes lists of the things she hates about her husband: "He wants to move to Yonkers. He wears tartan shirts. He prefers instant coffee." And that's just for starters. The other narrative is provided by the journals (and recipes) of Tressa's Irish grandmother, Bernadine, who was married to one man for 50 years, all the time loving the man she was not allowed to marry.

Prunty is a good writer, and a wise one. She has a keen eye for sensory details and an even keener third eye for what those details mean. Here is the Irish grandmother's reflection after having attended the funeral of her beloved mother-in-law:

"That is death's dirtiest trick; the way it plays with time so that the funeral seems to go on forever; yet when it's over, you are placed back in your first moment of shock, as if it hadn't happened at all."

It would spoil the broth (apropos of recipes) to reveal what this book says about the kind of love that women yearn for, the kind of love they sometimes find and what they should do about it. Suffice it to say, readers will take a journey to Ireland of the past, "watching the sky with gold and a hundred shades of purple; gray rain clouds hovering over Killala." Readers will also spend time with cell-phone dependent women in modern day Manhattan, and even get in on restoring a house in Yonkers.

And then there are the recipes — rhubarb tart, gooseberry jam and children's fairy cakes, to name a few. All of which would be great to serve at book club gatherings to discuss this thought provoking book.

The Watchman by Robert Crais

Robert Crais defines LA in the way Robert Parker has defined Boston. He brings the City of Angels alive with the verve of its characters and its sprawling neighborhoods, tangled in a web of freeways and cars – always cars. In The Watchman, Crais takes us for the ride of our lives through the mean streets of LA. This time, instead of Crais' usual lead, PI Elvis Cole, it is Joe Pike, Cole's dangerous and virtually silent partner, who is the main driver. These two go together like Smith & Wesson.

In classic LA style, it is their cars that define them. Cole, in his wild shirts, moves sleekly through town in his vintage yellow Corvette. Pike is all business and all-wheel drive. He sports an immaculate Jeep and favors sweatshirts with cutoff sleeves.

The adrenaline starts when for kicks heiress Larken Barkley puts the pedal to the floor of her exotic sports car and closes her eyes for seconds at a time. She crashes into a sinister looking Mercedes, whose three passengers disappear into the night. Soon the crash begins to look like the least of her worries.

Normally, Pike would not be one to get involved with a poster child for glamour and excess, but he is, above all, a man of honor. Obliged to return a favor to a shadowy character from his past, Pike finds himself duty-bound to save Larken Barkley both from herself and from professional killers. Like the director of an action-movie, Crais relentlessly cranks up the tension scene after scene, as Pike, confounded by treachery and deceit, falls back on both his instincts and his background in the Special Forces, LAPD SWAT and mercenary service in Africa. But nothing in his training has schooled him to suffer a Paris-Hilton-class brat. That is something he'll have to learn on his own.

The Watchman takes no prisoners in this battle for survival in the streets of LA.

Myra McLarey

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