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What Color Is Your PARACHUTE?

By Richard Nelson Bolles

Ten Speed Press, $18.95 (paperback)

If you’ve resolved to change jobs or careers this year, get a copy of this perennial bestseller. Bolles has written, revised and updated this indispensable guide every year since 1970 and it remains a prime resource for job seekers. He explains “The Three Essential Life Skills” you were not taught in school, to wit: How to choose and find a job; how to choose and find an appropriate partner, husband or wife; and how to think and make good decisions. You’ll learn what work you’re best suited for and how to make the right impression when interviewing.

Even if you’re happy and secure where you are, you’ll discover many ideas to enrich your situation and perhaps, improve your compensation.

Six-Day Financial Makeover

By Robert Pagliarini

St. Martin’s Press, $24.95

Pagliarini’s book arrives just in time to bolster your New Year’s resolution to get your finances in order … but in six days? Good luck.

He quick-starts the process with his “GO” plan, (goal-oriented investing). It calculates your independence factor (how long you can survive without working) and offers investing tips based on your investment personality and suggestions on how to get out of your own way. You’ll learn what to do to increase income and pay off your debts and even how much insurance you really need. This practical book will definitely help you improve your financial self.

You and Your Money

By Lois A. Vitt and Karen L. Murrell

FT Press, $17.99

In this book, you’ll learn how to better handle the money you already have, from how to find the right credit card, reduce interest charges and earn higher interest on CDs, savings accounts and Treasury bonds. It reads like a personal advisor or knowledgeable friend so you’re not caught up in lots of technical jargon.

Take this one to bed with you and you’ll sleep a whole lot better.

Hooked

By Matt Richtel

Twelve Publishing, $24.99

If the dizzying image on the cover doesn’t “hook” you, the plot sure will.

While Nat Idle sits in an Internet café, a woman drops a folded note on his table and quickly walks out. Puzzled, he hurries after her but she drives away. Opening the paper he reads, “Get out of the café – NOW!” Just then, the café explodes but he escapes unharmed. Even more puzzling, the note is written in handwriting he’d recognize anywhere – Annie’s, his girlfriend, who presumably drowned four years before.

Now, through a number of twists and turns and many flashbacks to his romance with Annie, he embarks on a mission to find the strange woman. Expect many surprises along the way.

Missing Witness

By Gordon Campbell

William Morrow, $24.95

A woman and her 12-year-old daughter, unseen by a worker, enter a house. Shots are heard and, as they leave, the woman drops a smoking gun to the ground. Rushing into the house, the workman finds the woman’s husband on the floor, dead and quickly calls the police.

Incredibly, prominent lawyer Dan Morgan is hired by the wealthy father of the dead husband to get the wife off. To accomplish that feat, he and his young protégé, Doug McKenzie, will have to prove that the woman’s daughter was the shooter. There’s some dazzling legal footwork in this debut thriller by Campbell, whose 30-year courtroom experience is clearly on display.

It Never Rains In Tiger Stadium

By John Ed Bradley

ESPN Books, $24.95

It might not rain in Tiger Stadium but it’s been the scene of a lot of lightning as the Fighting Tigers battled their way all season into the BCS Bowl this month.

For Bradley, his All-SEC career as center ended in December 1979 but his memories of that time haunt him still. He recalls the two-a-day drills, the bus rides, curfew checks and, most of all, sitting at the bedside of his dying coach. Following Coach “Mac’s” death, Bradley wrote a poignant story published in Sports Illustrated and on which this book is based. Tiger fan or not, this is one heckuva sport and human interest story everyone can enjoy.