🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Filled with passion and angst, this is a book tailor-made for anyone who has ever aspired to write - or rather, to be a “writer” — a seemingly innocuous label that, for those in the literary “know”, carries an inordinate amount of weight. A label that can invoke literary…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A charming cozy mystery, the third in a series featuring Miranda Abbott, and the first experienced by this reader. Miranda Abbott is a former TV detective, a sort of everyone’s favorite Jessica Fletcher, who traded in her sophisticated acting chops to star in a blissfully cheesy, but highly popular,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Is there anything more terrifying than a panic-laden run through a dark and desolate woodland, heavy footsteps not far behind? This fast and dread-inducing literary run leads us through two timelines — the first encompassing a horrific crime, twenty years ago, irreversibly damaging to the victims, participants, and all…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 An absolutely charming regency romp, hilarious in parts and thoughtful in others, that totally captured the heart of this reader. In an early nineteenth-century era when women are chattel (beholden to their male counterparts), when Lydia Hayworth, the low-born daughter of a now-wealthy gentleman, finds herself “accidentally” betrothed to…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A really interesting premise that comes out of nowhere, messes with a readers brain, and leaves one more than a little awed at the creative mind that inspired it. With a writing style that reminds this reader of Joanne Trollope, this story is a blend of family and relationship…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An engrossing and immersive trip to an exotic South African safari-compound, — Leopard Sands — second-home to an uber-wealthy family from Florida, that is teeming with things that creep, stalk, and kill (and I don’t mean the wildlife). Family matriarch Odelia Bach is in her sixties, undoubtedly a narcissist,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A heart-tugging and thoughtful look at love, loneliness, and searching — for answers to the secrets that all humans yearn to untangle — What makes a life “good”, and what, in the end, is it all “for”? Told in the voices of multiple characters, between these pages we will…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 The second in the superb DS Casey Wray series, this taut and complex story stretches tight, pulling the reader close into as absorbing a read as upper-echelon crime fiction can get. Following on the heels of a major police department shakeup (read the first book for details!) Detective Sergeant…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Book #23 in a mystery series featuring Joanne Kilbourn, this book came to this reader with history attached. Initially a Canadian series I loved, based in Saskatchewan, and featuring a wonderfully-accessible female professor,— a character authored so well, and decades before strongly centered, plain-spoken, independent female leads were a…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 “There was no longer any solid foundation to the world. It was all just stories.“ A beautifully rendered, challenging and often dark collection of eight short stories that somehow manage to balance the many avenues of man’s terrible brutality with the boundless tenderness of love — be it that…