🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Finally getting to this incredibly well-received book, it’s clear what all the praise was about. This is an incredible read — a saga really, about love and loss and what a human can bear. When the absolute worst is your new reality, how does one envision hope, then reach…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 The second book I have read from this author, each of which I have loved. “Needle Lake” is surprisingly tender, intensely atmospheric, and utterly compelling — with a main protagonist as heart-tuggingly authentic as an imagined character can possibly be. Based in a small town north of Seattle, Washington,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 An utterly charming and mostly unexpected treat, best described as the love child of ‘The Durrells’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, and an add-your-own-favorite cozy mystery. Set on the idyllic island of Corfu in the year 1898, the story is told by Minnie Harper, a smart and restrained thirty-three year old…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A lively cozy mystery featuring the colorful cast of characters introduced in the first Meredith Island mystery, “Secrets in the Water”, also reviewed by this reader. The series is set amidst a charming Welsh remote island inhabited by a tight knit community, including Kate Galway, a retired teacher and…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 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,…