🌟🌟🌟🌟 A clever and turbulent story, paced largely by: an achingly slow character-driven build; a plot-driven puzzle that surfaces early, is tweaked and dangled and kept alive with tiny tantalizingly hidden clues (very much solvable, if the reader sticks with it); and a supremely chaotic, crazily consistent ending. Our story…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A spellbinding book, based on historical events, that broke my heart but also mended it, (craggily and with herbs, twine, and a whole lot of love). The year is 1936, and the world is reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. As the author evokes the sweeping desperation…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟A pitch-perfect spy thriller - so well-written, evocative, and gripping that this reader could literally not put it down. (My first by this very prolific author, and I cannot wait to read more). The epitome of “spook” fiction - with all the undercover terror, subterfuge, violence, duplicity, and psychopathy one…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 This charming cozy mystery is clever, engaging and a tweak on the typical murder-in-an-exotic-location trope. With the madcap moodiness, sinister undercurrent, and dreamy gelato-soaked Italian-esque setting of the fabulous (and slyly referenced) “White Lotus”, this story is coupled with main characters who are themselves mystery authors, including (and a…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ “All I wanted was for you to see me” How to capture the joy of reading this, this collection of more than two dozen tiny perfect literary gems? Each story distinct, but at its heart, this is a cohesive collection - tearing through layers of yearning and isolation, revealing…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Gritty and dark, this fourth installment in the Yorkshire Murders series is my first by this author, working well as a stand-alone read. With shades of Ian Rankin, this is a world of drug lords and bosses, rival gangs and enforced loyalties, haves and have-nots, the universally-suffering arm of…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A wonderful, brilliantly-written, and wildly eclectic collection of ghost-themed short stories, from one of my favorite authors, interspersed with several ghostly introspections based on her own real life experiences. The stories run the gamut from spine-tingling and sinister, to heartbreaking and grieving, all the way to downright reflective and…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Moody and evocative, this book is the very essence of a slow burn, best described, in the author’s own words, as a tantalizingly “slow simmer”, bubbling and congealing, before “morphing into a full-blown boil”. Margot, our first person POV, is a strange and disturbingly-repressed narrator. Revealing little, and concealing…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A beautifully-written, heartbreakingly twisty tale of star-crossed lovers, who may in fact, now get a second chance to be together, almost forty years after their original romance. Sarah Carson Blackwell is sixty-ish, divorced, with two grown children, and is long used to living alone. (Note: well, not quite alone,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Imaginative and intricate, this sci-fi thriller blends a near-future world of inventive hi-tech gadgets and norms (fantastical, but perhaps only barely), with a thoughtful commentary on engineered procreation - in this case labeled “precision reproduction” - and its affect on the fragile identities of the generations of these humans…