🌟🌟🌟🌟 An ambitious and interesting novel, with a unique premise and a narrative voice totally unlike any other. Eddie Asher, a startlingly handsome bi-racial man and our third-person POV narrator, was adopted as an infant by a white family, granting Eddie loving parents, and an older brother, Robert, that he…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A clever and compelling story with plenty of pathos and charm, refreshingly unlike anything this reader has encountered between the pages. The story is told through narratives alternating in the first-person voices of five people: a therapist, Genevieve Dempsey; and her four subjects: Freya, Victoria, Mischa, and Callum; each…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A mesmerizing Nordic mystery, uniquely premised, cleverly plotted, and impossible to put down. Agnes Glin, our third-person-POV narrator, is twenty-seven years old and has lived her entire life in California, although her heritage on her father’s side is Icelandic. Agnes, with her white-blond hair, is still reeling from a…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A lushly intricate tale of love, and longing, and most of all, of lies — and what it will take to smooth out edges, creased and sharpened and soiled, by years (make that decades) of deceit. Narrated in the alternating third-person voices of three main protagonists, the story arcs…
🌟🌟🌟💫 Based in and around Portland, Oregon, this legal thriller is peppered with several plot twists, a central and darkly terrible crime, a bevy of suspicious characters, and a long and circuitous road that may or may not lead to justice. Charlie Webb is an average guy, and an equally…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Unusual and gripping, this made-for-teens story is the start of a new series by one of my favorite (adult mystery) authors. In this new genre, we meet Hannah Armstrong, a strangely-gifted fourteen-year-old, who has the ability to hear other’s thoughts, in the form of “whispers”, which are often chaotically…
🌟🌟🌟💫 Both an examination of the intensity of the trials of new motherhood, and a Martha-Vineyards-based mystery, this book only partially scores on both fronts. Brynn Nelson, our third person POV (and somewhat unreliable) narrator, is in her early thirties, and has not quite felt like herself since the birth…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 An extremely well-executed thriller, riveting in parts, with a shocker of an ending this reader absolutely did not see coming. The story is told in two timelines: the first occurring in 1998 when a trio of girls, students at Southern State University in North Carolina, go missing. Our first…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Wow. Layered with so many velvety bands of literary texture and nuance, this is an absorbing, mesmerizing, haunting read, leading the reader deep into the hidden lives of two families, — the stories untold, the fears blindly enacted, the words not spoken but festering, for years, and even decades,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A beautifully intricate story encompassing philosophical yearnings (fiercely compelling in their insight) for a pre-technological planet, and a multi-layered political agenda — all peppered with characters teeming with self-interest and corruption. Sadie Smith is an enigma. A seemingly heartless, perhaps even psychopathic, shadowy figure, “Sadie”, our first person POV…