🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Creepy and unsettling, this Australia-based read is part domestic thriller, part mystery, and all dark foreboding as the story weaves an ominous path through the trials of three adolescent foster family charges. As each girl suffers domestic tragedy and is “lucky” enough to find herself sequestered in Wild Meadows…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A tension-filled decades-long look at the rawness of need - the things we think, or perhaps are lucky enough to know, we need - to make us whole - and what may be unleashed in our compulsion to find them. Told in the alternating intimate first-person POV voices of…
My second read from this talented author; this is a twisty, sinister story that cannot help but evoke echoes of the atmosphere and tension of the terrible true-life crime story of Gabby Petito. With a spectacularly intimate feel, aided by the first-person POV voice of our main protagonist, Cassie Peters…
🌟🌟🌟💫 Are we destined to follow in the footsteps (good or even evil) of our ancestors? An interesting premise, explored by this author, as we meet nine-year-old Kate Harmon, with her very complicated parentage, who happens to be the only witness to a horrific fatal event. An event which may…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A deep dive into the sublime and the unpleasant, the pretense of living large, and the sheer awfulness that may be hidden, under deceptively ‘normal’ exteriors. Each of the four main protagonists in this story, women all, three of them fortyish and one an octogenarian, have secrets to hide.…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A darkly twisted tale that sets such a creepy tone that I swear I found myself reading this one with one eye closed - prepared to close both if and when the story warranted. And although butting up against the very edge, (my triggers are child and animal abuse,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Fourteen years ago, Angela Wong, a beautiful high school student with her whole life ahead of her, disappeared suddenly. As this book opens, Angela’s dismembered body has been found and her former best friend, Georgina Shaw, is on trial for her part in the murder and atrocities.The remainder of…
🌟🌟🌟💫 A moody look at a troubled marriage in an unsettling and violent environment, the masoleum-like mansion of a family home in Lagos, Nigeria. As Nicole and her husband Tonye, newly immigrated from the UK, struggle to adjust to life in the new country, an atmospheric trail of foreboding follows…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A disconcerting look at systemic racism, as it exists, in even the very nicest neighborhoods and families. For Salma and Bilal Khatun, along with their eighteen year-old son Zain, a move to new house signals the beginning of a nightmare, made all the worse by the seeming civility of…
🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 A riveting and powerful read, this multilayered story winds and sweeps through the lives of characters that at first glance, almost appear to have it all. Almost, but not quite, as soon becomes apparent when a young girl is murdered, and it becomes likely that the seventeen-year-old children of…