🌟🌟🌟🌟 First, a confession. I have loved pretty much everything written by this author. So approaching this, the seventh in the series featuring the riotous, charming and thoroughly hilarious Walsh family, my expectations were high. And to a very large extent, they were met. All my favorite Walsh’s are here,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A complex story of crime, revenge, and, underneath it all, love of the highest order, written by one of my all-time favorite authors, that is so slowly-building immersive it will take a mind-muddled reader a heroic effort to shift sticky gears back to “real” life. Book 2 in the…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Absolutely gripping and quite possibly the scariest book this reader has encountered this year, this real-life memoir, written by a first-person female former practicing member of Christian Fundamentalism (at its most devout) is a harrowing deep-dive into toxic patriarchal religious dogma and its stealthy indoctrination of the most horrifying…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Interesting and suspenseful, this is my third read from this author, and one I enjoyed equally. Diana Brewer, a beautiful seventeen year old, is dead. Murdered by an unknown assailant in a small close-knit community in Vermont. In a bit of an unusually supernatural twist, we meet Diana herself,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Written with her customary finesse, this is an author that always proves impeccable. With this, a typically densely-plotted, engrossing mystery, and #11 in the Vera series, we are back with all our favorite characters, and a new one to size up, at the same time. As DI Vera Stanhope…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An ambitious, earnest, heart-felt treatise on the much-needed ecological redemption of our planet - not based on a restorative tunnel-visioned scientific dogma which is destined to fail (as it has been, repeatedly), but integrating a newly-integrated indigenous perspective in which we, the Humans, (caretakers of old), live out our…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Peppered with the author's signature dry (and often laugh-out-loud) humour, this is PI Jackson Brodie, former cop and always wise guy, at his most unflappable. Hired to track a stolen painting, lifted from a country estate by a mysterious woman who just may have many more crimes up her…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ For this reader, in a word, love, pure and simple, for this book of essays that tackles all the prickly, suffocating, isolating hard-edges that come with growing old, as a female, - unnoticed and unwelcome in a global culture that prizes patriarchy and youth. An aging experience that no…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An unrelenting read that works its way deep inside your head, leaving thoughts and impressions that have lingered with this reader, beyond the page. Knife River, a small town in NY, based in a valley between two forests, is the setting for this atmospheric tale of sisters tormented by…
A Massachusetts-based fairy-tale of sorts, about “witches” and magic and the enraptured heart - one that is able, in this story, to transcend time and space, following a path that is destined beyond earthly boundaries, - encapsulated in a journey that is written with beauty and great care. The story…