🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An interesting character-based crime story - more a meandering, engaging, mystery-rich novel rather than a more typical police procedural, this book also serves to introduce DC Gabrielle Darin in the first of a series featuring Gaby and her Wales-based detective team. The story of Izzy, a twenty-something, pretty but…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Q: What do you get when you combine the camaraderie of the gang in the Oceans Eleven series, the plotting and intrigue of a newish James Bond movie, the hard-boiled romance of an old time Humphrey Bogart flick, and the epic-action-adventure-mayhem of a Marvel comic-book? A: this latest installment…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Quite likely the most uniquely-textured female heroine one is likely to meet between the pages, Dr Lily Robinson is a rare treat. A brilliant and beautiful pathologist and toxicologist, Dr Lily is one smart cookie - albeit one who is also deeply morally conflicted and suffering from a buried…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 This book is a somewhat unexpected departure from a more “traditional” memoir, as the author, Ilana Estelle - a lifelong sufferer of what was eventually (in her late forties) diagnosed as Cerebral Palsy complicated by Autism (two conditions which often co-exist), takes the reader on a thoughtful…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 How would you handle it - in the blink of an eye, your entire world turned upside down? Not once, in fact, but actually, twice - first, the overwhelming (and somewhat expected) devastation driven by grief-stricken loss, followed by a revelation, hidden and spectacularly unsuspected for decades,…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 “Sports and war are two of the world’s greatest equalizers”. A Canadian author/teacher’s exhaustively and beautifully-researched treatise into the history of sport, focusing on the systemic racially-abusive treatment of black, indigenous and other marginalized communities (including Japanese-Canadians) from the earliest days of organized amateur and professional leagues,…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 As much a sweet and immersive love-story as it is a cracking-good small(ish)-town detective story, this book got under my skin and into my heart in a way that was totally unexpected. Ben Ames, our first-person POV narrator, is an ex-cop, now running a one-man PI agency…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 A brisk, entertaining, well-written and engaging police procedural, this series follows the caseload of New Scotland Yard DCI Steve Burt, Head of the Special Resolutions unit, where he leads a team (mostly assembled case-by-case) of crackerjack detectives and specialists tasked with resolving the serious crimes that no…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A gritty and haunting look at the ravages of shame and abuse extending from childhood into the life-long decay of self and identity, this book is somewhat reminiscent of the also magnificent “Shuggie Bain”. A graceful and compassionate triumph - a brilliant book that will hurt to…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 Like a hot cup of tea on a drizzly afternoon, coming home to another installment of the “HedgeHog Hollow” series is a creature comfort - a warm and cozy settling into your bones, as you sink into your favorite chair and prepare to sip and read and…