⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ A hold-on-to-the-edge-of-your seat childrens’ adventure book for salty dogs and their sea-mates everywhere. Robert and Michael, twelve and fourteen years old, respectively, are runaways - each of them seeking escape from the harshness of a young world that seems to have no place for them. “Robert had had enough.…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Compulsively readable, “Black Reed Bay “ is crime fiction at its summit. One of my true joys is finding superb new authors, - authors whose writing style, characterization and plotting hit the sweet spot that defines what reading does for me - takes me away into another world where…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 Pablo Pinkerton is a middle-aged police officer, married 29 years to Delilah, with a lovely family consisting of 4 grown children and a gorgeous home in the British countryside that is an ongoing source of focus for his considerable DIY skills. Pablo is an outgoing man, large in…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Based on a true story. Carl Lundmark, our narrator, is living the dream - a high-powered finance career, earning the money and freedom to live an independent life in London far away from the little Swedish town where he was raised and where he always felt like an outsider…
⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 Book one in a new series, “The Reluctant DoorKeeper Trilogy”, “28 Days” is a speculative fiction dystopian tale set in Australia in the year 2100, where “saffron dust clouds are blown from the dry interior” of a world forever devastated by altered weather patterns and total climate breakdown.…
⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 Anna and her husband Alan, expats from London and Scotland, respectively, escape to the beautiful isle of Mallorca, where Anna writes for a local newspaper and provides this fictionalized travelogue (#7 in the series), a narrative of her ongoing encounters with the local populace, wild life, arts and…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Prepare to meet Dani Truehart, a fifteen year old “Rising Star” who just wants to sing and dance and feel the music carry her to a higher place. It’s what she was meant to do. If it all just wasn’t so complicated. Dani is a well-crafted, authentic and likable…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 What happens when an erudite, bookish, somewhat naive young man of twenty-two hailing from NYC decides to “escape leading the life expected of him and winds up leading a life he had never expected for himself” ? Our narrator is an unidentified individual who is telling the story…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Chillingly prescient, insightfully nuanced and disturbingly evocative, this historical epic, based in New Orleans, follows the turbulence that rocked the state of Louisiana in the years following the Confederate loss of the Civil War. The second in a historical series from this author featuring Emmett Collins, I had not…
⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 Set in the early days of WW1 in Merseyside, Lancashire, this story follows the journey of Anna and Ellie, two young female nurses, who long to do their part to help in the war effort. It’s a grim and difficult period for those left behind - the docksides…