🌟🌟🌟🌟 Clever and engrossing, this is a fun read with a twisty plot, and an ending this reader did not see coming. Jade Wiltshire wants to live like a millionaire, and has the appropriately titled paperback to help her. 30-ish and pretty, with her recent lottery winnings, Jade is unflinchingly…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 An unputdownable thriller, creatively centering on a true-crime podcast, a cold-case mystery, and a totally captivating nasty-but-nice heroine. Lucy Chase is almost thirty, - a beautiful, sarcastic, darkly hilarious, tough-as-nails loner who is used to being on the outside looking in. On the very outside, that is, - as…
🌟🌟🌟💫 Well-written, yet undeniably bleak, this is an 80’s era (both written and set) tale of domestic breakdown, existential nothingness, and bodies in motion, - unlikable characters bumping into each other randomly and in the process, spinning out trails invariably murky and mostly unpleasant. Set in Melbourne, Australia, the story…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An edge of your seat thriller that has it all - a creepy mansion occupied by a strange and repressed family; a child, old before her time, who is truly unsettling; a murder (maybe?) tied to a mystery; and a first person POV heroine who is female, authentic and…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 What a delight! A book just as likely to break your heart as it is to tickle your funny bone, this charmer is a one-of-a-kind read, featuring a one-of-a-kind family who, come what may, will love and support their offspring. (And their offspring. And all the interconnected others that…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 I’m always so pleased to discover a fantastic and new (to me) Canadian author, and particularly one in the legal/mystery space. This intricate and haunting story, involves two contemporary murders, based in Toronto, Canada, as well as war-time atrocities and the wounds left behind on a global and historical…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Reading this book is akin to taking a deep dive into a richly-fabricated speculative world, filled with interesting and intricate creatures, ideas and characters, and defined by an entirely new language. (Note: the author includes a very helpful glossary). Touching on many philosophical ideas and a whole host of…
Second in the Paradise Cafe series, this is another interesting, enjoyable read, with a likable heroine, an evocative setting in Depression-era 1936 Toronto, and not one, but two mysteries to solve. When Charlotte Frayne, PI, is hired to investigate the suspicious suicide of a severely disfigured veteran, she must confront…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 This little book is a hilarious, thoughtful, charming, magical gem of a novel, - part fable, and all heart. As laugh-out-loud-funny as it is pure whimsy, the humor in this read is dry, sardonic and continuous, layered with a silliness born of a sort of sweet, childish, eccentricity and…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself” - Emily Dickinson With perfect alignment, the cover quote (copied above), encapsulates the beauty and the wonder that is this book. Written by the poet Maggie Smith, this memoir details, with incredible candor, what it may take to find yourself, or…