🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An enthralling read by the Icelandic author Ragnar Jonasson, the first of his that this reader has experienced, but certainly not to be the last. This sequel to “The Darkness” can be read and enjoyed successfully as a standalone novel, (as I did,) with the loss of some backstory…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 The first I’ve read in this immensely popular series, featuring Lt Eve Dallas, — this will definitely not be the last. With an appeal that crosses genres, this story is as much about Dallas and her “tribe” - beginning with her ongoing romance with her spouse, the mega-rich and…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 “Houses remember” A gorgeously-narrated audio book, providing a sumptuous peek into the lives of two pairs of women, one in current day, and the other in 1974. In each case, the story told by one of the women is intricate, richly textured, and compelling - in particular as it…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 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…