🌟🌟🌟💫 A cozy mystery set in the rural Scottish Highlands, centering on the new owner of a bookstore, and her “Armchair Detectives” crime book club. Beth Cunningham is a thirty-four year old woman, newly released from the care of her ailing mother by the trauma of her death. Now the…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Creepy, mind-blowing and terrifying, this is not your average horror novel. Far, far from it. Oceans, in fact, away from anything resembling the boundaries of the world we know. Buckle up, as between these pages, we will meet Glen, our third-person-POV narrator, a high school biology teacher who embarks…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A true story, based on the fascinating life story of Anna, a Norwegian woman, now seventy years old, who for decades has spent each spring-time tending to the nesting needs of eider ducks on the remote island of Fjærøy, off the coast of Norway, just south of the Arctic.…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 The second book I have read from this author, each of which I have loved. “Needle Lake” is surprisingly tender, intensely atmospheric, and utterly compelling — with a main protagonist as heart-tuggingly authentic as an imagined character can possibly be. Based in a small town north of Seattle, Washington,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Filled with passion and angst, this is a book tailor-made for anyone who has ever aspired to write - or rather, to be a “writer” — a seemingly innocuous label that, for those in the literary “know”, carries an inordinate amount of weight. A label that can invoke literary…
A memoir and a somewhat complicated review — for a story beginning with horrific child abuse and leading to what will become a life-long adult search for healing — that could not help but raise all sorts of emotions in this reader. Empathy, pain and compassion. Curiosity and hope. Wonder,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A charming cozy mystery, the third in a series featuring Miranda Abbott, and the first experienced by this reader. Miranda Abbott is a former TV detective, a sort of everyone’s favorite Jessica Fletcher, who traded in her sophisticated acting chops to star in a blissfully cheesy, but highly popular,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 An absolutely charming regency romp, hilarious in parts and thoughtful in others, that totally captured the heart of this reader. In an early nineteenth-century era when women are chattel (beholden to their male counterparts), when Lydia Hayworth, the low-born daughter of a now-wealthy gentleman, finds herself “accidentally” betrothed to…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An engrossing and immersive trip to an exotic South African safari-compound, — Leopard Sands — second-home to an uber-wealthy family from Florida, that is teeming with things that creep, stalk, and kill (and I don’t mean the wildlife). Family matriarch Odelia Bach is in her sixties, undoubtedly a narcissist,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A heart-tugging and thoughtful look at love, loneliness, and searching — for answers to the secrets that all humans yearn to untangle — What makes a life “good”, and what, in the end, is it all “for”? Told in the voices of multiple characters, between these pages we will…