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…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 “There was no longer any solid foundation to the world. It was all just stories.“ A beautifully rendered, challenging and often dark collection of eight short stories that somehow manage to balance the many avenues of man’s terrible brutality with the boundless tenderness of love — be it that…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Welcome to The Quiet- a peek into a strange and darkly ominous world, part Orwellian but also, in some small way, strangely hopeful, as Science and Nature battle a fantastical oddity, with humanity’s future lying in the balance. Dr Hannah Newnham/Williams, our first person POV narrator, is a scientist…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 “The silence around me so heavy and charged it feels like a physical thing, thick and meaty” A darkly Southern thriller, fronted by an impulsive and somewhat unpredictable heroine, with more than a few surprises up its sleeve. Claire Campbell, a not-very-successful reporter, is thirty-three years old, and is…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 This collection of eight original short stories features Mike Bowditch and his colleague, retired game warden Charley Stevens, a duo made popular in a series of novels penned by this author, and the first this reader has come to experience. Reminiscent of Robert B Parker’s Jesse Stone, Mike Bowditch…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 “A moment arrives when the usefulness of a secret expires. Keeping it becomes the thing that hurts us. We have to tell. “ This heartfelt memoir takes us to the darkest place, and back again, as we meet Amy, and her “perfect life” in Amarillo, Texas, and then are…