🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 I adore this series. Having followed (and loved) the work of this brilliant and prolific author for decades, it is this series in particular - Isabel Dalhousie, her essential “goodness”, and her gorgeously-welcoming literary world - that has earned a very special place in my heart. An indulgence of…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 “Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.” What is play, or gaming, but “the possibility of a different world”? “The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.” An epic of a read,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Shockingly-twisty, tense and engrossing, this character-driven thriller veers between two equally-fascinating and fractured worlds. Marisa Grover, twenty-eight-years old, caramel-blonde and an illustrator of children’s fairy tales, is a damaged woman. Abandoned at a young age by her mother, Marissa ‘s short life thus far has her feeling left-behind, profoundly…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 As dazzling and beautiful as it is thoughtful and heart-wrenching, this speculative fiction narrative centers on the indescribable pain and beauty of motherhood, and the mysterious and horrifying related “affliction” one small and isolated community has found themselves subject to. Somehow, some way, this unnamed town has developed a…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 If you can’t beat em, join em? A NY-based secret society of powerful women, helping each other through influence-peddling and a whole lot more - modeled on the corrupt and seedy old-boys-club networks that have crisis-crossed the social, political and economic landscape of movers and shakers dominating the ruling…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 What can I say that hasn’t already been said? Here again, as we’ve seen before, Ann Cleeves, one of my all time favorite authors, writes like no other, in this, Book 9 of the wonderful Vera Stanhope series. In this story we meet Lorna Falstone, a beautiful and troubled…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 As dependable a treat as the coldest, sweetest, ice-cream on a summer day, any book by Ann Cleeves, including this hot-off-the-press installment (#10) in the glorious #Vera series, will not disappoint. Vera, back with all the brash, brave, headstrong (and unabashedly offensively-leaning) determination she brings to any crime-solving venture,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A creepy and sinister atmospheric thriller, suffocating and murky, that will get under your skin and hold you captive, lamp-lights burning (and doors locked) as you read on, losing conviction (but still optimistic! ) that you will be able to figure it all out. We. They.Insider. Outsider.Visitor. Home. What…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A brilliant excursion into the darkest, grittiest corners of Glasgow, where we meet what has to be one of the most spell-binding protagonists ever crafted - Rilke, a forty-seven year old head-auctioneer - a man, “too tall, too thin, too cadaverous to look like anything other than a vampire…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 The essence of love - the beautiful and tragic, the extraordinary and the mundane - revealed with such finesse and poignancy, that reading this book is an experience as painful as it is incandescent. What do we each bring to our relationships - our loves - but decades of…