🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A wonderful, brilliantly-written, and wildly eclectic collection of ghost-themed short stories, from one of my favorite authors, interspersed with several ghostly introspections based on her own real life experiences. The stories run the gamut from spine-tingling and sinister, to heartbreaking and grieving, all the way to downright reflective and…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Moody and evocative, this book is the very essence of a slow burn, best described, in the author’s own words, as a tantalizingly “slow simmer”, bubbling and congealing, before “morphing into a full-blown boil”. Margot, our first person POV, is a strange and disturbingly-repressed narrator. Revealing little, and concealing…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A beautifully-written, heartbreakingly twisty tale of star-crossed lovers, who may in fact, now get a second chance to be together, almost forty years after their original romance. Sarah Carson Blackwell is sixty-ish, divorced, with two grown children, and is long used to living alone. (Note: well, not quite alone,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Imaginative and intricate, this sci-fi thriller blends a near-future world of inventive hi-tech gadgets and norms (fantastical, but perhaps only barely), with a thoughtful commentary on engineered procreation - in this case labeled “precision reproduction” - and its affect on the fragile identities of the generations of these humans…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Otto is a lonely otter - one who is too shy and timid to join in with the other otters at play time in the water, and who is not feeling loved. With Valentines Day approaching, Otto knows he will be alone again, on the outside and watching everyone…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A claustrophobic thriller set in a fascinating location - aboard an expedition cruise set for the icy splendor of Antarctica. In this case, before the ship has even set sail, sinister and unexplained happenings are afoot. When a man is kidnapped enroute to boarding for the soon-to-depart cruise, it…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 I do so love a good gothic novel. All the elements are here, at this author’s hands, building into a hauntingly mesmerizing read that hits all the right notes, keeping this reader thoroughly hooked, - right up to an ending not unpredictable but so perfectly fitting it appears to…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 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…