🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 A feast for lovers of contemporary crime fiction, this stellar collection of 25 stories, all written by members of CWA and embracing a theme of music, is both a must read and a rare and captivating treat. With stories reaching broadly across the crime genre, including procedural police investigations,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 This poignant and thoughtful memoir challenged as much as it compelled me. It’s hard to look death directly in the eye, especially when it’s encroaching, with terrifying intensity, on the time that is left for a shy and sensitive seventeen year-old. Jody White, unexplainably and suddenly diagnosed with…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 “Why should a recipe book not be a thing of beauty?” Perhaps not such an outrageous concept - but in the year 1835, in a town such as Tonbridge, Kent, where poverty, disease and the harshness of scratching out a living can overwhelm much of the populace, while…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 ➕ If the Earth itself (wait, make that the “Universe”) could write, this would be its creation. Deeply wise, there’s a core of truth captured with such aching beauty that the images, ideas, and feelings so seamlessly poured into this work surround you, in the manner of something eternal…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️+ I adored this book. Quite simply, one the most enjoyable crime reads I have encountered. Set amongst the fjords, ferries, and dark spruce forests of Norway in the year 1987, this Scandinavian noir thriller, a gloriously-translated entry in the PI Varg Venum series, is an incredibly powerful book, written…
⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 “Like the rest of her life, it was beautiful on the outside and chaos on the inside” Cressida Howard is a woman who appears to have it all. A beautiful (and smart) seventeen year old daughter, Emily-Jane, a rich and successful husband, Laurence, (an e-commerce kingpin) and her…
⭐⭐⭐1/2 Impeccably researched and historically rich, this book details the troubling story of Lady Isabelle d’Albret Courteault, beginning in the year 1453, as she must manage events in her life that are brutal, intense, and not that uncommon in this turbulent historical context. A mystic with visions and interesting and…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Fascinating portrayal of a 1980’s real-life attempt to bring down the Naples-based Camorra - one of the largest and deadliest mob organizations in Italy - spearheaded, planned and led by a twelve year old boy. Written in the style of a memoir, the author shares the experiences as told…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 A delightful collection of Indian fairy tales, that read like short stories, sprinkled with magic, karma and a whole heap of kindness. Each beautifully intermingled story tells the tale of one ‘angel’, one not quite ‘normal’ being who comes to realize they are blessed with a power or…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Compulsively readable, “Black Reed Bay “ is crime fiction at its summit. One of my true joys is finding superb new authors, - authors whose writing style, characterization and plotting hit the sweet spot that defines what reading does for me - takes me away into another world where…