🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Extraordinarily tricky - this book will have you going back to re-read sections - shaking your head in wonder as you uncover the fiendishly-clever writing required to support that crazy-out-of-nowhere-humdinger-of-an-ending. This adroitness alone would easily merit the five stars - but this is one snappy, absorbing, fascinating read, an…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 A smartly sassy ride-along with an awesome new female Private Investigator, Fati Rizvi, - a coffee-loving, bear-spray-armed, no-holds-barred powerhouse, with a healthy disregard for all things pink and sparkly, as well as pretty much all authority and convention. Based in Lake Templeton, a fictional small lakeside community in…
🌟🌟🌟1/2 Intricate, tightly-plotted mystery yarn with plenty of twists, red herrings, and deliberate misfires guaranteed to keep you shaking your head and guessing. The first in the “Midlands Crime” series, set in and around Worcestershire, Birmingham and Warwickshire, centering on a crime-fighting squad known as “Heart of England” Police, the…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A brand new mystery series - featuring an odd and endearing trio of female sleuths, together forming one of the most unlikely crime-solving agencies (code named the SeeMs) you are likely to meet between the pages. Cat Harrington : multi-lingual, very tall, 60-ish, is a “tiger-mother” of a woman,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A feel-good contemporary romance in a gorgeous exotic location, - pristine and sunny San Sebastián, Spain. Perfect for one of those days when nothing will fill that need for dreamy travel, romance and new adventures but a “swathe of golden sand, a jumble of white buildings with terracotta roofs”,…
🌟🌟🌟1/2 A contemporary romance set in the beautiful sun, sand, and surf of Queensland’s Bellbird Bay. Ailsa McNeil, 52 years old, has just learned that her twenty-five year marriage to her husband Bob, (suddenly and somewhat mysteriously behaving like a “surly loner”, distancing himself in all forms of communication from…
🌟🌟🌟 Benji is a black Labrador, and interestingly, also a narrator of this book, which features a dog’s-eye view of the complications that can arise in seemingly perfect human lives. Meriel, the main (human) protagonist, and the story’s second-provided POV, believes herself to be happily married. Until the day she…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A gentle look at love, as it ages, batted about and corrupted by the passage of time, as long-held fears, insecurities and secrets, do their dirty work in darkness - leaving us to wonder, is it ever too late to start again? Prickly and somewhat unlikable, Meena Fisher is…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 (Agest 3 to 8) A delightful and poignant picture book, universally accessible in melodic and simple rhyme, packaging an environmental message so endearingly told that it will reach even the youngest child. Gorgeously illustrated with pictures so pure and vibrant they could be original cartoon celluloid, this book will…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 The fourth in the DS Nikita Parekh series, this book can be read as a standalone novel (although, in the case of this reader, there is an evolving backstory with Nikki’s family that is begging for more background. I will have to find a way to catch up…
