🌟🌟🌟🌟 Anyone who has been through a painful divorce, or a bad break-up, or really, faced any sort of momentous romantic rejection (and which of us hasn’t?) will relate to the main protagonist of this book, Claire Everett, and the emotional quandary she faces, heart-wrenchingly detailed in these pages. A…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 Who do we fall in love with, and why? A question no-one can really answer, least of all our two main protagonists, whose life stories criss-cross time and generations in this poignant and compelling story. Netta Wilde, a fifty-one year old divorced mother of two, has recently purchased…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 This is the fourth edition of the Hedgehog Hollow series, and the first one I have read - a situation I would love to remedy quickly! Based in the dreamy countryside of Yorkshire Wolds, this delightful book reads like a visit with friends, an extended “family” of wonderful characters…
⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 Sofia is a young Italian woman, recently graduated from college, who comes from a large Sicilian family that runs an Italian restaurant in Galveston, Texas. With five protective brothers and a deep and close relationship with her loving family, Sofia is eager to make her own mark on…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “They ate lunch outside, sitting in the enclosed small garden area at the back of the farmhouse. Weathered painted furniture, pots of lavender and rosemary, sweet-smelling old fashioned roses, trailing geraniums tumbling down the stone wall, bougainvillea climbing the pillars that the rusty hinges of the ancient wrought-iron gates…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ A near-perfect heart-stoppingly intense NY crime story - I read this almost straight through, hovering between intense interest in the events unfolding and an equally intense sickly anxiety for what I feared was going to happen next. Callum Burke, our main protagonist, is a Hong Kong cop with a…
⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 Book one in a new series, “The Reluctant DoorKeeper Trilogy”, “28 Days” is a speculative fiction dystopian tale set in Australia in the year 2100, where “saffron dust clouds are blown from the dry interior” of a world forever devastated by altered weather patterns and total climate breakdown.…
⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 Set in the early days of WW1 in Merseyside, Lancashire, this story follows the journey of Anna and Ellie, two young female nurses, who long to do their part to help in the war effort. It’s a grim and difficult period for those left behind - the docksides…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 With a story-telling style (and hints of magic) reminiscent of Ray Bradbury, and populated by darkly flat-affect characters straight out of Patricia Highsmith, this set of short stories is interesting, unusual and intriguingly compelling. Each of the stories features a story spun around a main protagonist (and in…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ With an interesting (and very socially intermingled) cast of police characters, this Scottish crime book, the first of the new DC Jane Renwick series, is off to an intriguing start. Part procedural police mystery, and part what-do-police-officers-do-in-their-social-lives, this story begins with a emotional wallop and the psychological suspense never…
