Readers' Favorite

January 18, 2020

Big Lies in a Small Town by Diane Chamberlain ~ Review

by Susan Roberts


"She'd never really had any yearning to travel south of the Mason-Dixon line and she was glad she'd only be here for a few days.  The South seemed backward to her.  Segregated schools and ridiculous laws about keeping colored and white apart on buses and at water fountains and in restrooms."  (p 14  Anna in 1940)

January 17, 2020

The Look-Alike by Erica Spindler ~ a Review

by MK French


Ten years ago, Sienna Scott stumbled across a body on her way back to her dorm in college. She had always lived in the shadow of her mother's paranoid delusions and feared that she would turn out the same way when she was unable to shake the feeling that she was the one meant to be killed. After ten years in London with her grandmother and getting trained as a chef, she's back in her hometown of Tranquility Bluffs, Wisconsin. She is back in the house where she grew up, and the investigation is open again. Someone is prank calling her house, people are talking about the murder, and Sienna is worried that perhaps she isn't as different from her mother after all.

January 16, 2020

The Hitwoman Goes to Prison by JB Lynn ~ a Review

by Donna Huber



After a tough week and a kind of boring book, The Hitwoman Goes to Prison was exactly what I needed to lift my mood. The antics of Maggie's menagerie and the predicaments she finds herself in had me smiling the whole time.

January 15, 2020

Cross Her Heart by Sarah Pinborough ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts


"He reads the letter three times before it sinks in.  She's gone.  They're gone...There is no trace of her, however, no passport, or driving license, none of those important things that frame her life...He is angry.  More than angry.  He's raging.  It's a white heat inside him.  He stares out through the window, the ball of paper damp in his sweating hands.  Vodka.  He needs vodka.  She has no right to do this to him.  Not after everything they've been through.  
He will destroy her for it." (p 2)

January 14, 2020

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jiminez ~ a Review

by MK French


He was born with an eleventh finger. A small bead of flesh and bone beside his right pinky. The doctor calmed the worried parents and told them the nub was a harmless thing. "Be still," he said, unlacing a small cloth pouch, "a farmer needs only ten fingers to work the dhuba." He coaxed the child to sleep with the smoke of torched herbs, and sliced the nub from the nad with a cauterizing knife. And though the mother knew her baby felt no pain in is medicated sleep, she winced when the flesh was parted, and clutched him to her breast, praying that there would be no memory of the hurt when he woke, while her husband, unable to resist indulging in his hedonism even then, breathed deep the doctor's herb smoke, and was spelled by a vision of the future - in his dilated pupils his sone, a full-grown man, handsome and powerful, with a big house at the top of the hill. The new governor of the Fifth Village. To commemorate this vision, he had the finger boiled of its flesh, and its bones placed in a corked glass jar, which he shook on wistful days, listening to the clack of good omens as he whispered to his baby, "You are going to run this place one day." The boy burbled in his arms, too young to recognize the small and varied ways life was contriving to keep him put. (p. 3 - 4)

January 13, 2020

The Secret Guests by Benjamin Black ~ a Review

by Donna Huber



As you know I love WWII fiction and especially enjoy ones that delve into little known history about that time. So I was excited to read The Secret Guests. It sounded like it would be a great read - set in Ireland where the royal princesses were sent to escape the Blitz in London.

January 12, 2020

Ka-e-ro-u: Time to Go Home by B. Jeanne Shibahara ~ a Review

by MK French



Meryl's grown son has left the home, and her father recently remarried. She has been widowed since the Vietnam War, and it's her cousin's push to get her to return a WWII Japanese flag to its home. Meryl travels throughout Japan for this task, meeting British and US ex-pats, and people of all kinds of professions. It takes her throughout Japan's history.

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