In The Collector’s Apprentice, the author B. A. Shapiro disguises the life of Dr. Albert Coombs Barnes, the chemist and physician, as Edwin Bradley, a man with a similar history, and turns it into a thriller. Both men develop a medication, Argyrol, to prevent...
Gods of Jade and Shadow is quite different from Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s noir-ish Velvet Was the Night. Gods of Jade and Shadow is set in the Yucatan peninsula during the 1920s. The old myths and religious beliefs of the indigenous folk have withered away, supplanted by...
Violeta is a coming of age story written in an epistolary style in a very long manuscript she sends to her grandson, Camilo. The protagonist, Violeta Del Valle, came into the world with the Spanish influenza pandemic in 1920, and, now 100, faces the Coronavirus...
S. M. Goodwin pulled me into Crooked in His Ways immediately just as she did the first book in the series, Absence of Mercy. As a physician I enjoyed her descriptions of Jasper Lightner, a Crimean War hero with post-traumatic stress syndrome and a traumatic brain...
The Island of Missing Trees is undoubtedly the most beautiful, most lyrical book I've read recently. I previously enjoyed Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul but feel she outdid herself with this newest book. Shafak writes with imagination, originality, and a hefty...
I read The Violin Conspiracy in one sitting, pulled along by the events and the emotional drama. The book follows Rayquan “Ray” McMillian, a vitruoso violinist from childhood through his entry into the world-famous Tchaikovsky musical competition in Moscow. Shortly...
The End is a young adult pre-apocalyptical dystopian science fiction book that deftly handles a bevy of social issues. It blends sci-fi with thriller as teens solve a murder. It may be more suited for older teens as alcohol, sex, and drugs play a large role. The...
I read Blue-Skinned Gods in one sitting, broken only by a telephone call from a friend. The cast of characters was compelling populated by everything from a child-god to rock-and-roll stars. S.J. Sindu intertwines these characters’ lives in such a mesmerizing fashion...
In the first of the Grecian Women Trilogy books, Athena's Child, Hannah Lynn retells the story of Medusa and Perseus. In the second of the trilogy, A Spartan's Sorrow, Lynn revisits the Trojan War, focusing on Clytemnestra. As in her depiction of Medusa, Lynn again...
Salvation: A novel based on a true story is the story of two girls “kidnapped” by a female evangelist in 1971. It is based on events told to author Avery Caswell by one of the children involved. Her testimony is coupled with Ms. Caswell’s research. In 1971, the United...
I loved this debut novel. The first chapter drew me in to this wildly dysfunctional family. The main characters are Olga Acevedo (named after a radical female) and her brother Prieto. Their father dies of AIDS picked up through intravenous drug use. Their mother...
The Beautiful Ones is very unlike Ms. Moreno-Garcia’s noir-ish Velvet Was the Night. The Beautiful Ones is a comedy of manners set in an imaginary world in which the characters maintain the tightly-drawn roles of the late 19th century British gentry with the addition...
In Athena's Child, a retelling of the Greek myth of Medusa and Perseus, Hannah Lynn depicts a beautiful young Medusa serving in Athena’s temple. Poseidon forces himself upon her. Athena, rather than blame Poseidon for raping her acolyte, blames Medusa and curses her,...
The Maid is a murder mystery set in the Regency Grand, a luxury hotel, and is narrated by the protagonist, Molly Gray. Molly, AKA Molly the Maid, is a twenty-five year old woman on the autism spectrum with the additional trait of being obsessive-compulsive. Her...
Colson Whitehead, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, presents his newest effort, Harlem Shuffle, a genre-bending amalgamation of historical fiction, family drama, and noir-ish crime drama. It is a multi-layered look at New York City’s Harlem neighborhood during the 1950s...
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