Valentine begins on February 14, 1976 when a fourteen-year-old Mexican girl, Gloria Ramirez, is picked up at a drive-in by a young oil field worker, Dale Strickland. He's the son of a preacher from Arkansas and reported to be a "good boy." However, hepped up on...
The Library of Legends is a gorgeous novel, a unique blend of historical fiction—based on Ms. Chang’s family stories about the second-Sino Japanese war—mysticism, and folklore. The storytelling is enchanting. The book, due to its broad scope, is told in an omniscient...
Set in present-day Massachusetts, Hinterland is stark and poetic, with far more beneath the surface than the words indicate. It is the third book I’ve read by L.M. Brown, and as in her others, melancholy runs like a ribbon through the pages as does (it seems strange...
Take It Back is so engrossing I stayed up until two a.m. reading it, then spent the next few hours replaying it in my head. Wow! Such a great book with challenging situations and legal and moral quandaries. Mariska Hargitay (Lieutenant Olivia Benson on Law & Order...
Blind Vigil is the seventh book in Coyle's Rick Cahill private investigator series, but reads well as a stand-alone book with just enough back story splashed in to orient the reader. Cahill is not on the best of terms with the local law enforcement stemming from days...
Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery is a look at the therapeutic psychological practice of Catherine Gildiner, a fascinating memoir of how she dealt with five clients, all so severely emotionally damaged that they had to...
S. M. Goodwin pulled me into Absence of Mercy immediately with her descriptions of Jasper Lightner, a Crimean War hero with post-traumatic stress syndrome and a traumatic brain injury. The second son of a duke, Jasper inherits enough money to become independent of his...
Chip Jones is a Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist who brings to life an amazing story. A succinct synopsis is drawn straight from the subtitle of his book: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South. To give readers some background into...
Nowhere Near Goodbye, released August 4, 2020 by Red Adept, is Barbara Conrey’s debut novel. It delves deeply into the age-old challenge women face: career versus family. I read this book because it looks at some of the same choices I, as a physician, had to make....
For years, Caitlin Bergman has told everyone that her mother is dead—it's a simpler explanation than the truth that, after giving Caitlin up for adoption, the woman dropped out of sight. When Caitlin receives word from a police department in Oregon that her mother has...
In her debut novel, In the Canyons of Shadow and Light, author Emily Donoho transports the reader into the psyche of a jaded middle-aged Manhattan police detective. Though the book frequently references a popular police procedural television program, Law & Order,...
The author of The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir, Sara Seager, is a pioneering astrophysicist and a professor at MIT. She also led NASA’s Probe Study team for the Starshade project and earned a MacArthur grant. Since childhood she’s loved astronomy and the...
After Elias is one of the most beautifully-written books I’ve read recently. It’s also a genre-breaker, gracefully combining a fractured romance with elements of a thriller and psychological drama. One week before their wedding, Coen Caraway loses Elias Santos, the...
The Song of Achilles retells the story of Achilles from the point of view of his lover, Patroclus. With all the verve of Mary Renault, Miller gives new life to The Iliad as well as developing a sweet, tender love story between the two men. As a child, I read the Greek...
After Kilimanjaro is Gayle Woodson’s debut novel, and one I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Her descriptions of the wilds of the Serengeti and the cities of Arusha and Dar Es Salaam are so accurate I sensed we’d stood in one another’s footsteps, particularly in parts of...
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