With a teenager in the house again after many years, I’ve been reading some Young Adult books to encourage their reading and discuss with them. I have always enjoyed Rick Riordan’s books, both his adult Tres Navarre mystery series and his many YA series. In the Magnus...
The Summer Before deals with child sexual abuse in an unusual and somewhat oblique way. The story focuses on the family, specially the daughter, of the perpetrator of the abuse and the rippling effects of that abuse. Madeline Plympton and Summer Starr are BFFs and...
John Henry (Doc) Holiday and his cousin, Mattie, are childhood lovers held apart by religion (her family is Catholic while his is Presbyterian) and consanguinity (they are first cousins). Doc moves West in an attempt to cure his tuberculosis but continues a long-term...
The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession is a fascinating psychological profile of Stéphane Breitwieser and his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, as they weave their way across Europe stealing art and artifacts from museums, averaging...
Guide Me, Home, the third installment of Attica Locke’s Southern noir Highway 59 mystery series continues along the veins of the first two. Darren Matthews, a Black Texas ranger, is persistently drinking, is burnt out, and resigns his commission. He divorces his wife...
Bluebird, Bluebird, the first in the Highway 59 trilogy, is an amazing Southern noir that it is so much more than the usual mystery. It’s also about home, whether the place of one’s birth or a found home; family; race; and justice. The protagonist, Darren Matthews,...
Doctors and Friends centers around a group of female physicians who’ve been buddies since medical school. Kira is an infectious disease doctor; Compton, an ER doc; Hannah, an OB-GYN; Georgia, a urologist; and Vani, an internist. These five go on vacation in Spain and...
Hot Hex Boyfriend is a cute enemies-to-lovers paranormal romance. Delia Merriweather is approaching her thirtieth birthday and still living with her eccentric but adorable extended family in Willow Root, Texas. She’s tried multiple careers, but nothing has ever taken...
Babylonia is set in ancient Assyria with its brutal, warlike society. The heroine, Semiramis, is orphaned when her mother commits suicide in the village of Mari in western Assyria. She’s adopted by the chief shepherd, a violent and sadistic man who frequently beats...
Canadian author Liam Taliesin scores with his debut novel, Lithium Fire. In it, he develops a vision of Winnipeg, Canada in the year 1984. The Royal Albert Arms Hotel is the central setting in a seedy neighborhood in Winnipeg, a “dive now but had a reasonably...
Having read Julia Phillips’s debut novel, Disappearing Earth, with its lush descriptions of a place no one has heard of before (a remote Russian peninsula called Kamchatka, where one goes for “bears and volcanoes”), I wanted to read her newest. Bear is set on the...
The Medicine Woman of Galveston is the story of a female physician, Tucia Hatherley, at the turn of the 20th century. After her mother dies when she is twelve and her father remarries, she develops severe anxiety and copes with it with trichtillomania—pulling out her...
In Every Life is a novel about Ben and Harper, a couple who are on their honeymoon when he becomes quite ill, and he is eventually diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer. As his way of coping with his illness, he devises a plan in which he hopes to have her find...
Thrust is a fascinating post-apocalyptic novel, loosely built around the Statue of Liberty, told from many points of view in many individual stories. First is Laisvė, a girl from Siberia who has immigrated with her father to America. She is a “carrier” who can move...
Ambushed is the third in Carol Potenza’s De-Exinct Zoo Mystery Series. Veterinarian Milly Smith trained in Siberia and now works in Pleistocene BioPark, a zoo dedicated by resurrected extinct megafauna (giant short-faced bears, dire wolves, smilodons, mammoths, woolly...
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