As the child of an intolerant oil field worker, I grew up all across the western United States. Little did I know that when I read Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West I would recounter many of the places I’d lived. Bandit...
Zeke and Ned is a western in which Larry McMurtry works his magic, as he did in his magnificent, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Lonesome Dove series, in capturing the essence of life during America's more rustic years. In this case, he and his co-author fictionalize true...
Demon Copperhead, the protagonist of this eponymously titled novel, is born in trailer house in Lee County in the southern mountains of Appalachia to a teenaged mother with substance abuse issues. To tone down her labor pains, she overdoses as her son comes into the...
Stolen Lives is the second in Joyce Yarrow’s Zahara series. In the first, Zahara and the Lost Books of Light, Seattle-based journalist Alienor Crespo decides to document her journey to recover her Sephardic family’s past when Spain offers citizenship to those...
In Zahara and the Lost Books of Light, the first of two books in Joyce Yarrow's Zahara series, when Spain offers citizenship to descendants of the Jewish community who were expelled in the past, young Seattle-based journalist Alienor Crespo decides to document her...
Songs for the Brokenhearted by Ayelet Tsabari is a dual time-line story, one set in the 1950s and the other in 1995; both concern Yemeni Jews who have immigrated to Israel and Israeli politics during each timeframe. The novel begins in a wretched, over-crowded...
Ahmet Atlan is a Turkish author/journalist born into a family of authors. Like his father and brother, he was jailed unjustly after writing an article dedicated to the victims of the Armenian Genocide. After a failed July 2016 coup d'état in 2016 against President...
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...
Like Bluebird, Bluebird, the first in the Highway 59 trilogy, Heaven, My Home is the story of a Black Texas Ranger named Darren Matthews, but it is so much more than that. It’s a thought-provoking novel—set in East Texas in the months post-election but before Donald...
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...
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