The Things We Do to Our Friends is a twisted story of toxic friendships, unlikeable characters, and an unreliable narrator filled with tons of teenaged angst. Clare has started studying art history at a university in Scotland. A rather unsophisticated young woman, she...
Valiant Ladies is an entertaining read, breezy but not totally frivolous. Loosely based on genuine historical characters, Eustaquia “Kiki” de Sonza and Ana Lezama de Urinza attempt to be proper seventeenth-century young ladies. But by their spirited temperaments...
Like Luanne Castle’s other volumes of poetry (Kin Types and Doll God), the poems of Rooted and Winged explore family, kinship, life, and death. A trail of images always ties the reader to the earth and nature. In this newest chapbook, Castle also explores flight and...
The Blue Bar is a gritty thriller set in Mumbai, complete with twisting plot lines that include a serial killer preying on vulnerable women, real estate fraud, a corrupt police administration, and a dash of Bollywood. Police investigator Arnav Singh Rajput is...
I was so impressed with the first in Barbara Nickless's Dr. Evan Wilding series At First Light that I immediately ordered the second in the series, Dark of Night. Author Nickless demonstrates great plotting, fascinating historical references, little-known trivial...
Boop and Eve's Road Trip takes a look at mental illness and its intergenerational effects. Boop (the grandmother) has a breakdown when her daughter, Justine, is born. Boop’s minimal mothering leads Justine to smother her daughter, Eve, to compensate. Couched in terms...
I can’t express how much I enjoyed At First Light. Author Nickless demonstrates great plotting, fascinating historical references, little-known trivial tidbits, intriguing characters, and a “ticking clock.” I have been binging on all things Viking lately, and At...
Heard It in a Love Song is a slow-burn romance between Layla, recently-divorced after ten years of marriage, and Josh, currently divorcing after a twenty-year marriage. Both are struggling to break free from their pasts. Layla had dreams of making it as a singer in a...
Like M.E. Hilliard’s debut novel, The Unkindness of Ravens, the newest in her Greer Hogan Mystery series, Shadow in the Glass, grabbed me immediately. The first person narration rapidly sucks the reader in the the thought processes of amateur sleuth, Greer Hogan. A...
Bombay Monsoon is a thriller set in post-Partition India in the mid 1970s. An ambitious young American journalist, Danny Jacobs, arrives in Bombay on a new assignment. He’s tossed into a maelstrom of events during which the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, fearing a...
As a contemporary of the protagonist of The Fourteenth of September, Private First Class Judy (Judy Blue Eyes) Talton, I felt transported to my last year of high school. We protested the war, protested the treatment of Mother Earth, celebrated the first Earth Day, and...
Eliza Ripple is a naive eighteen-year-old girl whose parents force her to wed a young man visiting her hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan. He projects wealth and ambition, so they feel their daughter will be well-cared for. The couple moves to Monterey, California, as...
Hardland is one of several books I've read that topple the Western genre, first by being from a woman’s point of view and by not romanticizing the American Old West. The novel follows the life of Ruby Fortune from her early teens, though her rise as an Annie Oakley...
It's News to Me by R.G. Belsky is the fifth in the Clare Carlson mysteries, an investigative journalist fiction series. When her boss and mentor is fired, Clare faces a controversial, cantankerous new head honcho, a woman determined to achieve high ratings on their TV...
Cleopatra’s Vendetta is a fast-paced thriller with an unusual background story. Cleopatra, after being defeated by Octavius, has a servant/spy hide a map to her secret stash of gold. She also hides images of female deities, before she kills herself. Centuries later,...
Ordinary Grace is a beautifully written coming-of-age story, told in retrospect from a distance of forty years and from the point of view of thirteen-year-old Frankie Drum. Set in New Bremen, Minnesota, in the summer of 1961, Frankie starts that summer a normal kid...
Doomed Legacy, the ninth book in Coyle's Rick Cahill private investigator series, 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 when...
Mother of Valor is the fourth in Gary Corbin's Valorie Dawes Thrillers. Valorie (Val) Dawes is molested at age twelve by a family friend, “Uncle Milt.” Though Val eventually reports it to her family, no one believes her except her Uncle Val, a cop. He’s shot in the...
Jason, the retelling of the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, is a 528-page tale of Jason's journey home after he's stolen the golden fleece. He's accomplished the mission his uncle, King Pelias of Iolkos, set for him, and now hopes retake the throne Pelias stole from...
The Silent Count is an interesting read on a subject—climate change—at the forefront of modern life. Author E. A. Smiroldo builds a lot of suspense in the life of Dara Bouldin, a young nuclear engineer who has just received her Ph.D. Dara has developed a plan to...
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