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...
Never Name the Dead, though the first in a series, may join the ranks of Native American books along the veins of Tony Hillerman and Anne Hillerman’s Leaphorn/Chee mysteries. I was entranced by the aspects of Kiowa culture found in this novel. All her life, Mud, a...
Dead and Gondola is the first in the Christie Bookshop series. Ellie Christy has recently returned to her family home in Last Word, Colorado, where she and her sister, Meg, run the family’s history bookshop, the Book Chalet. They are the fifth generation in the book...
The Darnells, a husband and wife team of Egyptologists, combine scholarship, suspense, and adventure in Egypt's Golden Couple. I have always been fascinated by Egyptology, so I particularly enjoyed this book. Like The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking...
Duplicity by Shawn Wilson is the second of Brick Kavanagh mysteries series. Kavanagh, recovering from his prior case, has spent three months in Ireland and is just returning to Washington, DC. This novel relies too much on back history and descriptions of the local...
When her mother dies of cancer, Mari Lennox accepts a grant to go to Japan to document the Yanagi Inn. She's reluctant to accept the grant so soon after her mother's death, but at her sister's urging, she goes ahead with her plans. As her father was an expatriate...
A Fearsome Moonlight Black reads like a memoir. At the end of the book, in the author’s notes, Putnam states, essentially, that the novel is a memoir based on his early years as a policeman with an added fictional love interest, so this qualifies as "autofiction,"...
Having read Barbara Linn Probst first two novels, I was excited to read her third, The Color of Ice. Probst’s brand is writing about art and the ups-and-downs of an artist’s life, and The Color of Ice continues her explorations of those themes. Coming from an artistic...
Symbol Maker’s Daughter is a historical romance set in the time just before the emergence of Henry Tudor who will become King Henry VII, the sovereign who ends the War of the Roses, forms the Tudor dynasty, and becomes the father of Henry VIII. The protagonist is...
Sweet Slow Sizzle, being a romance, is heavy on the romance, but this one is one of the slowest slow-burn love stories I’ve ever read. If not for the hot thoughts the two lovebirds have for each other, you might even call it a simmer. Hunky half-Hawaiian Jojo Williams...
Art history graduate student Cate Adamson struggles to place herself in the male-dominated world of art history. Her doctoral advisor, the misogynistic Professor Herat Jones, has not only turned down every dissertation topic she’s broached, but has given her scut work...
Set in the late 1990s, Many Are Invited starts as a sort of buddy story. The two male leads, Steve and John, both in their mid thirties, work for the phone company trying to resolve the Y2K problem of what will happen to the world’s computer systems when 12/31/1999...
I have been on a bit of a horror binge (and I rarely read horror) starting with Kris Waldheer’s retelling of Frankenstein, Unnatural Creatures, told from the points of view of three women in Victor Frankenstein's life; followed by Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein;...
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