After a tropical disease kills her infant son and husband in Ghana in 1894, Dr. Leah Maays returns to her hometown. In Edith’s Bay, Maine, she moves in with her aunt and uncle, Martha and Utterance, owners of a local apple orchard. Martha is as uptight as they come,...
The Crooked Medium's Guide to Murder is a complete change of pace from author Stephen Cox’s earlier works, Our Child of the Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds, a sci-fi duology about an alien child who lands on earth and is rescued by a human family. Though the subject...
Woman on the Verge deals with maternal ambivalence, those emotions generated when women want to be mothers yet hate mothering itself. Hooper deftly captures the love/hate relationship: the adoring of those tiny bodies loving you while simultaneously being overwhelmed...
I liked Ramona Emerson's Shutter, a blend of police procedural, Native American culture, paranormal, and horror, that I didn't wait long to read the second installment, Exposure. The latter can be read as a stand-alone novel, but reading the first helps set up the...
The Lost Masterpiece blends a contemporary story with a bit of history about the birth of French Impressionism. In the present, Tamara inherits a Manet painting Party on the Seine, featuring Berthe Morisot as the principal figure, a painting looted from its French...
I had hopes of liking Lady Macbeth, purportedly a feminist retelling of the Shakespearean play. However, from the start, it seems doomed to failure. Rather than being a strong female, Lady Macbeth is a whiny seventeen-year-old French girl (Roscille) brought to...
As a former professional photographer, I chose to read Shutter because it involved photography. Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. She is Navajo, but she’s an anomaly. Despite her culture’s teachings and taboos about...
Having been raised in a family of artists, I've always been fascinated by how artists live and what drives them to create. In Pale Morning Light With Violet Swan, the reader gets a glimpse of the pain, shame, heartbreak, and all-abiding love that form the psyche of...
I generally enjoy fiction about Egypt such as Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody mystery series, which I liked so much I read the entire series. Compared to that inimitable series, Reflections in the Nile falls flat. It is a retelling of the Biblical plagues of Egypt...
In A Spark of Light, Jodi Picoult, as usual, tackles tough social problems and deftly presents both sides of the story, in this case the issue of abortion. On a warm fall morning, a women’s reproductive health clinic is invaded by a gun-toting man who opens fire,...
The Entirely True Story of the Fantastical Mesmerist Nora Grey is historical fiction mixed with paranormal and horror aspects. It is a dual timeline story split between the mid- and the late-nineteenth century. Kathleen Kaufman is a story about two women who share a...
The Memory Hunters is science fiction/fantasy and centers around a society in which scientists extract memories via a complex process involving mushrooms and blood. The main character, Kiana Strade, comes from a family who lead the local religion’s temples, but she...
Considering Us is a cute food-related romance/women's fiction novel. In college, Devon Paige meets Kyle Holling, they have an instant connection, but after an intense night of talking, he goes to London. They never meet again. In the meantime, Devon becomes a private...
Goddess should have had everything I enjoy in books: an ahead-of-her-time, gender-swapping heroine with the swordsmanship of a musketeer and the voice of a La Scala operatic superstar. Despite her mind-boggling skills, fascinating life, and flamboyant lifestyle, I...
Return to Sender is the 21st book in Craig Johnson’s “Longmire” mystery series, not counting multiple novellas and short stories. Each is a continuation of the adventures of Walt Longmire, Sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming. In this novel, Walt goes undercover to...
We Burn Daylight is a contemporary western set in Waco, Texas, beginning in 1993. Though it’s based on the David Koresh/Branch Davidian standoff with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and later the FBI, it’s not a definitive play-by-play...
Unspoken brings to life a resilient eleven-year-old girl, Ruby Lee Becker, whose family and farm are trapped in the double whammy of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The recurrent dust storms kill her baby sister and grandmother and leave Ruby with weakened...
My expectations were high for Follow Me To Africa. As a budding paleoanthropologist in my youth and a lover of the Serengeti, I looked forward to discovering more about Mary Leakey’s work as a paleoanthropologist. However, this fictional biography failed to live up to...
The Ancients is a post-apocalyptic climate novel. One family lives a prehistoric-feeling life. They live in isolation in the wilderness trying to survive after the fish and elk they depend on for food begin to disappear. The rest of their tribe has moved on, hoping...
Book 8 of the Countess of Harleigh Mystery series, A Daughter's Guide to Mothers and Murder, continues with Frances and George in Paris during the Paris Olympics and the Paris World's Fair. An acquaintance, Alicia Stoke-Whitney, asks Frances to investigate Alicia’s...
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