🌟🌟🌟🌟 A wonderful debut from a new author, which manages to be sweet, funny, and engaging, while also facing complex issues — grief, family obligations, less than useful coping mechanisms, and trauma — head on. Laced with a charming romance that is just beginning for long-time friends Simran and Leo,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 This reader’s introduction to DS George Cross, in this, number four in the series featuring the detective, and his partner, DS Josie Ottey. A great new find, DS Cross is a detective unlike any other encountered. Neurodiverse (in this case, on the spectrum), Cross is detail-oriented, methodical, and totally…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 An extremely well-executed thriller, with a unique premise and more than one puzzle to decipher, backwards! When Jen Brotherhood, a forty-something lawyer who cares too much for her clients, witnesses a horrific event, her life is flung upside down in a manner that absolutely could not be predicted. For…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A book that couldn’t possibly be more charming, this is a read to savor, to enjoy, and to come back to, when your heart needs reminding that life is love, and all that goes with it. The disappointments, the grief, the anger, and of course, the joy and the…
🌟🌟🌟💫 A very mixed bag for this reader — first, the good (which is actually very good). This book starts with an interesting premise, featuring a detailed set of characters, each with their own POV, in a gorgeous island setting. The story is somewhat centered on a fascinating and horrifying…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A non-stop thriller which mixes Mexican drug cartel sheer and bloody terror with the incredible saga of a simple tequila-producing family, who grows from 1950’s Mexico to present day, along the way becoming a hugely successful, and absolutely dysfunctional, globally situated corporate dynasty, modeled with the moniker “RAM”. Peopled…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A searing and complex look at identity, sobriety, loneliness and longing — centering on the internal world of women, caretaking, motherhood, and the insidious push for disappearance into societal roles that, much as they may feel that way, do not ultimately define us. Between these pages we will follow…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A creepy and compelling peek into the not too distant future, where multiple acts of procreation (from those who can) are prioritized in a beat-up world struggling to preserve alarming population levels. Facing escalating climate pressures and mysterious viruses, (a world not too significantly unlike our own), our narrator,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 An interesting and detailed study of a criminal case, and a miscarriage of justice, as seen by the author, a former police officer. Lisa Lee Pruett was sixteen years old at the time of her murder, a horrific case that transpired in Shaker Heights, Ohio, that saw the teen…
A complex and intensely moving look at love, at trauma, at illness and the lengths a person may go to in their ultimate quest for belonging. Hannah is a desperate young woman with a traumatic past, a business and film major, living in Toronto. A social outcast of sorts, Hannah…