A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

The Widow's House is Carol Goodman's 12th novel.  I've read all except for her three YA novels ( Blythewood series) and the literary fiction novel that precedes this one, River Road .  I've reviewed most of them for the blog, and if you click this link , you can read those reviews.  Many of Goodman's novels have a literary theme or connection.  In this novel the main characters are writers/novelists, one of whom is a former composition professor at the local college while the other two are his former students.  This is a creepy, atmospheric, suspenseful mystery.  Goodman's story sucks you in from the beginning right through to the tense, pulse pounding ending.  It's a page turner that you won't want to put down. Jess Martin is a famous writer, whose follow up to his stunning debut is about a decade overdue.  Clare is his wife, an equally talented writer, who has given up writing in order to take a steady job as a copy editor for a publisher...

The Burning Soul is the latest installment of the Charlie Parker series.  With Connolly's books it's sometimes hard to write reviews--the plots often have multiple strands that connect by the conclusion and it's hard to balance how much to include in the review to convey the flavor of the story without giving the entire thing away.  There is more hinting in this book that something bad is coming Parker's way at some point and that (possibly) something else bad is keeping tabs on him unless the entity keeping tabs is the same nastiness headed his way in which case it's not fair that evil's doing reconnaissance on an unsuspecting Parker! Pastor's Bay is a tiny, insulated town on the Maine coast whose inhabitants are wary of outsiders and protective of its own citizens.  It has its small town, small time, petty crime, but little does it know that big government is luring some big city, big time, nasty criminals to its environs to orchestrate a take down of s...

Sister is the debut novel by the British author Rosamund Lupton.  It is an impressive, haunting, harrowing, and heartbreaking debut. When their mother calls Bee in New York to tell her that her younger sister, Tess, has been missing for four days, Bee catches the next flight to London.  She expects to find Tess and deliver the usual lecture about responsibility.  Instead her sister's body is found in a nearby park.  And despite the police ruling the death a suicide and her family's acceptance of this ruling, Bee is adamant that she knows her sister, that she knows her well enough to know that Tess would never take her own life.  Determined to find her sister's murderer, Bee moves into Tess's apartment and begins her own investigation predicated on the certainty of the closeness of the relationship between herself and Tess. The story is structured as a long letter that Bee has written to Tess to explain to her sister why she was murdered, who her murderer is...

The Glass Demon is Helen Grant's follow up to The Vanishing of Katharina Linden , a book previously reviewed on this blog back in June.   The Glass Demon is every bit as gripping as Grant's debut, starting from the killer first lines.   Demon is a dark and sinister, modern myth, and, like its predecessor, takes place in Germany.  Grant is expert at evoking the claustrophobia and clique-ishness of small town life where locals close ranks against outsiders and rumors and gossip fly like nobody's business. In the wake of a career setback, Lin's father uproots the family from their home in England and packs them off to the remote German countryside to spend the year living in a rundown castle in the middle of a forest.  When the family arrives, they come across an old man lying dead in an orchard, the ground around him littered with shattered glass, and when Lin's father refuses to report the corpse to the police, the reader knows this cannot bode well.  Indeed...

The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow was recently featured on BookPage's homepage and then reviewed in its February issue.  I enjoy the reviews in BookPage, but month to month it's really hit or miss as far as finding books in the reviews that I'm actually interested in reading.  Before I read this one I looked up Morrow's other books to see if he might have other titles I'd be interested in reading in case I liked The Diviner's Tale .  Unfortunately his other titles' subjects/plots don't really interest me so I may have to wait to see his next one to read another of his books. Beautifully and lyrically written the tale this novel tells is an unusual one of a modern day diviner.  A diviner or a dowser is a person who uses a rod to guide them in locating water on people's land.  It is a supernatural, mysterious, and dying art that until recently admitted only men to its fraternity. Cassandra is the fifth generation and first female dowser in...

Some children hover adoringly forever, others want nothing from you but their freedom. I know that. I've been watching mothers with their children all my life. I've never thought it would be easy, but I also never pictured heartbreak like this: estrangement, mental illness, love that grows an edge and expresses itself only in the pain it inflicts from page 103 It didn't take long to finish this book (as compared to the one I read right after this: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake from which I took a break of several days before I decided to finish reading the last half in one night). I've never read anything by Cammie McGovern, but I think I'll try some of her other books. This particular novel, I think, will have a special place in every librarian's heart because the narrator is a former librarian who goes away for a murder she believes she committed but didn't really. That's right. And no, the murder victim was not a patron from her library....