The Crazy School by Cornelia Read

The Crazy School is the second installment in Cornelia Read's Madeline Dare series. The Crazy School, both as a book and as a place, is populated by characters who are all different kinds of crazy for all different kinds of reasons. A Field of Darkness (Crazy's predecessor) started off with a killer first line/paragraph that set the bar and tone for the rest of that novel. The Crazy School doesn't have that distinction. However, the book very quickly hooks the reader--once the story gets going, it's very hard to put down, and the chapters fly by.

It's the year after the events of A Field of Darkness. While these events are referenced obliquely once or twice, it would be very easy for someone to jump into the series starting with this book and then catch up with the first one. Me, I like to read a series in order. Okay, let's just be honest: I HAVE to read a series in order, so I started with the first one and continued on through the third and most recent installment (the review for that one will be forthcoming).

It's 1989, and Madeline has finally made it out of Syracuse, New York, to settle in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts where she's found work at a boarding school for troubled teens. The school is strict with its students and its faculty, requiring them to adhere to eccentric rules. Both students and teachers are expected to abstain from smoking and caffeine...and participate in mandatory group and individual therapy sessions.

Unfortunately trouble finds Madeline wherever she goes because it's not long before two troubled and recently disciplined students are found dead in an apparent double suicide. However, Madeline doesn't believe they killed themselves despite the fact that the couple had recently confided an unwanted pregnancy to her and sworn her to secrecy. When she shares her suspicions with the police investigating the suicides, the tables quickly turn, and Madeline is arrested for the homicides. It's immediately clear to readers and to Madeline (but not necessarily the police) that someone is doing an artful job of framing her. As Madeline cobbles together bits of information, it becomes apparent that the current mad machinations are rooted in a twisted, horrifying tragedy perpetrated a decade ago, an ocean away and on another continent.

Who killed these students and why? And who can Madeline trust at the school to help her track down the real murderer? After the ending of the previous Dare book, it's extremely hard for the reader to trust that things are as they appear when it comes to who's on the straight and narrow and who's involved in diabolical misdeeds. There is also the fact that after reading S.J. Bolton's debut novel, Sacrifice, I am nearly always suspicious of authority figures and just who can be trusted and who cannot be trusted when it comes to the life and death issues revolving around a whodunit murder/conspiracy mystery. Reading Sacrifice will do that to a person. Granted the majority of the time these fears are unwarranted once the book has been all read and done.

I highly recommend you pick up this book the next time you're at the library--it's got great characters, a great mystery, great suspense, and it's hard to put down right up to the very last page.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip. I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage. The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it. It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger. Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read. Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one. Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment. The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story. It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve. Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week. This particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst

A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

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