Recent Reader Reviews

An author who is a highly experienced ghostwriter is so hard up for money that she takes a ghostwriting job with her father, a successful horror writer from whom she has been estranged for many years. For most of his life, he's carried around a mystery. Now, he says, he wants to finally come clean as he nears the end of his life.

Vincent Taylor has requested that Olivia, in particular, be his ghostwriter. He wants her to know the truth as to whether he really did kill his brother and sister when he was a teenager. But Olivia does not simply take his word for it. Plus, she finds that his own writings on this subject are unintelligible. So she really has her work cut out for her putting together all the pieces to this puzzle.

I wonder if this really is the job of a ghostwriter– –searching for the truth. I always thought a ghostwriter was at the mercy of his/her subject and looked no further for the truth of the matter.

If you think that, because this book is written by Julie Clark, it will be thrilling, please lower your expectations. This book is a mystery but not a thriller.

Dying Fall is the fifth book in the Ruth Galloway series by award-winning British author, Elly Griffiths. The audio version is narrated by Clare Corbett. The sad news that Dan Golding, a fellow archaeology student at UCL, has died in a house fire, is eerily followed by a letter from him. The man she hasn’t seen for over two decades tells her he had made an incredible find that he believes to be the bones of the legendary King Arthur, but also that certain disturbing elements at the university have made him afraid.

When the Clayton Henry, the head of the History Department, and Dan’s boss at Pendle University in Lancashire, asks Ruth to come and give an opinion of the bones, she eventually decides to make it a vacation with Kate and a catch up with another fellow student. She also asks Nelson to check the circumstances of her friend’s death, and his old friend in Blackpool, DCI Sandy Macleod reveals that he has opened a murder investigation into this grisly death.

Despite some rather threatening text messages trying to warn her off, Ruth reasons that she will keep Kate well away from anything happening at the University: Cathbad has come along to visit a druid friend and will care for his goddaughter while Ruth is busy. Nelson, having decided to vacation with Michelle in Blackpool, isn’t too pleased when he finds that Ruth has brought Katie into a potentially dangerous situation.

The bones Ruth examines reveal a surprise, and she’s none too sure about the people who claim to be Dan’s friends. By the time she and Nelson have unravelled the various complex relationships, and looked into a neo-pagan group with links to white supremacists, the list of possible motives and perpetrators lengthens.

In this instalment, there’s plenty of typical Blackpool activity, including an unexpected and somewhat awkward encounter on a beach between Ruth, Kate, Cathbad and Nelson’s extended family. Before matters are resolved, a dog is adopted, several women confess to an affair with Dan, and there’s a dramatic fairground incident in which Cathbad acts very heroically. As always, there are quite a few red herrings and distractors to keep the reader guessing, and the dialogue is often amusing. #6 of this addictive series, The Outcast Dead is eagerly anticipated. Page-turner crime fiction.

It is hard to write a graphic novel, even a good memoir, and a piece about Chinese-American history has a lot of company now. Luckily, I have grown to love all three subsets. "Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir" by Tessa Hulls uses striking visuals to tell the story of a woman who knows little about her Chinese background for reasons that she thought were "shame" but ended up to be "fear."

Paranoia in Communist China was at an all-time high with re-education and thought control, leading to mental health problems for Tessa's grandmother. Communism led to famine and dishonesty among its families, and many died trying to escape it. The process prompted Hull's mother to refrain from telling parts of the story.

The portions related to mental illness set the novel apart, starting a chicken-or-the-egg argument between the psychosis and the political upheaval. Which came first, the madness or the thought control? If you have ever tried to accumulate family history, you realize how much harder it would have been if some players were institutionalized or hiding.

The visuals will strike you as the author/artist carrying on the motif of ghosts haunting her mother and grandmother after political and mental unrest. The women resorted to undesirable marriages to improve their circumstances, and the pictures capture this haunting atmosphere. Over the three generations, the women struggle to identify mental health problems, trauma, and unhealthy coping mechanisms in each other and themselves.

This story will not be to everyone's taste, but the art, history, and mental illness thoughts are worth the price of admission and will show the power of memoirs. Wells has no easy answers, but anyone who has dealt with mental illness (either their own or that of their family) will tell you that these easy fixes do not exist.

A favorite of 2023

The House is on Fire is Rachel Beanland’s sophomore effort and I was even more pleased with it than her debut, Florence Adler Swims Forever. The story covers the fire on December 26, 1811 at the Richmond Theatre. Plantation owners came to Richmond in winter for their social season. Thus, the theater was especially full on the 26th. The fire was the worst urban disaster of our young country, resulting in the death of 72 individuals, mostly women.

The story starts with the night of the fire and progresses from there. I wasn’t sure how Beanland would maintain any suspense once the fire was over and done, but boy, was I wrong. The story centers around four characters - Jack Gibson , a young stagehand; Sally Henry Campbell, daughter of Patrick Henry and newly widowed; Cecily Patterson, a young black slave who was acting as a chaperone for her young white mistress but was required to sit on a different floor, and Gilbert Hunt, an enslaved blacksmith who ends up helping rescue 12 white women from the theater. Each of these four made decisions at the crisis point which affected not just themselves but others. By switching between their POVs, the story maintains a brisk pace. Each of the four is also fully drawn and I was equally engaged by each of their stories.

The book does a wonderful job of showing the places of women and blacks in southern society. For example, when a young wife breaks her leg jumping from the window and the surgeon announces only her husband can give permission for her leg to be amputated. And, of course, black women are chattel to be used in whatever way a man wants. Let’s just say most of the men in the story don’t come off in a good light. There aren’t a lot of heroes in this story, at least white ones. But there are several heroines.
The writing is clear and succinct and it was easy to envision each scene. Beanland has the ability to give the reader a firm grasp on the time and place. There are several aspects of this story which have been fictionalized, but Beanland spells them out in her Author’s Note. She gives a rationale for each of those modifications. Overall, this is exactly what I want from historical fiction. It taught me about a moment in history that I previously knew nothing about while telling a good story.

My thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for an advance copy of this book.

What an amazing, gripping book. The Great Believers tracks two different story lines. Mid 1980s Chicago, the AIDS epidemic is in full swing and Yale’s friends are falling ill and dying. Things truly go wrong at his friend Nico’s funeral when an ill placed word by Fiona, Nico’s sister, leads to a cavalcade of events. At least things are going well for his professional life, where as the director of an art museum at Northwestern University, he stands ready to acquire an extraordinary collection of modern art.

But then the reader gets to watch as assumptions Yale was living with fall away. In the second storyline, told 30 years later, Fiona is trying to track down her daughter who has joined a cult. The hunt takes her to Paris, where she reconnects with a photographer friend of her brother who captured life in “Boys Town”, the gay enclave in Chicago.
So often, I am not a fan of dual storylines. The current one is all too often merely a vehicle for the historical one. But not here. Fiona is coming to terms with the decisions she’s made. Did she sacrifice her family’s happiness to help her friends? I struggled with why Claire hated her mother so much. Her reasoning seemed blown out of proportion to Fiona’s faults. But then, children often hold their parents to impossibly high standards.

Makkai has done a wonderful job creating main characters I truly cared about. And both settings are richly detailed and easy to envision. It was a reminder of how awful things were when AIDS first cropped up, when there was little understanding and no cures. As another review said, Makkai did a brilliant thing by drawing parallels with the Lost Generation after WWI. This was written before the Covid pandemic, but younger generations may also find parallels with it.

I loved what Makkai had to say about survival, especially that sometimes life can be too long, when you are the last one left and the only one remaining to tell the stories, really hit home. It’s a poignant story which will really stick with me.

I listened to this and found Michael Crouch to be a great narrator.

Once again, John Boyne has crafted a book that drew me in and kept me enthralled. It is a powerful book. In The Elements, four interconnected stories explore sexual crimes and the different parties involved - the enabler, the accomplice, the perpetrator and the victim. The main character of the first story is a wife who remained obtuse to her husband’s crime and has now run away in the aftermath of him being found guilty. Next, there's the footballer who is on trial for supposedly filming his buddy’s rape of a young woman. Then a female doctor who rapes young boys because of a crime she was the victim of. And finally, a forty year old man who was once the victim of the doctor. The stories are all tangentially intertwined until the end, when everything comes full circle. The book presents a pebble in a pond aspect, watching the repercussions move outward.

Boyne manages to present each character in a straightforward manner. It takes a special talent to write from the first person POV in some of these situations. I didn’t feel sympathetic to the first three, but I also didn’t look away. Each was nuanced and I felt I was given a clear eyed view of their thoughts. Overall, it’s a book that covers different aspects of culpability, guilt, identity, forgiveness (or not) and survival. As always, the writing is beautiful. This is a deeply thought provoking book. It’s a book I’ll be pondering for a while.

My thanks to Netgalley and Henry Holt for an advance copy of this book.

OMG! This is one of those pressure-cooker psychological thrillers that just slowly builds and builds and builds until the chilling, appalling ending. Oh, this is a good book.

Written by Jean Hanff Korelitz, this is the story of frustrated novelist Jacob Finch Bonner. Jake published his first book to critical acclaim, although that didn't translate into significant book sales. His second book was a total flop. Now he is heading to Ripley College, a small little-known college in Northern Vermont near the fabled "Northeast Kingdom," where he will teach a low-residency symposium to wannabe novelists. Jake is miserable. Almost all his students are forgettable—except for one. Haughty, arrogant, and conceited Evan Parker thinks he has conceived a plot that is so exceptional, so explosive, so much of a pager-turner that it will not only be a No. 1 bestseller, but also a hit movie. And Evan will be world-famous. All he has to do is write it. Evan is guardedly evasive and highly secretive about this sure-thing winner, sharing only a few of the opening pages and telling no one the plot. At some point, Evan shares with Jake the gist of the plot, and Jake realizes that all the braggadocio is warranted. There has never been a novel like the one Evan has conceived. That sends Jake into a tailspin of gloom.

Fast forward a few years. Jake learns quite by accident that his former student has died. And he never wrote the novel. That amazing plot is still out there in the universe, waiting for an author to turn it into a book. Feeling only a little remorse and a few twinges of guilt about stealing his student's brilliant idea, Jake writes the book. It's titled "Crib," and it is indeed a runaway bestseller with Steven Spielberg signing on to make the movie of the book. Oprah chooses it for her book club. Jake's life is now everything he ever hoped it would be. And then it gets better. He's a guest on a radio show in Seattle, and the woman who booked him on it is gorgeous and is flirting with him! Jake and Anna hit it off quickly, and she moves to New York City where they happily live together and soon marry.

Life is perfect, right? No. Because while he was Seattle, Jake received the first (of what would be many) threatening emails. It said: "You are a thief." It was signed [email protected]. And so it begins. Someone out there knows that Jake stole the story idea, and that someone wants him to pay for his blatant, unabashed thievery. Jake is terrified. His only way out, in his mind, is to lie about what he did.

Korelitz gives lots of clues all along the way. Even I—who rarely figure out whodunit—could figure out this one, but the big plot twist at the end I didn't see coming until right before it happened. Many of the clues are literary, which is so much fun for avid readers. Pay attention in particular to the novels "Housekeeping," by Marilynne Robinson and "The Talented Mr. Ripley," by Patricia Highsmith. (Even if you haven't read these books, Korelitz eventually explains the clues from the these acclaimed novels, but if you have read them, you are more likely to figure out things sooner.)

"The Plot" is also two novels in one. Interposed with Jake's story of writing "Crib" is the novel "Crib," excerpted in several-page increments throughout the book. (And it IS a genius plot!)

This is an intense page-turner with an electrifying plot twist and a horrifying ending. But wait! There's more! The story continues in "The Sequel."

RED NOTICE is nonfiction, and I know that nonfiction can often be dull. But please believe that this isn't. You need to read this. RED NOTICE is a book that everyone should read.

This is Bill Browder's story of his experiences with Russia since the Soviet Union. He invested in Russia as CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and became the country's largest foreign investor. Then the Russians charged him with stealing and tax evasion, all lies, all made up so that he would stop accusing Russian oligarchs of doing exactly that and proving it. He had to leave Russia for his own safety and soon realized that anyone he worked with had to get out, too. What he didn't know at first was that even his lawyer was not safe there, even the lawyer who worked with his lawyer.

Eventually, Browder was able to convince his lawyer to leave Russia. But Sergei Magnitsky, Browder's other lawyer, would not. He believed too strongly in the law, that the truth would eventually win. But this was Russia, is Russia. Magnitsky would not lie, and the Russians arrested, tortured, and murdered him as a result.

This is also Browder's story of convincing other countries to enact laws, in the name of Magnitsky, to sanction these human rights abusers. Browder has devoted most of his life to this since Magnitsky's death. This is how he could see that Magnitsky's murderers are made to pay.

Everyone should read this so we remember the evil of Russia. As you read RED NOTICE, remember the news stories he speaks of and how they were presented to us at the time. For example, remember the news story of Vladimir Putin's no longer allowing Americans to adopt Russian orphans. That was his way of punishing Americans for enacting the Magnitsky Act. Putin says he did this for the orphans' safety, and that's how the media presented the story, as if we should take Putin at his word.

Browder wrote RED NOTICE 10 years ago. He followed up with another book, FREEZING ORDER, more recently, in 2022. Believe me, you'll want to read it when you finish RED NOTICE.

I read FREEZING ORDER first because I won it. It interested me so much I was sorry I hadn't read RED NOTICE first. And now that I've read it, I want to reread FREEZING ORDER. It will be the only book I've reread since THE GATEWAY TO STORYLAND when I was five.

I have watched The Wizard of Oz on TV more times than I can count and really enjoyed Hazel Gaynor's story about Dorothy's Auntie Em's earlier life and how she ended up Kansas. There are lots of references to the Wizard of Oz from a mention of the ruby red shoes, Toto and lots more. It was fun to see all of these references back to the original story and I think that Frank Baum would have approved of this story.

This story begins long before Dorothy was born. Emily and her two sisters had emigrated from Ireland with their parents and after several stops, they ended up in dirty and gritty Chicago. The oldest sister moved to California and Annie married someone that Emily didn't really like or trust. When Emily married Henry and they decided to farm in Kansas, Annie was very unhappy and kind of nasty to her sister about the move. Annie was pretty spoiled and willful and didn't want Emily to leave and not be available to help her. But Emily was not only in love with Henry but she soon was in love with the beauty that was Kansas and wanted to do everything that she could to help the farm. After a miscarriage, she realized that she'd never get pregnant and resigned herself to never becoming a mother. When Annie and her husband died, their will requested that Emily and Henry take responsibility and raise their daughter Dorothy. Life in Kansas was tough when Emily brought Dorothy to Kansas - the Depression was affecting farm prices and the huge dust storms had started along with frequent tornadoes. Emily wasn't sure how Dorothy would adapt to Kansas or adapt to her because she wasn't really sure how to be a mother. Yet despite everything, they did become a family.

Be sure to read the Author's notes at the end of the book where she gave some political background of the story and talked about her love of the Wizard of Oz movie. It was apparent when reading this book that the author had done considerable research into the time period and into the movie. It was a fun book to read and it was interesting to find all of the references to the original story.

Nick Ratcliffe is a man who is evil and cunning and uses so many different names it is a miracle he remembers to use the correct name the person knows him by.

He knows how to get women interested in him while he is only interested in their money.

He finds out a woman's husband who owned quite a few restaurants has passed. He poses as an old friend of her husband's and sends a package to her with something he says belonged to her husband.

His charm pulls her in just as he pulls in many women.

We then meet Martha married to Al along with a few other women who have a connection to him.

Both Nick and Al always have some business trip taking them away from their families.

And what a trip they both are on.

DON’T LET HIM IN will have your mind spinning and whiplashing back and forth after each introduction of a character and a new scheme of Nick’s.

You will not where to turn and not know how Nick pulls it all off.

Lisa Jewell has outdone herself with this one even though it takes a bit to figure who is who and and how it all fits together.

If you love to hate a character, this book is for you.

He is despicable and has a ready lie for anyone who questions him and anything that might threaten his charade.

You won't be able to stop reading. 5/5

Thank you to the publisher for a copy of this book. All opinions are my own.