en-US Thu, 01 May 2025 10:08:03 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 218372429
History contains a plethora of insane screwups—otherwise known as SNAFUs. Coined during World War I, SNAFU is an acronym that stands for Situation Normal: All F*cked Up. In other words, “things are pretty screwed up, but aren’t they always?�

Spanning from the 1950’s to the 2000’s, Ed Helms steps in as unofficial history teacher with a loving tribute to humanity’s finest faceplants, diving into each decade’s craziest SNAFUs. From planting nukes on the moon to training felines as CIA spies to weaponizing the weather, this book will unpack the incredibly ironic decision-making and hilariously terrifying aftermath of America’s biggest mishaps.

Filled with sharp humor and lively illustrations, SNAFU is a wild ride through time that covers the hilarious, head-scratching, and occasionally inspiring blunders that have shaped our world and made historians spit-take They’re the kind of stories that not only entertain but offer fresh insights that just might prevent history from repeating itself again and again.]]> 288 Ed Helms 1538769476 Martha 0 nonfic-auto-biog, to-read 4.77
author: Ed Helms
name: Martha
average rating: 4.77
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date added: 2025/05/01
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]]> 216793596 “Anne Hillerman deserves recognition as one of the finest mystery authors currently working in the genre.”�New York Journal of Books

In this gripping chapter in New York Times bestselling author Anne Hillerman’s Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito series, the detectives must sort out a save-the-planet meditation group connected to a mysterious death and a nefarious scheme targeting vulnerable indigenous people living with addiction.

The Navajo Nation police are on high alert when a U.S. Cabinet Secretary schedules an unprecedented trip to the little Navajo town of Shiprock, New Mexico. The visit coincides with a plan to resume uranium mining along the Navajo Nation border. Tensions around the official’s arrival escalate when the body of a stranger is found in an area restricted for the disposal of radioactive uranium waste. Is it coincidence that a cult with a propensity for violence arrives at a private camp group outside Shiprock the same week to celebrate the summer solstice? When the outsiders� erratic behavior makes their Navajo hosts uneasy, Officer Bernadette Manuelito is assigned to monitor the situation. She finds a young boy at grave risk, abused women, and other shocking discoveries that plunge her and Lt. Jim Chee into a volatile and deadly situation.

Meanwhile, Darleen Manuelito, Bernie’s high spirited younger sister, learns one of her home health clients is gone–and the woman’s daughter doesn’t seem to care. Darleen’s curiosity and sense of duty combine to lead her to discover that the client’s grandson is also missing and that the two have become ensnared in a wickedly complex scheme exploiting indigenous people. Darleen’s information meshes with a case Chee has begun to solve that deals with the evil underside of human nature.]]> 332 Anne Hillerman 0063344882 Martha 0 to-read 4.47 2025
author: Anne Hillerman
name: Martha
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 216926781 How could this have happened in the United States?

Is it even humanly possible that this young woman could have so brutally and with such unimaginable Herculean force fatally stabbed herself more than twenty times?

Beautiful, accomplished, and beloved, Ellen Greenberg was a vivacious and affectionate teacher of young children she adored. Always upbeat, she deeply loved her family and friends, and especially her fiancée, Sam Goldberg, with whom she was planning a wedding. In fact, they’d just sent out the save-the-date announcements when, on January 26, 2011, Ellen was found in the kitchen of the luxury apartment she shared with Sam, a knife still plunged in her chest. She’d been brutally stabbed more than twenty times, at least one of the wounds having been assessed as occurring post-mortem. The autopsy by the Philadelphia medical examiner recorded homicide as the cause of death. Following secretive meetings, including the Philadelphia Police Department, District Attorney’s Office, and possibly members of the Attorney General’s Office, the cause of death was changed to “suicide.� How could that possibly be? Could this petite, twenty-seven-year-old woman have so forcibly murdered herself, hitting parts of her body no one could reach with such Herculean force, again and again and again? Top forensics investigators who have painstakingly studied this case take huge exception to the suicide finding. They say it’s impossible. Period. So why can’t Ellen Greenberg’s still grieving parents get the Philadelphia justice system to simply reopen the case, despite a groundswell of public pressure and thirteen years of legal battles and appeals? Why is it that even the Philadelphia Supreme Court called the handling of the case questionable and even riddled with mistakes but stopped short of ordering a new investigation?]]> 272 Nancy Grace Martha 0 3.65
author: Nancy Grace
name: Martha
average rating: 3.65
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: crime-thriller, family, nonfic-auto-biog, politics, to-read
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]]> 12191568 A husband and wife race to find a cure for the disease that has inspired a serial killer to terrorize Manhattan in this classic medical thriller from the bestselling author and creator of the hit Netflix drama The Stranger.They’re one of the country’s most telegenic beloved TV journalist Sara Lowell and New York’s hottest basketball star, Michael Silverman. Their family and social connections tie them to the highest echelons of the political, medical, and sports worlds—threads that will tangle them up in one of the most controversial and deadly issues of our time.In a clinic on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a doctor has dedicated his life to eradicating a divisive and devastating disease. One by one, his patients are getting well. One by one, they’re being targeted by a serial killer. And now Michael has been diagnosed with the disease. There’s only one cure, but many ways to die...]]> 521 Harlan Coben 1101544449 Martha 0 4.04 1991
author: Harlan Coben
name: Martha
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: crime-thriller, family, to-read
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]]> 217112030 A deeply reported, perceptive, and celebratory biography of beloved actor James Gandolfini from a prominent critic and film historian

Based on extensive research and original reporting, including interviews with friends and collaborators, Gandolfini is a detailed and nuanced appraisal of an enduring artist.

More than a decade after his sudden passing, James Gandolfini still exerts a powerful pull on television and film enthusiasts around the world. His charismatic portrayal of complex, flawed, but always human men illuminated the contradictions in all of us, as well as our potential for grace, and the power of love and family.

In Gandolfini, critic and historian Jason Bailey traces the twinned stories of the man and the unforgettable roles he played. Gandolfini’s roots were working class, raised in northern New Jersey as the son of Italian immigrants, and acting was something he loved for a long time before he could see it as a career. It wasn’t until he was well into his bohemian twenties that he dedicated himself to a life on the stage and screen.

Bailey traces his rise, from bit parts to character roles he enlivened with menace and vulnerability, to Tony Soprano, the breakout role that would make him a legend, and onto a post-Sopranos career in which he continued to challenge himself and his audience.]]> 352 Jason Bailey 1419767690 Martha 0 nonfic-auto-biog, to-read 4.21
author: Jason Bailey
name: Martha
average rating: 4.21
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/26
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]]> 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Martha 4 bg-titles, family 3.92 2023
author: Ann Patchett
name: Martha
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: bg-titles, family
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]]> 217163697 #1ĚýNew York TimesĚýbestselling author Fredrik Backman returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a stranger’s life twenty-five years later.

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier. There’s Joar, who never backs down from a fight; quiet and bookish Ted who is mourning his father; Ali, the daughter of a man who never stays in one place for long; and finally, there’s the artist, a boy who hoards sleeping pills and shuns attention, but who possesses an extraordinary gift that might be his ticket to a better life. These four lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be put into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. As she struggles to decide what to do with this bequest, she embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn the story of how the painting came to be. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more she feels compelled to unleash her own artistic spirit, but happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this fresh testament to the transformative power of friendship and art.]]> 448 Fredrik Backman 1982112824 Martha 0 bg-possibles, family, to-read 4.58 2025
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Martha
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: bg-possibles, family, to-read
review:

]]> 218494525 From the pages of Vanity Fair to the red carpets of Hollywood, editor Graydon Carter’s memoir revives the glamorous heyday of print magazines when they were at the vanguard of American culture

When Graydon Carter was offered the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992, he knew he faced an uphill battle—how to make the esteemed and long-established magazine his own. Not only was he confronted with a staff that he perceived to be loyal to the previous regime, but he arrived only a few years after launching Spy magazine, which gloried in skewering the celebrated and powerful—the very people Vanity Fair venerated. With curiosity, fearlessness, and a love of recent history and glamour that would come to define his storied career in magazines, Carter succeeded in endearing himself to his editors, contributors, and readers, as well as many of the faces that would come to appear in Vanity Fair’s pages. He went on to run the magazine with overwhelming success for the next two and a half decades.

Filled with colorful memories and intimate details, When the Going Was Good is Graydon Carter’s lively recounting of how he made his mark as one of the most talented editors in the business. Moving to New York from Canada, he worked at Time, Life, The New York Observer, and Spy, before catching the eye of Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse, who pulled him in to run Vanity Fair. In Newhouse he found an unwavering champion, a loyal proprietor who gave Carter the editorial and financial freedom to thrive. Annie Leibovitz’s photographs would come to define the look of the magazine, as would the “New Establishment� and annual Hollywood issues. Carter further planted a flag in Los Angeles with the legendary Vanity Fair Oscar party.

With his inimitable voice and signature quip, he brings readers to lunches and dinners with the great and good of America, Britain, and Europe. He assembled one of the most formidable stables of writers and photographers under one roof, and here he re-creates in real time the steps he took to ensure Vanity Fair cemented its place as the epicenter of art, culture, business, and politics, even as digital media took hold. Charming, candid, and brimming with stories, When the Going Was Good perfectly captures the last golden age of print magazines from the inside out.]]> 432 Graydon Carter 0593655907 Martha 0 4.15
author: Graydon Carter
name: Martha
average rating: 4.15
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: nonfic-auto-biog, politics, to-read
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]]> 27394935 273 E.H. Reinhard Martha 0 4.06 2015
author: E.H. Reinhard
name: Martha
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: crime-thriller, series, to-read
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]]> 216301256 This empowering picture book celebrates the idea that every one of us -- from the smallest to the largest -- has something to offer, and if we all work together, we can make the world a better, greener place.

In the “vast, green forest,� animals of every kind live happily together � ants and monkeys, snakes and elephants. But all it takes to change this is one tiny spark, which soon swells into a big fire.

The animals are afraid... until one little hummingbird takes action. She carries one drop of water at a time, between river and fire, river and fire, trying to put it out.

Inspired by the hummingbird, the elephant dips her trunk into the river and begins to spray the fire with water. And soon, all the animals are pitching in, doing everything they can to help extinguish the flames.

This stunning picture book shows that everyone has the power to create big change... no matter how little they may be.

When Jerry Pinkney passed away in 2021, heĚýhad partially completed the illustrations for The Littlest Drop. His son Brian, also an award-winning illustrator, took up the mantle and finished them after Jerry's death. A collaboration between two remarkable talents, this unique bookĚýis Brian's tribute to his father.]]> 40 Sascha Alper 059330912X Martha 0 4.49
author: Sascha Alper
name: Martha
average rating: 4.49
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: to-read, family, memorable-animals
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]]> 135924 The 1st Deadly Sin, set a standard for today's novels of psychological suspense. Now, retired Captain Ed Delaney returns to a distinctly urban milieu of paranoia and impulsive violence to solve a brutal murder that shocks New York's unshockable art world.

The victim is Victor Maitland. Long-considered one of the world's greatest artists, he excelled in capturing the beauty of life on canvas. In private, he destroyed whomever he pleased: his wife, his son, his mistress, his dearest friends and family. Fittingly, Maitland has paid for his sins. But in a world where self-delusion is rewarded, where greed triumphs, and where murder is just another art, who else will pay the price?]]> 443 Lawrence Sanders 0425104281 Martha 0 3.93 1977
author: Lawrence Sanders
name: Martha
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: crime-thriller, family, series, currently-reading
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]]> 43673
Distracted by the serious illness of his wife, Barbara, Delaney begins his secret investigation. Then the killer claims another victim—slain in the exact same way, leaving the strange puncture wound. As more young men are found murdered, Delaney starts putting the pieces together. Soon, he’s faced with a cop’s dilemma: He knows who the killer is, but the man is untouchable. That’s when Delaney lays a trap to bring a monster to justice . . .]]> 628 Lawrence Sanders 0425104273 Martha 4 4.06 1973
author: Lawrence Sanders
name: Martha
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: crime-thriller, family, favorites, series
review:

]]> 61771675
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters� unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]> 416 Ann Napolitano Martha 0 bg-titles, to-read 4.14 2023
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Martha
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> 61723825 New York Times bestselling author Stuart Woods, Stone Barrington faces his most dangerous threat yet.]]> 320 Brett Battles 0593540107 Martha 5 4.27 2024
author: Brett Battles
name: Martha
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: crime-thriller, favorites, series, loved-it
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]]> 218497550 New York Times bestselling series, Stone Barrington is confronted with a dangerous new threat.]]> Brett Battles 059385473X Martha 0 4.44
author: Brett Battles
name: Martha
average rating: 4.44
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: crime-thriller, favorites, series, to-read
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]]> 13115282
This book is divided into two parts; part one covers the theoretical and disciplinary foundations of the study of violent behavior, spanning the disciplines of sociology, psychology, biology, and neuroscience. Part two covers the policy and practice of responding to violent offenders from the insightful perspectives of people who work among them on a daily basis.

New and Key Features of the Second
� Contains 10 NEW chapters (5 in theory and research and 5 in policy and practice). These additions provide greater overall coverage of sociological theory, evolutionary psychology theory, and female offenders. The section on policy and practice is organized to be consistent with the criminal justice system, from law enforcement through the courts, to corrections.
� Hands-on research and practitioner expertise illustrate today's study of criminal predation
� Provides clear explanations of how criminological theory relates to the formation of a criminal offender to help students understand the reasons behind a person's violent actions

Instructor
- Test Bank
- Lecture Outline (Word doc.)
- PowerPoint Lecture Outlines]]> 469 Matt DeLisi 0763797901 Martha 0 to-read, nonfic-auto-biog 3.30 2011
author: Matt DeLisi
name: Martha
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read, nonfic-auto-biog
review:

]]> 216247526 'It's time we name our kingdom!' he shouted over the wind. 'I say we call this place Happy Land. If this ain't the land of happy people, then where is it? Why not create our heaven right here on earth?'

In the hills of Appalachia, there once existed a land ruled by a king and queen. Inspired by memories of African kingdoms, a community of formerly enslaved men and women grasped freedom on mountain land they owned. But freedom doesn't always last forever . . .

Today, after years of silence, Nikki has been summoned to North Carolina by her estranged grandmother. But instead of revealing answers about their recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki a shocking story about her great-great-great grandmother, Queen Luella, and the very land they stand on. Land Mother Rita insists must be protected at all costs.

As Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, she comes to realise how much of her identity is rooted in this family land, and how much they stand to lose if it, like so much else, is taken from them. It's time to reclaim what's theirs.]]> 368 Dolen Perkins-Valdez 0593337727 Martha 0 family, hist-fic, to-read 4.32 2025
author: Dolen Perkins-Valdez
name: Martha
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: family, hist-fic, to-read
review:

]]> 11737271
Three people living lives they never wanted, hiding secrets that even those closest to them would never suspect, will find that the past doesn’t recede. Even as the terrible consequences of long-ago events crash together in the present and threaten to ruin lives, they will come to the startling realization that they may not want to forget the past at all. And as each confronts the dark side of the American Dream—the boredom of a nice suburban life, the excitement of temptation, the desperation and hunger that can lurk behind even the prettiest facades—they will discover the hard truth that the line between one kind of life and another can be as whisper-thin as a heartbeat.

With his trademark combination of page-turning thrills and unrivaled insight into the dark shadows that creep into even the happiest communities, Harlan Coben delivers a thriller that cements his status as the master of domestic suspense.]]> 387 Harlan Coben 0525952276 Martha 4 crime-thriller, family 3.87 2012
author: Harlan Coben
name: Martha
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2012
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: crime-thriller, family
review:

]]> 204871506 “A small coterie of retired cops jumps at the chance to solve the mystery of the neighbor’s missing granddaughter. A thoroughly engaging and clever read where the senior sleuths encounter a network of dastardly characters involved in drugs and human trafficking. Two thumbs up!� –Sherry Hobbs, author of Bird of Passage and Mac—The Wind Beneath My Wings

Four retired detectives are living out their golden years on the same cul-de-sac in an idyllic planned community called Peace River Village in Sunland, Florida.

When the neighbor's seventeen-year-old granddaughter goes missing, the local police conclude she's a runaway and dead file the case. Dissatisfied with the official police response, the girl's grandmother is desperate to find her and seeks counsel from her detective friends.

Upon hearing of her plight, the cadre of retirees reach a different conclusion and decide to launch their own investigation. But they could never imagine the evil they would encounter or the danger they would confront.

Will the retirees' combined experience be enough to solve the mystery before the teen is sold into the lurid underground sex trafficking world?

Christopher Amato, who spent a career as a federal agent, is back with his latest thriller in Peace River Village. It's time to buckle up your seat belt and get ready for a wild ride that careens from tension to hilarity to horror!]]> 300 Christopher Amato Martha 0 4.07
author: Christopher Amato
name: Martha
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read, crime-thriller, family, series
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]]> 228534 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

A newspaper photographer, Jean, researches the lurid and sensational ax murder of two women in 1873 as an editorial tie-in with a brutal modern double murder. (Can you guess which one?) She discovers a cache of papers that appear to give an account of the murders by an eyewitness. The plot weaves between the narrative of the eyewitness and Jean's private struggle with jealousies and suspicions as her marriage teeters. A rich, textured novel.]]> 246 Anita Shreve 0316780375 Martha 0 3.66 1997
author: Anita Shreve
name: Martha
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: crime-thriller, family, to-read
review:

]]> 43784892
All summer long he has been hibernating, just like the bears do in winter. During the fall he spent his months preparing, getting ready, making sure this season would be his best ever. And when winter finally comes…he’ll hunt.

The winters in Willow Falls, Iowa are cold, brutal and unforgiving. And so is the town’s newest visitor. Except he’s not passing through. He’s here on vacation, for some fun and he’s going to stay for a while.

They call him “Robin Hood�, a winter serial killer who has left a gruesome trail of horror and death across four Midwestern states. His grisly trademark is skewering his victims to tree trunks using a hunting crossbow.

Now he’s here�

For ex-FBI Special Agent Carolyn Ryder, winter is the season to reflect, to come home, to take stock and to grieve. Willow Falls for her is filled with sorrow and regret. She has returned to her hometown to bury her mother after a long battle with illness. Her sister blames Carolyn for not caring, for not being there for her and their mother, for being a cold, dispassionate person who was more interested in building her career than in the family.

In the close-knit community of Willow Falls, Ryder has no reputation, no authority and no say with the townsfolk. To them she’s a stranger, an outsider, someone who can’t be trusted.

Then the first body is discovered; a local, a teenage girl found almost crucified to a white pine deep in the forest.

The local police aren’t equipped to deal with something like this, yet they stubbornly refuse Ryder’s help. With no support, Ryder decides to go it alone, to follow the clues herself, to trust her instincts. Slowly she starts to formulate a theory as to who the killer is. But no one will believe her. It’s too incredible to conceive.

Lock the doors, check the windows, stoke the fire and keep the lights on. It’s winter, and a new kind of predator has just come out of hibernation.]]> 304 J.K. Ellem Martha 0 4.36 2019
author: J.K. Ellem
name: Martha
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: crime-thriller, series, to-read
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]]> 213870442 New York Times bestseller C.J. Box.]]> 358 C.J. Box 0593851064 Martha 5 4.49 2025
author: C.J. Box
name: Martha
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: crime-thriller, family, favorites, memorable-animals, series
review:

]]> 229004506 #1 New York Times bestselling author John Grisham is the acclaimed master of the legal thriller. Now, he’s back with his first-ever whodunit, even more suspenseful than his courtroom dramas, as a small-time lawyer accused of murder races to find the real killer to clear his name.

Simon Latch is a lawyer in rural Virginia, making just enough to pay his bills while his marriage slowly falls apart. Then into his office walks Eleanor Barnett, an elderly widow in need of a new will. Apparently, her husband left her a small fortune, and no one knows about it.

Once he hooks the richest client of his career, Simon works quietly to keep her wealth under the radar. But soon her story begins to crack. When she is hospitalized after a car accident, Simon realizes that nothing is as it seems, and he finds himself on trial for a crime he swears he didn’t murder.

Simon knows he’s innocent. But he also knows the circumstantial evidence is against him, and he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. To save himself, he must find the real killer�.]]> 416 John Grisham 0385548982 Martha 0 4.50 2025
author: John Grisham
name: Martha
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read, crime-thriller, family, favorites
review:

]]> 5359 483 John Grisham 0385339089 Martha 5 4.06 1993
author: John Grisham
name: Martha
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: crime-thriller, family, favorites, loved-it, politics
review:

]]> 32542 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780385338608

Before The Firm and The Pelican Brief made him a superstar, John Grisham wrote this riveting story of retribution and justice. In this searing courtroom drama, best-selling author John Grisham probes the savage depths of racial violence, as he delivers a compelling tale of uncertain justice in a small southern town, Clanton, Mississippi.

The life of a ten-year-old girl is shattered by two drunken and remorseless young men. The mostly white town reacts with shock and horror at the inhuman crime. That is, until her black father acquires an assault rifle and takes matters into his hands.

For ten days, as burning crosses and the crack of sniper fire spread through the streets of Clanton, the nation sits spellbound as young defense attorney Jake Brigance struggles to save his client's life, and then his own.]]> 738 John Grisham Martha 5 4.11 1989
author: John Grisham
name: Martha
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: crime-thriller, family, favorites, loved-it, politics
review:

]]> 175828
Once a cop on Chicago’s South Side, there’s not much that can shock him. But when the town’s judge is brutally murdered, and a young Eagle Scout is reported missing, Cork takes on this complicated and perplexing case of conspiracy, corruption, and a small-town secret that hits painfully close to home.]]> 464 William Kent Krueger 0671016970 Martha 0 3.89 1998
author: William Kent Krueger
name: Martha
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read, crime-thriller, series
review:

]]> 58613424 752 J.K. Rowling Martha 5 4.56 2000
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Martha
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2000/07/10
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: crime-thriller, family, favorites, loved-it, series
review:

]]> 101160844 In 1958, a small Minnesota town is rocked by the murder of its most powerful citizen, pouring fresh fuel on old grievances in this dazzling standalone novel.

On Memorial Day, as the people of Jewel, Minnesota gather to remember and honor the sacrifice of so many sons in the wars of the past, the half-clothed body of wealthy landowner Jimmy Quinn is found floating in the Alabaster River, dead from a shotgun blast. Investigation of the murder falls to Sheriff Brody Dern, a highly decorated war hero who still carries the physical and emotional scars from his military service. Even before Dern has the results of the autopsy, vicious rumors begin to circulate that the killer must be Noah Bluestone, a Native American WWII veteran who has recently returned to Jewel with a Japanese wife. As suspicions and accusations mount and the town teeters on the edge of more violence, Dern struggles not only to find the truth of Quinn’s murder but also put to rest the demons from his own past.

Caught up in the torrent of anger that sweeps through Jewel are a war widow and her adolescent son, the intrepid publisher of the local newspaper, an aging deputy, and a crusading female lawyer, all of whom struggle with their own tragic histories and harbor secrets that Quinn’s death threatens to expose.

Both a complex, spellbinding mystery and a masterful portrait of midcentury American life, The River We Remember is an unflinching look at the wounds left by the wars we fight abroad and at home, a moving exploration of the ways in which we seek to heal, and a testament to the enduring power of the stories we tell about the places we call home.]]> 432 William Kent Krueger 198217921X Martha 5 4.19 2023
author: William Kent Krueger
name: Martha
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: crime-thriller, family, politics, hist-fic, memorable-animals
review:

]]> 33155325 One teenager with a lighter.
One moment that changes both of their lives forever.

If it weren't for the 57 bus, Sasha and Richard never would have met. Both were high school students from Oakland, California, one of the most diverse cities in the country, but they inhabited different worlds. Sasha, a white teen, lived in the middle-class foothills and attended a small private school. Richard, a black teen, lived in the crime-plagued flatlands and attended a large public one. Each day, their paths overlapped for a mere eight minutes. But one afternoon on the bus ride home from school, a single reckless act left Sasha severely burned, and Richard charged with two hate crimes and facing life imprisonment. The case garnered international attention, thrusting both teenagers into the spotlight.]]> 320 Dashka Slater 0374303231 Martha 0 4.10 2017
author: Dashka Slater
name: Martha
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: family, nonfic-auto-biog, to-read
review:

]]> 6681454
Wendy Tynes is a reporter on a mission, to identify and bring down sexual predators via elaborate—and nationally televised—sting operations. Working with local police on her news program Caught in the Act, Wendy and her team have publicly shamed dozens of men by the time she encounters her latest target. Dan Mercer is a social worker known as a friend to troubled teens, but his story soon becomes more complicated than Wendy could have imagined.]]> 388 Harlan Coben 052595158X Martha 5 3.96 2010
author: Harlan Coben
name: Martha
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: series, crime-thriller, family, favorites
review:

]]> 214151304 Emma Donoghue, the “soul-stirring� (Oprah Daily) nationally bestselling author of Room, returns with a sweeping historical novel about an infamous 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station.

Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train’s crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more.

From an author whose “writing is superb alchemy� (Audrey Niffenegger, New York Times bestselling author), The Paris Express is an evocative masterpiece that effortlessly captures the politics, glamour, chaos, and speed that marked the end of the 19th century.]]> 288 Emma Donoghue 1668082799 Martha 0 hist-fic, to-read 3.28 2025
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Martha
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: hist-fic, to-read
review:

]]> 123036004 A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.]]> 307 Amanda Peters 1646221958 Martha 5 4.04 2023
author: Amanda Peters
name: Martha
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: bg-titles, crime-thriller, family, hist-fic, loved-it
review:

]]> 213890792 New from the author of Presumed Innocent, the #1 bestseller that redefined the legal thriller and is the basis for Apple TV+’s most-watched drama series ever.

Rusty is a retired judge attempting a third act in life with a loving soon-to-be wife, Bea, with whom he shares both a restful home on an idyllic lake in the rural Midwest and a plaintive hope that this marriage will be his best, and his last. But the peace that’s taken Rusty so long to find evaporates when Bea’s young adult son, Aaron, living under their supervision while on probation for drug possession, disappears. If Aaron doesn’t return soon, he will be sent back to jail.

Aaron eventually turns up with a vague story about a camping trip with his troubled girlfriend, Mae, that ended in a fight and a long hitchhike home. Days later, when she still hasn’t returned, suspicion falls on Aaron, and when Mae is subsequently discovered dead, Aaron is arrested and set for trial on charges of first degree murder.

Faced with few choices and even fewer hopes, Bea begs Rusty to return to court one last time, to defend her son and to save their last best hope for happiness. For Rusty, the question is not whether to defend Aaron, or whether the boy is in fact innocent—it’s whether the system to which he has devoted his life can ever provide true justice for those who are presumed guilty.]]> 544 Scott Turow 1538706369 Martha 0 4.23 2025
author: Scott Turow
name: Martha
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: crime-thriller, series, currently-reading
review:

]]> 32499 400 John Grisham 0385339704 Martha 5 4.06 1992
author: John Grisham
name: Martha
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: crime-thriller, loved-it, politics
review:

]]> 207294741 A group of students encounter a supernatural terror while on a road trip through Appalachia in this chilling new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the “unforgettable and scary� (Harlan Coben) Chasing the Boogeyman. 1983: Three students from a small college embark on a week-long road trip to film a documentary on roadside memorials for their American Studies class. The project starts out as a fun adventure with long stretches of empty road and nightly campfires where they begin to open up with one another. But as they venture deeper into the Appalachian backwoods, the atmosphere begins to darken. They notice more and more of the memorials feature a strange, unsettling symbol hinting at a sinister secret. Paranoia sets in when it appears they are being followed. Their vehicle is tampered with overnight and some of the locals appear to be anything but welcoming. Before long, the students can’t help but wonder if these roadside deaths were really random accidents…or is something terrifying at work here?]]> 480 Richard Chizmar 1668009196 Martha 0 3.75 2024
author: Richard Chizmar
name: Martha
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: crime-thriller, family, sk-recommends, to-read
review:

]]> 212400054 288 L.R. Wright 1631943197 Martha 0 3.77 1991
author: L.R. Wright
name: Martha
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: crime-thriller, family, series, to-read
review:

]]> 216247500
Doris Grandfelt, an employee at an accounting firm, was brutally stabbed to death . . . but nobody knew exactly where the crime took place. Her body was found the next night, dumped among a dense thicket of trees along the edge of an urban park, eight miles east of St. Paul, Minnesota. Despite her twin sister Lara Grandfelt’s persistent calls to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the killer was never found.

Twenty years later, Lara has been diagnosed with breast cancer. Confronted with the possibility of her own death, she’s determined to find Doris’s killer once and for all. Finally taking matters into her own hands, she dumps the entire investigative file on every true-crime site in the world and offers a $5 million reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest. Dozens of true-crime bloggers show up looking for both new evidence and “clicks,� and Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are called in to review anything that might be a new lead.

When one of the bloggers locates the murder weapon, Lucas and Virgil begin to uncover vital details about the killer’s identity. But what they don’t know is the killer lurks in plain sight, and with the true-crime bloggers blasting every clue online, the killer can keep one step ahead. As the nation maneuvers the detectives closer to the truth, Lucas and Virgil will find that digging up Doris’s harrowing past might just get them buried instead.]]> 400 John Sandford 0593718402 Martha 0 4.12 2025
author: John Sandford
name: Martha
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: crime-thriller, favorites, series, to-read
review:

]]> 208516656 If you knew your future, would you try to fight fate?

Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed.

Because on this ordinary, short, domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are going to die. For some, their death is far in the future—age 103!—and they laugh. But for six passengers, their predicted deaths are not far away at all.

How do they know this? There were ostensibly more interesting people on the flight (the bride and groom, the jittery, possibly famous woman, the giant Hemsworth-esque guy who looks like an off-duty superhero, the frazzled, gorgeous flight attendant) but none would become as famous as “The Death Lady.�

Not a single passenger or crew member will later recall noticing her board the plane. She wasn’t exceptionally old or young, rude or polite. She wasn’t drunk or nervous or pregnant. Her appearance and demeanor were unremarkable. But what she did on that flight was truly remarkable.

A few months later, one passenger dies exactly as she predicted. Then two more passengers die, again, as she said they would. Soon no one is thinking this is simply an entertaining story at a cocktail party.

If you were told you only had a certain amount of time left to live, would you do things differently? Would you try to dodge your destiny?

Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment is a brilliantly constructed tale that looks at free will and destiny, grief and love, and the endless struggle to maintain certainty and control in an uncertain world. A modern-day Jane Austen who humorously skewers social mores while spinning a web of mystery, Moriarty asks profound questions in her newest I-can’t-wait-to-find-out-what-happens novel.]]> 512 Liane Moriarty 0593798600 Martha 4 family, favorites 4.5 3.98 2024
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Martha
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: family, favorites
review:
4.5
]]> 213870090 A thrilling reimagining of the world of Dickens, as seen through the eyes of the infamous Jacob Fagin, London’s most gifted pickpocket, liar, and rogue.

Long before Oliver Twist stumbled onto the scene, Jacob Fagin was scratching out a life for himself in the dark alleys of nineteenth-century London. Born in the Jewish enclave of Stepney shortly after his father was executed as a thief, Jacob and his open-minded mother, Leah, are each other’s whole world. But Jacob’s prospects are forever altered when a light-fingered pickpocket takes Jacob under his wing and teaches him a trade that pays far better than the neighborhood boys could possibly dream.

Striking out on his own, Jacob familiarizes himself with London’s highest value neighborhoods while forging his own path in the shadows. But everything changes when he adopts an aspiring teenage thief named Bill Sikes, whose mercurial temper poses a danger to himself and anyone foolish enough to cross him. Along the way, Jacob’s found family expands to include his closest friend, Nancy, and his greatest protege, the Artful Dodger. But as Bill’s ambition soars and a major robbery goes awry, Jacob is forced to decide what he really stands for—and what a life is worth.

Colorfully written and wickedly funny, Allison Epstein breathes fresh life into the teeming streets of Dickensian London–reclaiming one of Victorian literature’s most notorious villains in an unforgettable new adventure.]]> 336 Allison Epstein 0385550707 Martha 0 to-read, family, hist-fic 4.14 2025
author: Allison Epstein
name: Martha
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read, family, hist-fic
review:

]]> 216818681
Over the fifty years that Lorne Michaels has been at the helm of Saturday Night Live, he has become a revered, inimitable, and bewildering presence in the entertainment world. He’s a tastemaker, a mogul, a withholding father figure, a genius spotter of talent, a shrewd businessman, a name-dropper, a raconteur, the inspiration for Dr. Evil, the winner of more than a hundred Emmys—and, essentially, a mystery. Generations of writers and performers have spent their lives trying to figure him out, by turns demonizing and lionizing him. He’s “Obi-Wan Kenobi� (Tracy Morgan), the “great and powerful Oz� (Kate McKinnon), or “some kind of very distant, strange comedy god� (Bob Odenkirk).

Lorne will introduce you to him, in full, for the first time. With unprecedented access to Michaels and the entire SNL apparatus, Susan Morrison takes readers behind the curtain for the lively, up-and-down, definitive story of how Michaels created and maintained the institution that changed comedy forever.

Drawn from hundreds of interviews—with Michaels, his friends, and SNL’s iconic stars and writers, from Will Ferrell to Tina Fey to John Mulaney to Chris Rock to Dan Aykroyd�Lorne is a deeply reported, wildly entertaining account of a man singularly obsessed with the show that would define his life—and have a profound impact on American culture.]]> 656 Susan Morrison 0812988876 Martha 0 4.20 2025
author: Susan Morrison
name: Martha
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, favorites, nonfic-auto-biog
review:

]]> 50089336 Code Name Hélène is a spellbinding and moving story of enduring love, remarkable sacrifice and unfaltering resolve that chronicles the true exploits of a woman who deserves to be a household name.

It is 1936 and Nancy Wake is an intrepid Australian expat living in Paris who has bluffed her way into a reporting job for Hearst newspaper when she meets the wealthy French industrialist Henri Fiocca. No sooner does Henri sweep Nancy off her feet and convince her to become Mrs. Fiocca than the Germans invade France and she takes yet another name: a code name.

As LUCIENNE CARLIER Nancy smuggles people and documents across the border. Her success and her remarkable ability to evade capture earns her the nickname THE WHITE MOUSE from the Gestapo. With a five million franc bounty on her head, Nancy is forced to escape France and leave Henri behind. When she enters training with the Special Operations Executives in Britain, her new comrades are instructed to call her ±áÉł˘Ă�±··ˇ. And finally, with mission in hand, Nancy is airdropped back into France as the deadly MADAM ANDRÉ, where she claims her place as one of the most powerful leaders in the French Resistance, armed with a ferocious wit, her signature red lipstick, and the ability to summon weapons straight from the Allied Forces.

But no one can protect Nancy if the enemy finds out these four women are one and the same, and the closer to liberation France gets, the more exposed she--and the people she loves--become.]]> 451 Ariel Lawhon 0385544685 Martha 0 4.39 2020
author: Ariel Lawhon
name: Martha
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: hist-fic, nonfic-auto-biog, to-read
review:

]]> 33989585
Countless others have rendered their verdict. Now it is your turn.

Russia, July 17, 1918: Under direct orders from Vladimir Lenin, Bolshevik secret police force Anastasia Romanov, along with the entire imperial family, into a damp basement in Siberia, where they face a merciless firing squad. None survive. At least that is what the executioners have always claimed.

Germany, February 17, 1920: A young woman bearing an uncanny resemblance to Anastasia Romanov is pulled shivering and senseless from a canal. Refusing to explain her presence in the freezing water or even acknowledge her rescuers, she is taken to the hospital where an examination reveals that her body is riddled with countless horrific scars. When she finally does speak, this frightened, mysterious young woman claims to be the Russian grand duchess.
As rumors begin to circulate through European society that the youngest Romanov daughter has survived the massacre at Ekaterinburg, old enemies and new threats are awakened. The question of who Anna Anderson is and what actually happened to Anastasia Romanov spans fifty years and touches three continents. This thrilling saga is every bit as moving and momentous as it is harrowing and twisted.]]> Ariel Lawhon 052549622X Martha 0 to-read, hist-fic 3.68 2018
author: Ariel Lawhon
name: Martha
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, hist-fic
review:

]]> 214175082 From the authors of Quackery, a visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science.Ěý

From the easily disproved to the wildly speculative, to Ěýstraight-up hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science—it’s a light-hearted look into why we insist on believing in things such as Big Foot, astrology, and the existence of aliens. Did you know, for example, that you can tell a person’s future by touching their butt? Rumpology. It’s a thing, but not really. Or that Stanley Kubrick made a fake moon landing film for the US government? Except he didn’t. Or that spontaneous human combustion is real? It ain’t, but it can be explained scientifically. ĚýĚý

PseudoscienceĚýis a wild mix of history, pop culture, and good old fashioned science–that not just entertains, but sheds a little light on why we all love to believe in things we know aren't true.Ěý]]> 320 Lydia Kang 1523524251 Martha 0 to-read, nonfic-auto-biog 3.60
author: Lydia Kang
name: Martha
average rating: 3.60
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read, nonfic-auto-biog
review:

]]> 49534036
Viewing an apartment normally doesn’t turn into a life-or-death situation, but this particular open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes everyone in the apartment hostage. As the pressure mounts, the eight strangers slowly begin opening up to one another and reveal long-hidden truths.

As police surround the premises and television channels broadcast the hostage situation live, the tension mounts and even deeper secrets are slowly revealed. Before long, the robber must decide which is the more terrifying prospect: going out to face the police, or staying in the apartment with this group of impossible people.]]> 346 Fredrik Backman 1501160850 Martha 0 to-read 4.22 2019
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Martha
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 219449299 A brand new series. An iconic new detective duo. And a puzzling new murder to solve...

Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now.

Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. As a private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. She’s currently on a remote island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job...

Then a dead body, a bag of money, and a killer with their sights on Amy have her sending an SOS to the only person she trusts. A breakneck race around the world begins, but can Amy and Steve stay one step ahead of a lethal enemy?]]> 387 Richard Osman 059365322X Martha 0 currently-reading 4.06 2024
author: Richard Osman
name: Martha
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 40163119
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.

Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.]]> 441 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385521316 Martha 5 4.47 2018
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Martha
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: family, nonfic-auto-biog, politics, crime-thriller
review:

]]> 205478844
Jesse Ed Davis shared stages with the greatest music stars of the 1960s and �70s. His riffs and licks enlivened albums by three of four Beatles, and recordings by artists as distinct as Eric Clapton, Leonard Cohen, and Cher. But Davis—whose name has been all but lost to the annals of rock ’n� roll history—was more than just the most versatile session guitarist of the decade. By pairing bright flourishes with soulful melodies, Davis exploded our idea of what rock music could be, and who could make it. Interweaving more than a hundred interviews with legendary peers, bandmates, and family members, Washita Love Child reimagines the Kiowa-Comanche musician’s improbable career, from his childhood in Oklahoma to his first major gig backing rockabilly star Conway Twitty, and from his climactic, dramatic performance at George Harrison’s 1971 Concert for Bangladesh to his tragic demise, years later, in Los Angeles.]]> 400 Douglas Kent Miller 1324092092 Martha 0 4.23
author: Douglas Kent Miller
name: Martha
average rating: 4.23
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: family, nonfic-auto-biog, to-read
review:

]]> 16857 The Last Tycoon, edited by the renowned literary critic Edmund Wilson, was first published a year after Fitzgerald's death and includes the author's notes and outline for his unfinished literary masterpiece. It is the story of the young Hollywood mogul Monroe Stahr, a character inspired by the life of boy-genius Irving Thalberg, and is an exposé of the studio system in its heyday.]]> 169 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0020199856 Martha 0 classic, family, to-read 3.67 1941
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Martha
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1941
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: classic, family, to-read
review:

]]> 216730656
One was a tough junkman’s son, the other a cosseted mama’s boy, but they dreamed the same mighty dream: that the right movies could make a profit and change both the culture and individual lives. Sharing a religion and an evangelical zeal for film, Louis B. Mayer (1884�1957) and Irving Thalberg (1899�1936) were unlikely partners in one of the most significant collaborations in movie history. Over the course of their decade-long relationship, as key players at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and major players in Hollywood, they joined forces in redefining and mastering the template for the film industry.

Mayer, older by fourteen years, was the business-minded face of the studio, and Thalberg worked closely with the creative corps, especially writers—together they rarely set a foot wrong. And while Mayer initially viewed Thalberg as the son he never had, the two would go from passionate friends to near enemies before Thalberg’s shocking death at the age of thirty-seven.

In the first joint biography of the two men in fifty years, film critic Kenneth Turan traces their fraught relationship while examining the complicated history of Jewish identity in Hollywood.]]> 392 Kenneth Turan 0300254490 Martha 0 nonfic-auto-biog, to-read 4.41
author: Kenneth Turan
name: Martha
average rating: 4.41
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: nonfic-auto-biog, to-read
review:

]]> 206180597
Teddy Fay is ready to embark on the European press tour of Peter Barrington’s latest film Storm’s Eye, when he receives an unexpected visit from Lance Cabot, director of the CIA. Several CIA agents have been turning up dead. The commonality? They were all part of a mission Teddy was involved in: Golden Hour. Lance wants Teddy to use his trip as a cover to investigate who is behind these killings.

From Venice and Budapest to their last stop at a film festival in Berlin, Teddy must dodge excited fans, enamored women, and a few too many assassins who seem dead set on tracking down Golden Hour agents. And if Teddy doesn’t work fast enough, his identity—and life—might just be the next target in the killer’s ruthless plot for revenge.]]> 352 Brett Battles 0593331605 Martha 5 3.82
author: Brett Battles
name: Martha
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: crime-thriller, favorites, politics, series, loved-it
review:
Love this series! Teddy does a masterful job of juggling his multiple identities... Can't wait for the next book!!
]]> 49523517
A young man and woman are found dead in a hotel room, the evidence initially suggesting a suicide pact.

But as Reilly and the investigative team dig deeper and more bodies are discovered, they soon realize that each crime has an intriguingly unique element in common.

And that a cunning mind is at work, one who seeks to upset society's norms in the most twisted way...

2019 Edition: Previously published in the UK as 'Taboo'.]]> 380 Casey Hill Martha 0 4.28 2011
author: Casey Hill
name: Martha
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: crime-thriller, family, to-read
review:

]]> 203164414
Flavia de Luce, along with her pestilent younger cousin, investigates the murder of a former public hangman and uncovers secrets that bring the greatest shock of her life.



Poisonous mushrooms, pestilent cousins—and a most perplexing murder...

There's a new arrival at Buckshaw—Flavia de Luce's obnoxious cousin Undine. Flavia reluctantly takes on the mentorship of her fellow orphan, who in her best moments shows some potential for trespassing and trickery.

When Major Greyleigh, a former hangman, is found dead from a breakfast of poisonous mushrooms, suspicion falls on the de Luce family's longtime cook, Mrs. Mullet. After all, didn't she pick the mushrooms and serve them to Greyleigh moments before his death?

Flavia knows her beloved Mrs. Mullet is innocent. Together with Dogger, estate gardener and partner-in-crime, and the odious Undine, she sets out to find the real killer and clear Mrs. Mullet's good name.

But following the case's twists and turns will lead her to a most surprising discovery—one with the power to upend her entire life...]]> 298 Alan Bradley 0593724518 Martha 4 3.97 2024
author: Alan Bradley
name: Martha
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: crime-thriller, family, favorites, series
review:

]]> 221633230 From master storyteller Stephen King comes an extraordinary new novel with intertwining storylines—one about a killer on a diabolical revenge mission, and another about a vigilante targeting a feminist celebrity speaker—featuring the beloved Holly Gibney and a dynamic new cast of characters.

When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to “kill thirteen innocents and one guilty� in “an act of atonement for the needless death of an innocent man,� Detective Izzy Jaynes has no idea what to think. Are fourteen citizens about to be slaughtered in an unhinged act of retribution? As the investigation unfolds, Izzy realizes that the letter writer is deadly serious, and she turns to her friend Holly Gibney for help.

Meanwhile, controversial and outspoken women’s rights activist Kate McKay is embarking on a multi-state lecture tour, drawing packed venues of both fans and detractors. Someone who vehemently opposes Kate’s message of female empowerment is targeting her and disrupting her events. At first, no one is hurt, but the stalker is growing bolder, and Holly is hired to be Kate’s bodyguard—a challenging task with a headstrong employer and a determined adversary driven by wrath and his belief in his own righteousness.

Featuring a riveting cast of characters both old and new, including world-famous gospel singer Sista Bessie and an unforgettable villain addicted to murder, these twinned narratives converge in a chilling and spectacular conclusion—a feat of storytelling only Stephen King could pull off.

Thrilling, wildly fun, and outrageously engrossing, Never Flinch is one of King’s richest and most propulsive novels.]]> 448 Stephen King 1668089335 Martha 0 3.68 2025
author: Stephen King
name: Martha
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: series, crime-thriller, favorites, to-read
review:

]]> 38530939 My real name, no one remembers. The truth about that summer, no one else knows.

In the summer of 1862, a group of young artists led by the passionate and talented Edward Radcliffe descends upon Birchwood Manor on the banks of the Upper Thames. Their plan: to spend a secluded summer month in a haze of inspiration and creativity. But by the time their stay is over, one woman has been shot dead while another has disappeared; a priceless heirloom is missing; and Edward Radcliffe’s life is in ruins.

Over one hundred and fifty years later, Elodie Winslow, a young archivist in London, uncovers a leather satchel containing two seemingly unrelated items: a sepia photograph of an arresting-looking woman in Victorian clothing, and an artist’s sketchbook containing the drawing of a twin-gabled house on the bend of a river.

Why does Birchwood Manor feel so familiar to Elodie? And who is the beautiful woman in the photograph? Will she ever give up her secrets?]]> 485 Kate Morton 1451649398 Martha 5 bg-titles, crime-thriller 3.73 2018
author: Kate Morton
name: Martha
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/26
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: bg-titles, crime-thriller
review:

]]> 203708995 400 Griffin Dunne 0593652827 Martha 4 family, nonfic-auto-biog 4.01 2024
author: Griffin Dunne
name: Martha
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: family, nonfic-auto-biog
review:

]]> 6614960 When your son can't look you in the eye...does that mean he's guilty?

Jacob Hunt is a teen with Asperger's syndrome. He's hopeless at reading social cues or expressing himself well to others, though he is brilliant in many ways. But he has a special focus on one subject - forensic analysis. A police scanner in his room clues him in to crime scenes, and he's always showing up and telling the cops what to do. And he's usually right.

But when Jacob's small hometown is rocked by a terrible murder, law enforcement comes to him. Jacob's behaviors are hallmark Asperger's, but they look a lot like guilt to the local police. Suddenly the Hunt family, who only want to fit in, are directly in the spotlight. For Jacob's mother, Emma, it's a brutal reminder of the intolerance and misunderstanding that always threaten her family. For his brother, Theo, it's another indication why nothing is normal because of Jacob.

And over this small family, the soul-searing question looms: Did Jacob commit murder? ]]> 532 Jodi Picoult 0743296435 Martha 5 4.04 2010
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Martha
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 55361205
In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency—a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.

Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation’s highest office.

Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune’s Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden.

A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective—the story of one man’s bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of “hope and change,� and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible.

This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama’s conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.]]> 768 Barack Obama 1524763187 Martha 0 4.32 2020
author: Barack Obama
name: Martha
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: family, nonfic-auto-biog, to-read
review:

]]> 61885113
Armed with a pile of mysterious notes mailed to Elisa over the years, Sarah Booth and Tinkie follow an increasingly twisty trail leading all over Sunflower County, leading them to a tree and an empty grave in the county cemetery. A grave that's said to be haunted...]]> 352 Carolyn Haines 125088585X Martha 0 4.04 2023
author: Carolyn Haines
name: Martha
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: crime-thriller, memorable-animals, to-read
review:

]]> 18880086
This revised edition now brings the Martha Moxley murder case to a close. Updated to include the indictment, trial, and conviction of the murderer, Greentown offers the suspenseful and chilling account of a terrible crime. More than that, while relating a tale of seductive power, it uses the murder to tell the heartrending story of a family and a community responding to the unthinkable.]]> 256 Timothy Dumas Martha 0 3.53 1998
author: Timothy Dumas
name: Martha
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: crime-thriller, family, nonfic-auto-biog, to-read
review:

]]> 15803059 “That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.�

New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.

Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy unexpectedly strikes his family—which includes his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic mother; Juilliard-bound older sister; and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years.

Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.]]> 307 William Kent Krueger 1451645821 Martha 0 4.23 2013
author: William Kent Krueger
name: Martha
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read, bg-possibles, family, hist-fic
review:

]]> 222163948 An American mathematician’s assignment in Russia spirals into a high-stakes maze of shifting loyalties and intrigue in a propulsive short thriller by #1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child.

Nathan Tyler is an unassuming professor at a middling American university with a rather obscure specialty in mathematics—in short, a nobody from nowhere. So why is the White House calling? Summoned to Washington, DC, for a top-secret briefing, Nathan discovers that he’s the key to a massive foreign intelligence breakthrough. Reading between the lines of a cryptic series of equations, he could open a door straight into the heart of the Kremlin and change the global balance of power forever. All he has to do is get to a meeting with the renowned Russian mathematician who created it. But when Nathan crashes headlong into a dangerous new game, the odds against him suddenly look a lot steeper.]]> 50 Lee Child 1662526202 Martha 0 4.09 2025
author: Lee Child
name: Martha
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: crime-thriller, favorites, series, to-read
review:

]]> 5413 Also contains: One For the Road, Jerusalem's Lot. For standalone novel see ISBN 9780450031069.

Stephen King's second novel, the classic vampire bestseller 'Salem's Lot, tells the story of evil in small-town America. For the first time in a major trade edition, this terrifying novel is accompanied by previously unpublished material from King's archive, two short stories, and eerie photographs that bring King's fictional darkness and evil to vivid life.

When Stephen King’s classic thriller 'Salem's Lot hit the stands in 1975, it thrilled and terrified millions of readers with tales of demonic evil in small-town America. Now, thirty years later and still scaring readers witless, 'Salem's Lot reemerges in a brilliant new edition, complete with photographs, fifty pages of deleted and alternate scenes, and two short stories related to the events of the novel.

While the original edition of 'Salem's Lot will forever be a premier horror classic, 'Salem's Lot: Illustrated Edition, with the inclusion of material from King’s archive, is destined to become a classic in its own right and a must-have for all Stephen King fans. In this edition, the hair-raising story of Jerusalem’s Lot, a small town in Maine whose inhabitants succumb to the evil allure of a new resident, is told as the author envisioned it, complete with fifty pages of alternate and deleted scenes. With a new introduction by the author, two short stories related to the events and residents of Jerusalem’s Lot, the lavishly creepy photographs of Jerry Uelsmann, and a stunning new page design, this edition brings the story to life in words and pictures as never before.

No library will be complete without this ideal collector’s item for any King aficionado, the definitive illustrated edition of the great 'Salem's Lot.]]> 594 Stephen King 0385516487 Martha 4 4.28 1975
author: Stephen King
name: Martha
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 219282692 An Internet influencer and her boyfriend are brutally killed in their home in Los Angeles, and homicide detective Casey Stafford is under pressure by the LAPD and the news media to catch the disturbed killer—even as he desperately murders more people to cover his tracks.

It appears that their suspect is killing any potential witnesses, and each murder is more disturbing and out of control than the last.

The investigation leads Casey and his partner, Banchet, to a Chinese gang, a Mexican hitman, the FBI, a million dollars in stolen gold, and a leak in the LAPD itself, and with each murder, media interest in the case grows until the entire nation is watching.

Casey needs to stop the deranged murderer before he kills again, and he needs to do it before he is taken off the case by his commanding officers.

With Prior’s “crackling prose and relentless pacing,� each book in the Casey Stafford Series is filled with action, torn-from-the-headlines criminals, authentic LAPD police procedural details, and Casey’s joy in getting justice for his victims and just being a good cop.

If you enjoy crime thrillers like Michael Connelly’s Bosch series, or John Sandford's Virgil Flowers, you'll love Detective Casey Stafford. Get a copy now and see if you agree!

KILLER

"George Prior’s debut novel is a masterclass in suspenseful storytelling. …a high-octane pace� a triumph of suspense and thriller writing." � NetGalley Reviewer

"If you like John Sandford, you'll like this. I've read all the Prey and Virgil Flowers books. Finally found a series in the same vein." - Amazon Reviewer

“Michael Connelly, look out - Pacy, up-to-the-minute LA police procedural with slick dialogue and wry humour. Move over Harry Bosch, there’s a new sheriff in town.� - Amazon Reviewer

“An exhilarating thriller. Get it.� � Kirkus Reviews

"Adrenaline rush," "Thrilling," "The best crime I have read," "Non-stop action," "A total page-turner," "When is George Prior going to release another book?" - Amazon Reviewers]]> 481 George Prior Martha 0 4.34
author: George Prior
name: Martha
average rating: 4.34
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: crime-thriller, series, to-read
review:

]]> 212400096
Much as they'd like to, nobody in the sleepy hamlet of Sechelt knows anything about the death. So Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg has to start from scratch. But he finds his mind being distracted by Cassandra Mitchell, the local librarian with whom he has an on-again, off-again relationship, and her infatuation with a flirtatious actor visiting from Los Angeles. As Alberg struggles to separate jealousy from suspicion, the killer stalks the sleepy town, and only another murder can lead Alberg to the horrifying truth.]]> 264 L.R. Wright 1631943170 Martha 0 3.78 1986
author: L.R. Wright
name: Martha
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: crime-thriller, family, to-read
review:

]]> 212399973 The Suspect and A Chill Rain in January comes a superbly crafted story of love, hate, and murder...

RCMP Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg is at a crossroads. Coping with the death of his father and his own inexorable slide into middle age, he must make a decision about his relationship with his lover of eight years, Cassandra Mitchell. Restless and in desperate need of distraction, Alberg finds a project to fill the time during his bereavement leave: looking into the all-too-neat disappearance of a local man on the morning after his sixth wedding anniversary. Ultimately the case converges with another, as the very messy life of a simpleminded Vancouver stock boy spills over into the small coastal town of Sechelt, in an explosive climax of shocking, unforgettable violence.]]> 240 L.R. Wright 1631943200 Martha 0 3.64 1992
author: L.R. Wright
name: Martha
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: crime-thriller, family, series, to-read
review:

]]> 212399985 272 L.R. Wright 1631943189 Martha 0 3.71 1990
author: L.R. Wright
name: Martha
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: crime-thriller, family, series, to-read
review:

]]> 200484931 In the grand finale of "queen of the beach read" Elin Hilderbrand's beloved Nantucket novels, there's a new couple in town... and they instantly shake things up. Amid the extravagant parties on land and sea, there's trouble on the island, forcing Chief of Police Ed Kapanesh to postpone his retirement and changing the fabric of life on the picturesque island forever...

After thirty-five years serving as the Chief of Police on the island of Nantucket, Ed Kapenash's heart can no longer take the stress. But his plans to retire are thwarted when, with only three days left to serve, he receives a phone call. A 22-million-dollar summer home, recently purchased by the flashy new couple in town, the Richardsons, has burned to the ground. The Richardsons are far from hurt—in fact, they're out on the water, throwing a lavish party on their yacht—but when news of the fire reaches them, they discover that their personal assistant has vanished. The Chief is well-acquainted with the Richardsons, and his daughter is best friends with the now-missing girl, leaving him no choice but to postpone his retirement and take on the double case.

On a small island like Nantucket, the Richardsons shook things up from the second they stepped on to the scene, throwing luxurious parties and doing whatever they could to gain admittance to the coveted lunches at the Field & Oar Club (with increasing desperation). They instantly captured the attention of local real estate agent Fast Eddie, and the town gossip Blond Sharon, both dealing with their own personal dramas. Blond Sharon is going through a divorce, and in order to avoid becoming a cliché, she's enrolled in a creative writing class, putting her natural affinity for scandal towards a more noble purpose. To solve the case of the fire and track down his daughter's best friend, the Chief will have to string together the pieces of the lives of all of these characters and more, rallying his strength for his final act of service to the tight-knit community he knows and loves.

The last of Elin Hilderbrand's bestselling Nantucket novels, Swan Song is a propulsive medley of glittering gatherings, sun-soaked drama, wisdom and heart, featuring the return of some of her most beloved characters, including, most importantly, the beautiful and timeless island of Nantucket itself.]]> 384 Elin Hilderbrand 0316258873 Martha 4 3.98 2024
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: Martha
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: crime-thriller, family, favorites, series, loved-it
review:

]]> 217453559 From the author of The Violin Conspiracy and Symphony of Secrets comes a mesmerizing page-turner about a young Black musical virtuoso at the peak of his career who’s forced into hiding when his family runs afoul of a ruthless international cartel—and uses his music to fight back.

Curtis Wilson is a classical music prodigy. Having played since the age of five, he is that rare performer who, through sheer force of will and phenomenal talent, has clawed his way out of inner-city DC and risen to the heights of the classical music world—soloing with the New York Philharmonic. Zippy, his father, is a midlevel drug dealer, and Larissa, his father’s girlfriend, is a loving mother figure to Curtis and the heart of the family.Ěý

Then, when Zippy runs afoul of the kingpin who has provided his livelihood and nurtured his son’s talents, the family finds their lives in danger. With no choice but to run, they enter the witness protection program and abandon their former lives, including Curtis’s extraordinary career. When law enforcement seems unable to bring the cartel down, Curtis, Zippy, and Larissa realize that their only chance of returning to the way things were is to take on the cartel themselves—their own way.

A propulsive and moving story about sacrifice, loyalty, and the indomitable human spirit, TheĚýDark Maestro is Slocumb at the height of his powers.]]> 416 Brendan Slocumb 0593687612 Martha 0 4.06 2025
author: Brendan Slocumb
name: Martha
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: bg-possibles, family, hist-fic, to-read
review:

]]> 174156145
Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He’s found it, more or he’s built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he’s gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places. But then Trey’s long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland, and suddenly everything the three of them have been building is under threat. Cal and Lena are both ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn’t want protecting. What she wants is revenge.

A nuanced, atmospheric tale that explores what we’ll do for our loved ones, what we’ll do for revenge, and what we sacrifice when the two collide.]]> 467 Tana French 0593493435 Martha 4 3.95 2024
author: Tana French
name: Martha
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: crime-thriller, favorites, series, family, memorable-animals
review:

]]> 217394492 In this stunningly twisty thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Harlan Coben, a secret from former Detective Sami Kierce’s college days comes back to haunt him. His memory is clear, but all these years later, the facts don’t add up…which is something he cannot ignore.

Sami Kierce, a young college grad backpacking in Spain with friends, wakes up one morning, covered in blood. There’s a knife in his hand. Beside him, the body of his girlfriend. Anna. Dead. He doesn’t know what happened. His screams drown out his thoughts—and then he runs.

Twenty-two years later, Kierce, now a private investigator, is a new father who’s working off his debts by doing low level surveillance jobs and teaching wannabe sleuths at a night school in New York City. One evening, he recognizes a familiar face at the back of the classroom. Anna. It’s unmistakably her. As soon as Kierce makes eye contact with her, she bolts. For Kierce there is no choice. He knows he must find this woman and solve the impossible mystery that has haunted his every waking moment since that terrible day.

His investigation will bring him face-to-face with his past—and prove, after all this time, he’s nobody’s fool.]]> 352 Harlan Coben 1538756358 Martha 0 4.10 2025
author: Harlan Coben
name: Martha
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: crime-thriller, favorites, to-read
review:

]]> 112975658 A gripping historical mystery inspired by the life and diary of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into American history.

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own.

Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon’s newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.]]> 432 Ariel Lawhon 0385546874 Martha 5 4.37 2023
author: Ariel Lawhon
name: Martha
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: bg-titles, crime-thriller, hist-fic, loved-it
review:

]]> 208433854 The true hero of The Wizard of Oz takes center stage in this brilliant, delightfully snarky reimagining from the author of The Library of the Unwritten.

I was mostly a Good Dog until they sold me out to animal control, okay?

But if it’s a choice between Oz, with its creepy little singing dudes, and being behind bars in gray old Kansas, I’ll choose the place where animals talk and run the show for now, thanks.

It’s not my fault that the kid is stuck here too, or that she stumbled into a tug-of-war over a pair of slippers that don’t even taste good. Now one witch in good eyeliner calls her pretty and we’re off on a quest? Teenagers.

I try to tell her she’s falling in with the wrong crowd when she befriends a freaking hedge wizard made of straw, that blue jay with revolutionary aspirations, and the walking tin can. Still, I’m not one to judge when there’s the small matter of a coup in the Forest Kingdom....

Look, something really stinks in Oz, and this Wizard guy and the witches positively reek of it. As usual, it’s going to be up to a sensible little dog to do a big dog’s job and get to the bottom of it.

And trust me: Little dogs can get away with anything.]]> 352 A.J. Hackwith 0593546571 Martha 0 3.44 2024
author: A.J. Hackwith
name: Martha
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: family, memorable-animals, to-read
review:

]]> 40180098 The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A New York Times Bestseller.]]> 502 Richard Powers 039335668X Martha 0 nonfic-auto-biog, to-read 4.10 2018
author: Richard Powers
name: Martha
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: nonfic-auto-biog, to-read
review:

]]> 201626940 FromĚýNew York TimesĚýbestseller Maureen Callahan, a fierce, character-driven exposĂ© of the real Kennedy Curse—the family’s generations-long legacy of misogyny, murder, and mayhem—and the women who have paid the price for our obsession with Camelot

The Kennedy name has long been synonymous with wealth, power, glamor, and—above all else—integrity. But this carefully constructed veneer hides a dark truth: the pattern of Kennedy men physically and psychologically abusing women and girls, leaving a trail of ruin and death in each generation’s wake. Through decades of scandal after scandal—from sexual assaults to reputational slander, suicides to manslaughter—the family and their defenders have kept the Kennedy brand intact.

Now, in Ask Not, bestselling author and journalist Maureen Callahan reveals the Kennedys� hidden history of violence and exploitation, laying bare their unrepentant sexism and rampant depravity while also restoring these women and girls to their rightful place at the center of the dynasty’s story: from Jacqueline Onassis and Marilyn Monroe to Carolyn Bessette, Martha Moxley, Mary Jo Kopechne, Rosemary Kennedy, and many others whose names aren’t nearly as well known but should be.

Drawing on years of explosive reportage and written in electric prose, Ask Not is a long-overdue reckoning with this fabled family and a consequential part of American history that is still very much with us. At long last Callahan redirects the spotlight to the women in the Kennedys� orbit, paying homage to those who freed themselves and giving voice to those who, through no fault of their own, could not.]]> 400 Maureen Callahan 0316276170 Martha 0 4.04 2024
author: Maureen Callahan
name: Martha
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves: nonfic-auto-biog, politics, to-read
review:

]]> 199269577 The Spellshop is Sarah Beth Durst’s romantasy debut–a lush cottagecore tale full of stolen spellbooks, unexpected friendships, sweet jams, and even sweeter love.

Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people. Thankfully, as a librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she and her assistant, Caz—a magically sentient spider plant—have spent the last decade sequestered among the empire’s most precious spellbooks, preserving their magic for the city’s elite.

When a revolution begins and the library goes up in flames, she and Caz flee with all the spellbooks they can carry and head to a remote island Kiela never thought she’d see again: her childhood home. Taking refuge there, Kiela discovers, much to her dismay, a nosy—and very handsome—neighbor who can’t take a hint and keeps showing up day after day to make sure she’s fed and to help fix up her new home.

In need of income, Kiela identifies something that even the bakery in town doesn’t have: jam. With the help of an old recipe book her parents left her and a bit of illegal magic, her cottage garden is soon covered in ripe berries.

But magic can do more than make life a little sweeter, so Kiela risks the consequences of using unsanctioned spells and opens the island’s first-ever and much needed secret spellshop.

Like a Hallmark rom-com full of mythical creatures and fueled by cinnamon rolls and magic, The Spellshop will heal your heart and feed your soul.]]> 384 Sarah Beth Durst Martha 0 to-read, family 4.05 2024
author: Sarah Beth Durst
name: Martha
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves: to-read, family
review:

]]> 195704224
Flavia de Luce, along with her pestilent younger cousin, investigates the murder of a former public hangman and uncovers secrets that bring the greatest shock of her life.



Poisonous mushrooms, pestilent cousins—and a most perplexing murder...

There's a new arrival at Buckshaw—Flavia de Luce's obnoxious cousin Undine. Flavia reluctantly takes on the mentorship of her fellow orphan, who in her best moments shows some potential for trespassing and trickery.

When Major Greyleigh, a former hangman, is found dead from a breakfast of poisonous mushrooms, suspicion falls on the de Luce family's longtime cook, Mrs. Mullet. After all, didn't she pick the mushrooms and serve them to Greyleigh moments before his death?

Flavia knows her beloved Mrs. Mullet is innocent. Together with Dogger, estate gardener and partner-in-crime, and the odious Undine, she sets out to find the real killer and clear Mrs. Mullet's good name.

But following the case's twists and turns will lead her to a most surprising discovery—one with the power to upend her entire life...]]> Alan Bradley Martha 4 4.07 2024
author: Alan Bradley
name: Martha
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: crime-thriller, family, politics
review:

]]> 220160204 Kristin Harmel, the New York Timesbestselling author who “is the best there is at sweeping historical drama� (Kelly Harms, author ofThe Seven Day Switch), returns with an electrifying new novel about two jewel thieves, a priceless bracelet that disappears in 1940s Paris, and a quest for answers in a decades-old murder.

Colette Marceau has been stealing jewels for nearly as long as she can remember, following the centuries-old code of honor instilled in her by her mother, take only from the cruel and unkind, and give to those in need. Never was their family tradition more important than seven decades earlier, during the Second World War, when Annabel and Colette worked side by side in Paris to fund the French Resistance.

But one night in 1942, it all went wrong. Annabel was arrested by the Germans, and Colette’s four-year-old sister, Liliane, disappeared in the chaos of the raid, along with an exquisite diamond bracelet sewn into the hem of her nightgown for safekeeping. Soon after, Annabel was executed, and Liliane’s body was found floating in the Seine—but the bracelet was nowhere to be found.

Seventy years later, Colette—who has “redistributed� $30 million in jewels over the decades to fund many worthy organizations—has done her best to put her tragic past behind her, but her life begins to unravel when the long-missing bracelet suddenly turns up in a museum exhibit in Boston. If Colette can discover where it has been all this time—and who owns it now—she may finally learn the truth about what happened to her sister. But she isn’t the only one for whom the bracelet holds answers, and when someone from her childhood lays claim to the diamonds, she’s forced to confront the ghosts of her past as never before. Against all odds, there may still be a chance to bring a murderer to justice—but first, Colette will have to summon the courage to open her own battered heart.]]> 384 Kristin Harmel 1982191732 Martha 0 4.52
author: Kristin Harmel
name: Martha
average rating: 4.52
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read, bg-possibles, crime-thriller, family, hist-fic
review:

]]> 181110045 A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; police officer’s daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has ended along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?]]> 432 Kate Quinn 0063244748 Martha 0 to-read, hist-fic 4.26 2024
author: Kate Quinn
name: Martha
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read, hist-fic
review:

]]> 209786389
A fundamental principle of our legal system is a presumption of innocence, but once someone has been found guilty there is very little room to prove doubt. Framed shares ten true stories of men who were innocent but found guilty and forced to sacrifice friends, families, wives, and decades of their lives to prison while the guilty parties remained free. In each of the stories, John Grisham and Jim McCloskey recount the dramatic hard-fought battles for exoneration. They take a close look at what leads to wrongful convictions in the first place, and the racism, misconduct, flawed testimony, and the corrupt court system that can make them so hard to reverse.

Told with page-turning suspense as only John Grisham can deliver, Framed is the story of overcoming adversity when the battle already seems lost, and the deck is stacked against you.]]> 368 John Grisham 0385550448 Martha 0 4.08 2024
author: John Grisham
name: Martha
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read, nonfic-auto-biog, politics
review:

]]> 199798006
As a young, queer couple who flip houses, Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just gotten on an old house in a picturesque neighborhood. As they’re working in the house one day, there’s a knock on the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. People pleaser to a fault, Eve lets them in.

As soon as the strangers enter their home, inexplicable things start happening, including the family’s youngest child going missing and a ghostly presence materializing in the basement. Even more weird, the family can’t seem to take the hint that their visit should be over. And when Charlie suddenly vanishes, Eve slowly loses her grip on reality. Something is terribly wrong with the house and with the visiting family—or is Eve just imagining things?

This unputdownable and spine-tingling novel “is like quicksand: the further you delve into its pages, the more immobilized you become by a spiral of terror. We Used to Live Here will haunt you even after you have finished it� (Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender Is the Flesh).]]> 312 Marcus Kliewer 1982198788 Martha 0 3.66 2024
author: Marcus Kliewer
name: Martha
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: crime-thriller, family, to-read
review:

]]> 197108968 From the acclaimed author of The One and The Marriage Act, The Family Experiment is a dark and brilliant speculative thriller about families: real and virtual.

Some families are virtually perfect�

The world's population is soaring, creating overcrowded cities and an economic crisis. And in the UK, the breaking point has arrived. A growing number of people can no longer afford to start families, let alone raise them.

But for those desperate to experience parenthood, there is an alternative. For a monthly subscription fee, clients can create a virtual child from scratch who they can access via the metaverse and a VR headset. To launch this new initiative, the company behind Virtual Children has created a reality TV show called The Substitute. It will follow ten couples as they raise a Virtual Child from birth to the age of eighteen but in a condensed nine-month time period. The prize: the right to keep their virtual child, or risk it all for the chance of a real baby�

Set in the same universe as John Marrs's bestselling novel The One and The Marriage Act, The Family Experiment is a dark and twisted thriller about the ultimate Tamagotchi—a virtual baby.]]> 384 John Marrs 1335000364 Martha 0 to-read, family, politics 4.00 2024
author: John Marrs
name: Martha
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read, family, politics
review:

]]> 156009464
Cassie Andrews works in a New York City bookshop, shelving books, making coffee for customers, and living an unassuming, ordinary life. Until the day one of her favorite customers—a lonely yet charming old man—dies right in front of her. Cassie is devastated. She always loved his stories, and now she has nothing to remember him by. Nothing but the last book he was reading.

But this is no ordinary book�

It is the Book of Doors.

Inscribed with enigmatic words and mysterious drawings, it promises Cassie that any door is every door. You just need to know how to open them.

Then she’s approached by a gaunt stranger in a rumpled black suit with a Scottish brogue who calls himself Drummond Fox. He’s a librarian who keeps watch over a unique set of rare volumes. The tome now in Cassie’s possession is not the only book with great power, but it is the one most coveted by those who collect them.

Now Cassie is being hunted by those few who know of the Special Books. With only her roommate Izzy to confide in, she has to decide if she will help the mysterious and haunted Drummond protect the Book of Doors—and the other books in his secret library’s care—from those who will do evil. Because only Drummond knows where the unique library is and only Cassie’s book can get them there.

But there are those willing to kill to obtain those secrets. And a dark force—in the form of a shadowy, sadistic woman—is at the very top of that list.]]> 404 Gareth Brown 0063323982 Martha 0 family, favorites, to-read 4.01 2024
author: Gareth Brown
name: Martha
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: family, favorites, to-read
review:

]]> 195967140 A mind-bending, psychological thriller from Freida McFadden, the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Housemaid!

Lesson #1: trust no one

Eve has a good life. She gets up each day, gets a kiss from her husband Nate, and heads off to teach math at the local high school. All is as it should be. Except�

Last year, Caseham High was rocked by a scandal involving a student-teacher affair, with one student, Addie, at its center. But Eve knows there is far more to these ugly rumors than meets the eye.

Addie can't be trusted. She lies. She hurts people. She destroys lives. At least, that's what everyone says.

But nobody knows the real Addie. Nobody knows the secrets that could destroy her. And Addie will do anything to keep it quiet.

From the New York Times bestselling author Freida McFadden comes a story of twisting secrets and long-awaited revenge.]]> 379 Freida McFadden 1728296218 Martha 0 3.82 2024
author: Freida McFadden
name: Martha
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: crime-thriller, family, to-read
review:

]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Martha 0 family, to-read 3.87 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Martha
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: family, to-read
review:

]]> 136251
In this final, seventh installment of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling unveils in spectacular fashion the answers to the many questions that have been so eagerly awaited.]]> 759 J.K. Rowling Martha 5 4.61 2007
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Martha
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: family, favorites, memorable-animals, series
review:

]]> 221566576
Meanwhile, controversial and outspoken women's rights activist Kate McKay is embarking on a multi-state lecture tour, drawing packed venues of both fans and detractors. Someone who vehemently opposes Kate's message of female empowerment is targeting her and disrupting her events. At first, no one is hurt, but the stalker is growing bolder, and Holly is hired to be Kate's bodyguard—a challenging task with a headstrong employer and a determined adversary driven by wrath and his belief in his own righteousness.

Featuring a riveting cast of characters both old and new, including world-famous gospel singer Sista Bessie and an unforgettable villain addicted to murder, these twinned narratives converge in a chilling and spectacular conclusion—a feat of storytelling only Stephen King could pull off.

Thrilling, wildly fun and outrageously engrossing, Never Flinch is one of King's richest and most propulsive novels.]]> Stephen King 1399744356 Martha 0 3.82 2025
author: Stephen King
name: Martha
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: to-read, crime-thriller, family, favorites, memorable-animals
review:

]]> 39030 464 Douglas Preston 0765354950 Martha 5 4.03 1997
author: Douglas Preston
name: Martha
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2016/08/19
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: series, sandford-club, favorites
review:

]]> 203578881 The nineteenth mystery in the #1 New York Times bestselling Armand Gamache series

Relentless phone calls interrupt the peace of a warm August morning in Three Pines. Though the tiny Québec village is impossible to find on any map, someone has managed to track down Armand Gamache, head of homicide at the Sûreté, as he sits with his wife in their back garden. Reine-Marie watches with increasing unease as her husband refuses to pick up, though he clearly knows who is on the other end. When he finally answers, his rage shatters the calm of their quiet Sunday morning.

That's only the first in a sequence of strange events that begin The Grey Wolf, the nineteenth novel in Louise Penny's #1 New York Times bestselling series. A missing coat, an intruder alarm, a note for Gamache reading "This might interest you," a puzzling scrap of paper with a mysterious list—and then a murder. All propel Chief Inspector Gamache and his team toward a terrible realization. Something much more sinister than any one murder or any one case is fast approaching.

Armand Gamache; Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his son-in-law and second in command; and Inspector Isabelle Lacoste can only trust each other, as old friends begin to act like enemies, and long-time enemies appear to be friends. Determined to track down the threat before it becomes a reality, their pursuit takes them across Québec and across borders. Their hunt grows increasingly desperate, even frantic, as the enormity of the creature they’re chasing becomes clear. If they fail, the devastating consequences would reach into the largest of cities and the smallest of villages.]]> 421 Louise Penny 1250328136 Martha 4 3.95 2024
author: Louise Penny
name: Martha
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: crime-thriller, family, favorites, series
review:

]]> 24580
Take a lighthearted, nostalgic trip to a simpler time, seen through the eyes of a very special boy named Tom Sawyer. It is a dreamlike summertime world of hooky and adventure, pranks and punishment, villains and first love, filled with memorable characters. Adults and young readers alike continue to enjoy this delightful classic of the promise and dreams of youth from one of America’s most beloved authors.

ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

He has no mother, his father is a brutal drunkard, and he sleeps in a barrel. He’s Huck Finn—liar, sometime thief, and rebel against respectability. But when Huck meets a runaway slave named Jim, his life changes forever. On their exciting flight down the Mississippi aboard a raft, the boy nobody wanted matures into a young man of courage and conviction. As Ernest Hemingway said of this glorious novel, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.�
--back cover]]> 520 Mark Twain 0451528646 Martha 0 4.10 1884
author: Mark Twain
name: Martha
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1884
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: bg-titles, family, hist-fic, politics, to-read
review:

]]> 204432624 The gripping new Jack Reacher thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling authors Lee Child and Andrew ChildReacher wakes up, alone, in the dark, handcuffed to a bed in a makeshift hospital room. His few possessions are gone. He has no memory of getting there. The last thing he can recall is the car he had hitched a ride in getting run off the road. The driver was killed. The people who staged the attack assume Reacher was the driver's accomplice and patch up his wounds as they plan to make him talk. A plan that will backfire spectacularly . . .]]> 324 Lee Child 0593725808 Martha 4 crime-thriller, series 3.65 2024
author: Lee Child
name: Martha
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: crime-thriller, series
review:

]]> 165099
In 2002, Bill Zehme landed one of the most coveted assignments for a magazine writer: an interview with Johnny Carson—the only one he’d granted since retiring from hosting The Tonight Show a decade earlier. Zehme was tapped for the Esquire feature story thanks to his years of legendary celebrity profiles, and the resulting piece portrayed Carson as more human being than showbiz legend. Shortly after Carson’s death in 2005 and urged on by many of those closest to Carson, Zehme signed a contract to do an expansive biography. He toiled on the book for nearly a decade—interviewing dozens of Carson’s colleagues and friends and filling up a storage locker with his voluminous research—before a cancer diagnosis and ongoing treatments halted his progress. When he died in 2023 his obituaries mentioned the Carson book, with New York Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman calling it “one of the great unfinished biographies.�

Yet the hundreds of pages Zehme managed to complete are astounding both for the caliber of their writing and how they illuminate one of the most inscrutable figures in entertainment history: A man who brought so much joy and laughter to so many millions but was himself exceedingly shy and private. Zehme traces Carson’s rise from a magic-obsessed Nebraska boy to a Navy ensign in World War II to a burgeoning radio and TV personality to, eventually, host of The Tonight Show—which he transformed, along with the entirety of American popular culture, over the next three decades. Without Carson, there would be no late-night television as we know it. On a much more intimate level, Zehme also captures the turmoil and anguish that accompanied the success: four marriages, troubles with alcohol, and the devastating loss of a child.

In one passage, Zehme notes that when asked by an interviewer in the mid-80s for the secret to his success, Carson replied simply, “Be yourself and tell the truth.� Completed with help from journalist and Zehme’s former research assistant Mike Thomas, Carson the Magnificent offers just that: an honest assessment of who Johnny Carson really was.]]> Bill Zehme 0739324144 Martha 0 nonfic-auto-biog, to-read 3.18
author: Bill Zehme
name: Martha
average rating: 3.18
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: nonfic-auto-biog, to-read
review:

]]> 196312522 Alan Bradley Martha 0 5.00
author: Alan Bradley
name: Martha
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: to-read, crime-thriller, favorites
review:

]]> 196092587
From legendary storyteller and master of short fiction Stephen King comes an extraordinary new collection of twelve short stories, many never-before-published, and some of his best EVER.

“You like it darker? Fine, so do I,� writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life—both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to digest. King writes to feel “the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,� and in You Like It Darker, listeners will feel that exhilaration too, again and again.

“Two Talented Bastids� explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,� a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In “Rattlesnakes,� a sequel to Cujo, a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance—with major strings attached. In “The Dreamers,� a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. “The Answer Man� asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.

King’s ability to surprise, amaze, and bring us both terror and solace remains unsurpassed. Each of these stories holds its own thrills, joys, and mysteries; each feels iconic. You like it darker? You got it.]]> 600 Stephen King Martha 0 4.57 2024
author: Stephen King
name: Martha
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves: crime-thriller, favorites, sk-recommends, currently-reading
review:

]]> 199408564 351 James B. Comey 1613165242 Martha 5 3.79 2024
author: James B. Comey
name: Martha
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves: crime-thriller, family, politics, loved-it, series
review:
One of the best novels I've read in a long time! A well-constructed plot with excellent main and secondary characters. I can't wait for the next tale in this series!
]]> 199793431
Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.

Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.

Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own.

Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day.

The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

A new novel by Louise Erdrich is a major literary event; gorgeous and heartrending, The Mighty Red is a triumph.]]> 384 Louise Erdrich 0063277050 Martha 0 family, to-read 3.78 2024
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Martha
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: family, to-read
review:

]]> 14864
One hundred miles away, Philadelphia defense attorney Ellie Hathaway has achieved an enviable, high-profile career. But her latest court victory has set the sands shifting beneath her. Single at thirty-nine and unsatisfied with her relationship, Ellie doesn't look back when she turns down her chance to make partner and takes off for an open-ended stay at her great-aunt's home in Paradise. Fate brings her to Katie Fisher. Suddenly, Ellie sees the chance to defend a client who truly needs her, not just one who can afford her.

But taking on this case challenges Ellie in more ways than one. She finds herself not only in a clash of wills with a client who does not want to be defended but also in a clash of cultures with a people whose channels of justice are markedly different from her own. Immersing herself in Katie Fisher's life -- and in a world founded on faith, humility, duty, and honesty -- Ellie begins to understand the pressures and sacrifices of those who to live plain. As she peels away the layers of fact and fantasy, Ellie calls on an old friend for guidance. Now, just as this man from Ellie's past reenters her life, she must uncover the truth about a complex case, a tragic loss, the bonds of love -- and her own deepest fears and desires.]]> 416 Jodi Picoult 0743275012 Martha 4 3.99 2000
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Martha
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: bg-possibles, family, politics
review:

]]> 15753740
Sage Singer is a baker. She works through the night, preparing the day’s breads and pastries, trying to escape a reality of loneliness, bad memories, and the shadow of her mother’s death. When Josef Weber, an elderly man in Sage’s grief support group, begins stopping by the bakery, they strike up an unlikely friendship. Despite their differences, they see in each other the hidden scars that others can’t, and they become companions.

Everything changes on the day that Josef confesses a long-buried and shameful secret—one that nobody else in town would ever suspect—and asks Sage for an extraordinary favor. If she says yes, she faces not only moral repercussions, but potentially legal ones as well. With her own identity suddenly challenged, and the integrity of the closest friend she’s ever had clouded, Sage begins to question the assumptions and expectations she’s made about her life and her family. When does a moral choice become a moral imperative? And where does one draw the line between punishment and justice, forgiveness and mercy?

In this searingly honest novel, Jodi Picoult gracefully explores the lengths we will go in order to protect our families and to keep the past from dictating the future]]> 461 Jodi Picoult 1439102767 Martha 4 family, hist-fic, politics 4.28 2013
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Martha
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: family, hist-fic, politics
review:

]]> 10916
So when midnight calls from the hospital come in, no one is ready for the appalling truth: Emily is dead at seventeen from a gunshot wound to the head. There's a single unspent bullet in the gun that Chris took from his father's cabinet—a bullet that Chris tells police he intended for himself. But a local detective has doubts about the suicide pact that Chris has described.]]> 512 Jodi Picoult 0061150142 Martha 4 family 4.03 1998
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Martha
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: family
review:

]]> 10917 New York Times best-selling author Jodi Picoult is widely acclaimed for her keen insights into the hearts and minds of real people. Now she tells the emotionally riveting story of a family torn apart by conflicting needs and a passionate love that triumphs over human weakness.

Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age 13 she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate—a life and a role that she has never challenged ... until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister—and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable, a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves.

My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person. Is it morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child's life, even if that means infringing upon the rights of another? Is it worth trying to discover who you really are if that quest makes you like yourself less? Should you follow your own heart or let others lead you? Once again, in My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult tackles a controversial real-life subject with grace, wisdom, and sensitivity.]]> 423 Jodi Picoult 0743454537 Martha 4 family 4.10 2004
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Martha
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: family
review:

]]> 203578763 The Afterword. After all, how hard can it really be to write a universally lauded bestseller?

But when Anna publishes her book and indulges in her own literary acclaim, she begins to receive excerpts of a novel she never expected to see again, a novel that should no longer exist. Something has gone wrong, and someone out there knows far too much about her late brother, her late husband, and possibly about Anna herself. What does this person want, and what are they prepared to do? She has come too far and worked too hard to lose what she values most: the sole and uncontested right to her own story—and she is, by any standard, a master storyteller.]]> 304 Jean Hanff Korelitz 1250875471 Martha 0 crime-thriller, to-read 3.59 2024
author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Martha
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/14
shelves: crime-thriller, to-read
review:

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