Sue's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 13 Apr 2025 20:25:39 -0700 60 Sue's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Only Woman in the Room 40785754 She possessed a stunning beauty. She also possessed a stunning mind. Could the world handle both?

Her beauty almost certainly saved her from the rising Nazi party and led to marriage with an Austrian arms dealer. Underestimated in everything else, she overheard the Third Reich's plans while at her husband's side, understanding more than anyone would guess. She devised a plan to flee in disguise from their castle, and the whirlwind escape landed her in Hollywood. She became Hedy Lamarr, screen star.

But she kept a secret more shocking than her heritage or her marriage: she was a scientist. And she knew a few secrets about the enemy. She had an idea that might help the country fight the Nazis...if anyone would listen to her.

A powerful novel based on the incredible true story of the glamour icon and scientist whose groundbreaking invention revolutionized modern communication, The Only Woman in the Room is a masterpiece.

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320 Marie Benedict 1492666874 Sue 3 4.11 2019 The Only Woman in the Room
author: Marie Benedict
name: Sue
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/13
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves:
review:
I didn’t know what to expect from this book in this genre I rarely read, but it surprised me half way through when we finally learn the identity of the woman in the title. I probably should have tumbled to it sooner, but I honestly didn’t know this woman’s history, or anyway the version of it in this novel. Abuse, intrigue, espionage, escape, stardom, WWII, invention, misogyny. Not a lot has changed, but this book has made me want to learn more.
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<![CDATA[The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches]]> 58912891
But someone does. An unexpected message arrives, begging her to travel to the remote and mysterious Nowhere House to teach three young witches how to control their magic. It breaks all of the rules, but Mika goes anyway, and is immediately tangled up in the lives and secrets of not only her three charges, but also an absent archaeologist, a retired actor, two long-suffering caretakers, and…Jamie. The handsome and prickly librarian of Nowhere House would do anything to protect the children, and as far as he’s concerned, a stranger like Mika is a threat. An irritatingly appealing threat.

As Mika begins to find her place at Nowhere House, the thought of belonging somewhere begins to feel like a real possibility. But magic isn't the only danger in the world, and when peril comes knocking at their door, Mika will need to decide whether to risk everything to protect a found family she didn’t know she was looking for....]]>
334 Sangu Mandanna Sue 4 4.16 2022 The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
author: Sangu Mandanna
name: Sue
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/13
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves:
review:
This is not my genre. (I read it to get a Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ bookmark.) So I didn’t know what to expect. This book is a bit more sappy than I really like, but it was also a bit more magical than I thought it would be. That combination was just right and I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. Witches and humans solve a problem and maybe start a bit of a revolution in the world of both. Magic, love, family, and a happy ending.
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Memorial Days 212976235 A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey łŮ´ÇĚýpeace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofâ€�Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz � just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy � collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert’s Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the varied ways those of other cultures grieve, such as the people of Australia's First Nations, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.]]>
224 Geraldine Brooks 0593653998 Sue 5 4.55 2025 Memorial Days
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Sue
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/10
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves:
review:
I expected this book to be sad, and it was, but it was also honest and open and cathartic, both for the author and for the reader. Geraldine Brooks generously shares her experience of the loss of her husband and her delayed period and method of mourning. It’s an inevitability that we will all experience in our own unique ways. This is a lovely book.
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We're Alone: Essays 216461214 A collection of exceptional new essays by one of the most significant contemporary writers on the world stage

Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We’re Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience.

From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides in both tragedies and triumphs.

Danticat is an irresistible presence on the full of heart, outrage, humor, clear thinking, and moral questioning, while reminding us of the possibilities of community. And so “we’re alone� is both a fearsome admission and an intimate invitation—we’re alone now, we can talk. We’re Alone is a book that asks us to think through some of the world’s intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.]]>
157 Edwidge Danticat 1644453037 Sue 5 4.17 We're Alone: Essays
author: Edwidge Danticat
name: Sue
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves:
review:
Edwidge Danticat’s writing is clear and succinct. She is a master of the essay form. This book covers a wide range of topics, both personal and global. One of the later essays in the book is about Haiti and its political climate and it sounded eerily familiar. Definitely a book to add to your library.
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Kills Well with Others 214537674 “Much like fine wine, battle-hardened assassins grow better with age.”�#1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner

Four women assassins, senior in status—and in age—sharpen their knives for another bloody good adventure in this riotous follow-up to the New York Times bestselling sensation Killers of a Certain Age.

After more than a year of laying low, Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are called back into action. They have enjoyed their time off, but the lack of excitement is starting to a professional killer can only take so many watercolor classes and yoga sessions without itching to strangle someone...literally. When they receive a summons from the head of the elite assassin organization known as the Museum, they are ready tackle the greatest challenge of their careers.

Someone on the inside has compiled a list of important kills committed by Museum agents, connected to a single, shadowy figure, an Eastern European gangster with an iron fist, some serious criminal ambition, and a tendency to kill first and ask questions later. This new nemesis is murdering agents who got in the way of their power hungry plans and the aging quartet of killers is next.

Together the foursome embark on a wild ride across the globe on the double mission of rooting out the Museum’s mole and hunting down the gangster who seems to know their next move before they make it. Their enemy is unlike any they’ve faced before, and it will take all their killer experience to get out of this mission alive.]]>
359 Deanna Raybourn 0593638522 Sue 0 currently-reading 4.23 2025 Kills Well with Others
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Sue
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[The Vanishing Kind (Alex Carter #4)]]> 110960109 From highly acclaimed author Alice Henderson comes the eagerly anticipated and electrifying fourth book in the Alex Carter series, in which the wildlife biologist encounters anti-immigrant vigilantes, rugged terrain, and threatening intruders in search of this sleek and powerful, furtive animal: the jaguar.

When wildlife biologist Alex Carter is tasked with locating jaguars on a vast desert preserve in New Mexico, she is ecstatic. While jaguars once roamed throughout the Southwest, they are now endangered, with only a handful remaining, and Alex hopes some of the sleek and elusive creatures have found their way to the protected sanctuary.

Meanwhile, an archaeological team is excavating the gravesite of a sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador on a neighboring piece of land. Curious about the dig, Alex meets the team and, while learning about their discoveries, she encounters a dangerous group of anti-immigrant vigilantes roaming the area, threatening the archaeology team, demanding they leave. And when the militants learn of Alex’s mission, they become bent on stopping her. Because jaguars are federally endangered, the vigilantes worry that if Alex finds them, concessions will be made so that wildlife can cross the border wall. And they want no one crossing it�

And then there are the strange holes that keep appearing on the preserve�Who is digging them, and what are they looking for?

As tensions mount, she soon finds herself in a fight for her life against those who would prevent her from restoring jaguars to their historical habitat.]]>
318 Alice Henderson 0063223074 Sue 5 4.15 The Vanishing Kind (Alex Carter #4)
author: Alice Henderson
name: Sue
average rating: 4.15
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves:
review:
OMG! I can’t believe I finished this book so quickly, but I CAN believe it because it was so damn GOOD! Alex Carter is back again looking to protect another endangered species. And almost getting herself killed in the process. These books make me yell, out loud, very often. Jaguars, racism, murder, human and animal sacrifice, heroism. Please, when is the next book coming?
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<![CDATA[A Dead Djinn in Cairo (Dead Djinn Universe, #0.1)]]> 30225035 Alex Award-winning author P. Djèlí Clark, A Dead Djinn in Cairo is a Tor.com original historcal fantasy set in an alternate early twentieth century infused with the otherworldly.

Egypt, 1912. In Cairo, the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities investigate disturbances between the mortal and the (possibly) divine.

What starts off as an odd suicide case for Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi leads her through the city’s underbelly as she encounters rampaging ghouls, saucy assassins, clockwork angels, and a plot that could unravel time itself.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]>
47 P. Djèlí Clark Sue 3 4.14 2016 A Dead Djinn in Cairo (Dead Djinn Universe, #0.1)
author: P. Djèlí Clark
name: Sue
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves:
review:
This story reminds me a lot of the movie Hellboy. Magic, djinn, angels(?), otherworldly beings, the threat of total destruction of our world, doom, despair. It was interesting but just OK.
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The Narrowboat Summer 53138243 From the author of Meet Me at the Museum, a charming novel of second chances, about three women, one dog, and the narrowboat that brings them together.

Eve expected Sally to come festooned with suitcases and overnight bags packed with everything she owned, but she was wrong. She arrived on foot, with a rucksack and a carrier bag. “I just walked away,� she said, climbing on to the boat. Eve knew what she meant.

Meet Eve, who has left her thirty-year career to become a Free Spirit; Sally, who has waved goodbye to her indifferent husband and two grown-up children; and Anastasia, a defiantly independent narrowboat-dweller, who is suddenly landlocked and vulnerable.

Before they quite know what they’ve done, Sally and Eve agree to drive Anastasia’s narrowboat on a journey through the canals of England, as she awaits a life-saving operation. As they glide gently � and not so gently � through the countryside, the eccentricities and challenges of narrowboat life draw them inexorably together, and a tender and unforgettable story unfolds. At summer’s end, all three women must decide whether to return to the lives they left behind, or forge a new path forward.

Candid, hilarious, and uplifting, The Narrowboat Summer is a novel of second chances, celebrating the power of friendship and new experience to change one’s life, at any age.]]>
336 Anne Youngson 1250764610 Sue 5 3.69 2020 The Narrowboat Summer
author: Anne Youngson
name: Sue
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves:
review:
Having read and loved Meet Me at the Museum, I was already prepared to love this novel. The same gentle style of writing draws you in like a warm blanket. It’s not that tough issues aren’t tackled. They are, but matter of factly. This is about 3 women who bond together through a narrowboat and each needing a fresh start. Their personal growth and growing friendship lead to the book’s hope filled conclusion.
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The Sublet 224277538 From #1 New York Times bestselling author Greer Hendricks comes a chilling story about the hidden cost of perfection.

Anne is barely keeping it together. A frazzled ghostwriter and aspiring novelist, she juggles nine-year-old twins and a listless marriage from an overcrowded Manhattan apartment, spreading herself thinner each day. Just as Anne is about to give up on her dreams, she lands her biggest client Melody Wells.

Melody paints a picture of serenity and empowerment in the lavender haze of her visualization workshops—however, the one thing she can’t manifest are the pages her publisher is demanding for her new motivational book. Enter Anne.

As Melody invites Anne deeper into her magical world, Anne finds herself working impossibly long days and traveling far beyond her comfort zone.

When Melody passes along a lead on a spacious sublet complete with East River views, built-in closets, and three bedrooms, Anne can’t believe her luck. Melody seems to know just what her family needs. But as small, unsettling incidents begin to accumulate, Anne starts to wonder what price she’s willing to pay for the good life.]]>
61 Greer Hendricks 1662528515 Sue 4 3.23 2025 The Sublet
author: Greer Hendricks
name: Sue
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves:
review:
This is a tidy little short story mystery. Anne is a ghostwriter hired by a fitness lifestyle guru. Things start to get strange as her client gets too close for comfort. Who is she really ghostwriting for? And is she safe? I got goosebumps reading it.
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Wuthering Heights 11019333 400 Emily Brontë Sue 5 currently-reading 4.05 1847 Wuthering Heights
author: Emily Brontë
name: Sue
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1847
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth]]> 196774869
“Mesmerizing, world-expanding, and achingly beautiful.� –Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

“Rich, vital, and full of surprises. Read it!” –Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky and The Sixth Extinction 

“A brilliant must-read. This book shook and changed me.� –David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen

Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom and reveals the astonishing capabilities of the green life all around us.

It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents.

The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it? Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close.

What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously? More important, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities? Examining the latest epiphanies in botanical research, Schlanger spotlights the intellectual struggles among the researchers conceiving a wholly new view of their subject, offering a glimpse of a field in turmoil as plant scientists debate the tenets of ongoing discoveries and how they influence our understanding of what a plant is.

We need plants to survive. But what do they need us for—if at all? An eye-opening and informative look at the ecosystem we live in, this book challenges us to rethink the role of plants—and our own place—in the natural world.]]>
298 Zoë Schlanger 0063073870 Sue 0 currently-reading 4.43 2024 The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
author: Zoë Schlanger
name: Sue
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[Broken Fields (A Cash Blackbear Mystery Book 4)]]> 214283968 Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman,Ěýis back on the case after two men are found dead on a rural farm in Minnesota in the next installment of the acclaimed Native crime series.

1970s Minnesota. It's spring in the Red River Valley and Cash Blackbear is hoping to make some spending money doing spring field work for local farmers while attending college—and she finds a dead man on the kitchen floor of the property's rented farmhouse. The only possible witness to the murder is the young daughter of a Native laborer. The girl is too terrified to speak about what she’s witnessed, and her parents seem to have vanished. 

In the wake of the murder, Cash can't deny her intuitive she is suspicious of the dead man's grieving widow, who offers to take in the girl temporarily. While Cash scours the county and White Earth reservation trying to find the missing mother before the girl is placed in the care of a social worker—the same woman who placed Cash in foster care a decade earlier—another body turns up. Concerned about the girl's fate, and with the help of local Sheriff Wheaton, Cash races against the clock to figure out the truth of what happened in the farmhouse.

µţ°ů´Ç°ě±đ˛ÔĚýąóľ±±đ±ô»ĺ˛ő is a compelling, fast read with seamlessly woven in details of rural life, the American Indian Movement, abusive labor practices, and women's liberation.]]>
222 Marcie R. Rendon 1641296593 Sue 5 4.48 2025 Broken Fields (A Cash Blackbear Mystery Book 4)
author: Marcie R. Rendon
name: Sue
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves:
review:
Another stellar installment in the Cash Blackbear mystery series. I love Cash, so much, and in this novel we see her vulnerability and emerging maturity. She’s still “dangerous�, as one character states, and she probably always will be, but her intuition is still right on and her “visions� serve her well. Murder, foster care, betrayal, racism, family, and so much more. Please, I’d like another.
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The Haunted Looking Glass 275470
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD, "The Empty House"
W.F. HARVEY, "August Heat"
CHARLES DICKENS, "The Signalman"
L.P. HARTLEY, "A Visitor from Down Under"
R.H. MALDEN, "The Thirteenth Tree"
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, "The Body-Snatcher"
E. NESBIT, "Man-Size in Marble"
BRAM STOKER, "The Judge's House"
TOM HOOD, "The Shadow of a Shade"
W.W. JACOBS, "The Monkey's Paw,"
WILKIE COLLINS, "The Dream Woman"
M.R. JAMES, "Casting the Runes"]]>
254 Edward Gorey 0940322684 Sue 5 4.04 1959 The Haunted Looking Glass
author: Edward Gorey
name: Sue
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1959
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves:
review:
What could be better than a book of haunting short stories picked by Edward Gorey? Same book with Edward Gorey illustrations. These short stories will make you shiver and one or two might make you sleep with the lights on. I loved this book, so much.
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Jamaica Inn 19419219 From the author of Rebecca and The a classic thriller of shipwreck and murder, "rich in suspense and surprise" (New York Times Book Review). On a bitter November evening, young Mary Yellan journeys across the rainswept moors to Jamaica Inn in honor of her mother's dying request. When she arrives, the warning of the coachman begins to echo in her memory, for her aunt Patience cowers before hulking Uncle Joss Merlyn. Terrified of the inn's brooding power, Mary gradually finds herself ensnared in the dark schemes being enacted behind its crumbling walls -- and tempted to love a man she dares not trust.The inspiration for the 1939 Alfred Hitchcock film.  ]]> 307 Daphne du Maurier Sue 5 4.04 1936 Jamaica Inn
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Sue
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1936
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:
I had only ever read Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel and they are very different novels from Jamaica Inn. Both of the former novels are what we expect from du Maurier, gothic type romance/pseudo ghost stories. Jamaica Inn is more rough and ready and the heroine is more self reliant. It also feels like quite a wild ride. I had guessed at the villain, and was surprised by the, I guess, first ending, but not by the final ending.
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<![CDATA[The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus]]> 216246655 A witty, atmospheric, and brilliantly told novel that offers compelling portraits of womanhood, motherhood and female friendship, along with the irresistible intrigue surrounding an extraordinary British family

Arriving at the University of Edinburgh for her first term, Pen knows her divorced parents back in Canada are hiding something from her. She believes she’ll find the answer here in Scotland, where an old friend of her father’s—now a famous writer known as Lord Lennox—lives. When she is invited to spend the weekend at Lord Lennox’s centuries-old estate with his enveloping, fascinating family, Pen begins to unravel her parents� secret, just as she’s falling in love.

As Pen experiences the sharp shock of adulthood, she comes to rely on herself for the first time in her life. A rich and rewarding novel of campus life, of sexual awakening, and ultimately, of the many ways women can become mothers in this world, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus asks to what extent we need to look back in order to move forward.]]>
379 Emma Knight 0593830466 Sue 4 3.79 The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus
author: Emma Knight
name: Sue
average rating: 3.79
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves:
review:
It’s not until near the end of the book that we learn the significance of the title, and it’s a little disappointing, to be honest. Also, I think the way the author ended the novel is what made me rate it only 4 stars. It was quite abrupt and a bit of a let down and mood breaker. But this was a charming coming of age novel.
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Unshod, Cackling, and Naked 224111347 *Next Generation Indie Award Winner for Horror*



A beauty pageant veteran appeases her mother by competing for one final crown, only to find herself trapped in a hand-sewn gown that cuts into her flesh. A journalist falls deeply in love with a mysterious woman but discovers his beloved can vanish and reappear hours later in the same spot, as if no time has passed at all. A cash-strapped college student agrees to work in a shop window as a mannequin but quickly learns she's not free to break her pose. And what happens when the family pet decides it no longer wants to have "owners?"

In the grim and often horrific thirteen tales collected here, beauty is violent, and love and hate are the same feeling, laid bare by unbridled obsession. Entering worlds both strange and quotidian, and spanning horror landscapes both speculative and real, Unshod, Cackling, and Naked asks who among us is worthy of love and who deserves to die?



"This powerful collection of 13 intimate horror shorts from Thompson (Salamander Justice) derives its scares by pushing mundane Black experiences into unsettling territory. Several pieces dive into simultaneously validating and terrifying expressions of Black female rage...Readers of any background will find that these stark terrors hit close to home."

-Publishers Weekly



"This collection of short stories from Thompson (Salamander Justice, 2020) is thrilling and engrossing, with classic horror tropes and experimental new tactics and scares...Thanks to these exquisite stories, readers will look forward to a future library with a shelf full of Thompson's books."

-ĚýBooklist



"Each story pulls you in, ties you to it for one blistering hard ride after another. They all are certain to leave their own personal mark, whether it's the twisting of everyday common things, people, or animals, or the more reflective, unspoken sorrows and hatred of those closest to us, and of ourselves."

- Bailey Hunter, Dark Recesses Press]]>
239 Tamika Thompson 1998763838 Sue 5 3.33 Unshod, Cackling, and Naked
author: Tamika Thompson
name: Sue
average rating: 3.33
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves:
review:
These are really compelling short stories and unlike any I have read. Dystopian, horrifying, world turned upside down, laugh out loud, cry out loud. They cover it all. You will tear through these stories and want more.
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<![CDATA[The Bookstore Keepers (Once Upon a Time Bookshop Stories, #3)]]> 214128353
Five years into their happily ever after, Isabel and Johnny are making the most of their second chance at love. Then one night, Johnny awakens from an extraordinary dream…and their world is irrevocably altered. Isabel does her best to give Johnny space as he struggles to accept the new chapter life has opened for them. But Johnny can’t do it alone—no one can. As the whole family is soon to discover, seasons change, but love never does.]]>
35 Alice Hoffman 1662522045 Sue 5 4.06 2025 The Bookstore Keepers (Once Upon a Time Bookshop Stories, #3)
author: Alice Hoffman
name: Sue
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves:
review:
This third novelette in the series ties things up, but leaves the ends out. I don’t think there needs to be another book, but I know I’ll think about this family and wonder what they’re doing and know that they’re happy.
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<![CDATA[The Kill List (Inspector Anjelica Henley, #3)]]> 62366977 Five shocking murders
Twenty-five years ago, DCI Harry Rhimes arrested Andrew Streeter for the brutal murders of five young people. Streeter’s â€kill listâ€� of victims was found in his home, and he was convicted of all five crimes.

A legacy under threat
Now, Streeter’s convictions are being overturned, as new evidence implies the original investigation was corrupt. No one is more shocked that DI Henley. Because this case is personal; Rhimes was her old boss, and he’s no longer alive to defend himself. But when the killings start up again, Henley must face the truth: Rhimes got it wrong twenty-five years ago.

A hunt for a killer
Henley and her team reopen the original murder cases, but they must put their personal feelings to one side. Because the real killer is still out there, and he’s working his way through a new kill list . . .]]>
400 Nadine Matheson Sue 5 4.20 2024 The Kill List (Inspector Anjelica Henley, #3)
author: Nadine Matheson
name: Sue
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves:
review:
I absolutely adore Anjelica Henley. She is a badass but so beautifully human. This is one of my favorite series. How to prove that the wrong man has been convicted of 5 murders that happened 30 years ago? Why is somebody killing again? Better question. Why had they stopped? And why are the victims being buried alive? Such a chilling novel. You won’t want to put it down.
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With a Vengeance 219603177 One train. No stops. A deadly game of survival and revenge.

In 1942, six people destroyed Anna Matheson’s family. Twelve years later, she’s ready for retribution.

Under false pretenses, Anna has lured those responsible for her family’s downfall onłŮ´ÇĚýa luxury train from Philadelphia to Chicago,Ěýan overnight journey of fourteen hours. Her goal? Confront the people who’ve wronged her, get them to confess their crimes, and deliver them into the hands of authorities waiting at the end of the line. Justice will at last be served.

But Anna’s plan is quickly derailed by the murder of one of the passengers. As the train barrels through the night, it becomes clear that someone else on board is enacting their own form of revenge—and that they won’t stop until everyone else is dead.

With time running out before the train reaches its destination, Anna is forced to hunt the killer in their midst while protecting the people she hates the most. In order to destroy her enemies, she must first save them—even though it means putting her own life at risk.]]>
400 Riley Sager 0593472403 Sue 0 to-read 3.64 2025 With a Vengeance
author: Riley Sager
name: Sue
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read
review:

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The Man Made of Smoke 217387838 The latest gripping serial killer thriller from the New York Times bestselling author Alex North.

Dan Garvie’s life has been haunted by the crime he witnessed as a child—narrowly escaping an encounter with a notorious serial killer. He has dedicated his life since to becoming a criminal profiler, eager to seek justice for innocent victims. So when his father passes away under suspicious circumstances, Dan revisits his small island community, determined to uncover the truth about his death. Is it possible that the monster he remembers from his childhood nightmares has returned after all these years?

With his signature shock and suspense, Alex North brings us The Man Made of Smoke. In turn emotional, introspective, and utterly terrifying, this is a story of fathers and sons, shadows and secrets, and the fight we all face to escape the trauma of the past.]]>
320 Alex North 1250757894 Sue 0 to-read 4.24 2025 The Man Made of Smoke
author: Alex North
name: Sue
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

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Famous Last Words 212421066
From the author of Reese’s Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller Wrong Place Wrong Time comes an addictive thriller about a new mother’s world upended when her husband commits a terrifying crime. How well does she truly know the man she loves? And what danger does she face if her entire life has been built on a lie?

It is June 21st, the longest day of the year, and new mother Camilla’s life is about to change forever. After months of maternity leave, she will drop her infant daughter off at daycare for the first time and return to her job as a literary agent. Finally. But, when she wakes, her husband Luke isn’t there, and in his place is a cryptic note.

Then it starts. Breaking news: there's a hostage situation developing in London. The police arrive, and tell her Luke is involved. But he isn't a hostage. Her husband—doting father, eternal optimist—is the gunman.

What she does next is crucial. Because only she knows what the note he left behind that morning says...

Famous Last Words is the story of a crime, a marriage, and more secrets than Camilla ever could have imagined. This novel cements Gillian McAllister’s reputation as “the best at putting her characters in impossible situations and making her readers not only contemplate but feel what it would be like to find themselves in those situations.� (Emily Henry)]]>
336 Gillian McAllister 0063338424 Sue 5 3.73 2025 Famous Last Words
author: Gillian McAllister
name: Sue
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves:
review:
I didn’t know what to expect from this book, but I really, really liked it. It reads quickly and is very engaging. Family, love, loyalty, murder, intrigue, shadowy figures, obfuscation. Part way toward the end, I started figuring some things out, but that just added to my reading enjoyment. And there’s a happy ending. I loved that. This is a terrific book.
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<![CDATA[Open Season (Alex Delaware #40)]]> 213050545 Psychologist Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis become embroiled in an all-out race against time to find a twisted assassin in this riveting thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling “master of suspense� (Los Angeles Times).

Los Angeles is a city of stars, a city of strivers and wannabes. Not everyone can shine bright, but they’ll burn themselves up for a glimpse of the high life. LAPD homicide lieutenant Milo Sturgis knows it all too The best dreamers often make the worst monsters.

The body of an aspiring actress has been found—and she’d been drugged. The main suspect is a stunt double with the ego of an action star. He’s more brawn than brains, it seems, with few boundaries when it comes to women. But he’s offed before Milo and Alex can get to him. Worse yet, the rifle that killed him was used in a prior case . . . and another case before that. And then it's fired again and again, taking victims right under their noses.

They begin to think that someone is avenging the victims of men without boundaries—but is this a slick, efficient assassin with their own corrupt code of justice, or a knight errant, one who doesn’t want to be seen, but still wants to be known?

Alex and Milo soon find themselves in the thick of a truly complicated and twisted case—one with no shortage of suspects or victims that takes them on a wild ride through the surreal underbelly of Los Angeles.]]>
276 Jonathan Kellerman 0593497708 Sue 3 4.46 2025 Open Season (Alex Delaware #40)
author: Jonathan Kellerman
name: Sue
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves:
review:
Why do I feel manipulated? This Alex Delaware mystery was a head scratcher. Seemingly unrelated murders. Frustrating amounts of time spent coming to the conclusion that they were murders. Alex Delaware predictably magics the solution. The ending was a bit of a let down and a puzzle and were we deliberately left thinking that there was more to this than what we are told? Or is that just a ploy? Despite that I enjoyed the book.
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You Belong Here 220160921 A decades-old secret that drove a mother from her hometown now threatens her college-bound daughter in this twisty new thriller from New York Times bestselling author Megan Miranda.

Beckett Bowery never thought she’d return to Wyatt Valley, a picturesque college town in the Virginia mountains steeped in tradition. Her roots there were strong: Beckett’s parents taught at the college, and she never even imagined studying anywhere else—until a tragedy her senior year ended with two local men dead, and her roommate on the run, never to be seen again�

For the last two decades, Beckett has done her best to keep her distance. Then her daughter, Delilah, secretly applies to Wyatt College and earns a full scholarship, and Beckett can only hope that her lingering fears are unfounded. But deep down she knows that Wyatt Valley has a long memory, and that the past isn’t the only dangerous thing in town…]]>
352 Megan Miranda 1668080974 Sue 0 to-read 3.80 2025 You Belong Here
author: Megan Miranda
name: Sue
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read
review:

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Dream Count 219520778 A publishing event ten years in the making�a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists�the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until � betrayed and brokenhearted � she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America � but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]>
416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 0593802721 Sue 0 to-read 3.97 2025 Dream Count
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Sue
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

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We Do Not Part 205673168 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter of Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama.

A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend's house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering,it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]>
272 Han Kang 0593595475 Sue 0 currently-reading 3.95 2021 We Do Not Part
author: Han Kang
name: Sue
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store]]> 85148114
    As these characters� stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.]]>
400 James McBride 0593422961 Sue 0 currently-reading 4.25 2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
author: James McBride
name: Sue
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[Book of Night (Book of Night #1)]]> 198033818 An alternative cover edition for this ASIN can be found here.
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A modern dark fantasy of betrayals, secret societies, and a dissolute thief of shadows.

Charlie Hall has never found a lock she couldn’t pick, a book she couldn’t steal, or a bad decision she wouldn’t make.

She's spent half her life working for gloamists, magicians who manipulate shadows to peer into locked rooms, strangle people in their beds, or worse. Gloamists guard their secrets greedily, creating an underground economy of grimoires. And to rob their fellow magicians, they need Charlie Hall.

Now, she’s trying to distance herself from past mistakes, but getting out isn’t easy. Bartending at a dive, she’s still entirely too close to the corrupt underbelly of the Berkshires. Not to mention that her sister Posey is desperate for magic, and that Charlie's shadowless, and possibly soulless, boyfriend has been hiding things from her. When a terrible figure from her past returns, Charlie descends into a maelstrom of murder and lies.

Determined to survive, she’s up against a cast of doppelgangers, mercurial billionaires, gloamists, and the people she loves best in the world—all trying to steal a secret that will give them vast and terrible power.]]>
320 Holly Black Sue 5 3.76 2022 Book of Night (Book of Night #1)
author: Holly Black
name: Sue
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves:
review:
This has got to be the weirdest book I’ve read in a while. I wish there were real magic in the world, but this kind of magic creeped me the hell out. I haven’t been able to look at my shadow without feeling a chill go up my spine. I love the back and forth between past and present, Charlie’s and Vince’s. And the truth will shock you. Such a good read!
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<![CDATA[The Grey Wolf (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #19)]]> 204174589
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.

Including Three Pines.]]>
432 Louise Penny 1250328144 Sue 5 4.42 2024 The Grey Wolf (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #19)
author: Louise Penny
name: Sue
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves:
review:
I have very rarely read an Armand Gamache novel that didn’t deserve a full five stars, and this one is no exception. Even though it clearly leads into the next one, it’s not such a terrible cliff hanger, and I only have to wait until October. The theme of this book, domestic terrorism, is scarier than some horror books I’ve read, because it feels so very plausible. Louis Penny is a master story teller.
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A Woman in the Polar Night 175968321
This rediscovered classic memoir tells the incredible tale of a woman defying society's expectations to find freedom and peace in the adventure of a lifetime.

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to 'read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content', but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.

At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies... But as time passes, after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a great sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for the sanctity of life.]]>
226 Christiane Ritter Sue 5 4.40 1938 A Woman in the Polar Night
author: Christiane Ritter
name: Sue
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1938
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves:
review:
This is the extraordinary true story of a woman who joins her husband in the Arctic and lives in a primitive hut for a year, absolutely falling in love with the polar region and with the wild lifestyle. She has such an engaging personality and writing style.
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Witchcraft for Wayward Girls 207610827 There’s power in a book�

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood Home in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who knows she’s going to go home and marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

In Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, the author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group delivers another searing, completely original novel and further cements his status as a “horror master� (NPR).]]>
492 Grady Hendrix Sue 0 currently-reading 4.11 2025 Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Sue
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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Private Rites 203756158 From the award-winning author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world

It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and arcane rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father dies. An architect as cruel as he was revered, his death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.

More estranged than ever, the sisters� lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams; Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling; and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters� lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.]]>
285 Julia Armfield Sue 0 currently-reading 3.40 2024 Private Rites
author: Julia Armfield
name: Sue
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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Rock Paper Scissors 57026221 Think you know the person you married? Think again�

Things have been wrong with Mr and Mrs Wright for a long time. When Adam and Amelia win a weekend away to Scotland, it might be just what their marriage needs. Self-confessed workaholic and screenwriter Adam Wright has lived with face blindness his whole life. He can’t recognize friends or family, or even his own wife.

Every anniversary the couple exchange traditional gifts � paper, cotton, pottery, tin � and each year Adam’s wife writes him a letter that she never lets him read. Until now. They both know this weekend will make or break their marriage, but they didn’t randomly win this trip. One of them is lying, and someone doesn’t want them to live happily ever after.

Ten years of marriage. Ten years of secrets. And an anniversary they will never forget.

Rock Paper Scissors is the latest exciting domestic thriller from the queen of the killer twist, New York Times bestselling author Alice Feeney.]]>
297 Alice Feeney 1250266114 Sue 5 3.96 2021 Rock Paper Scissors
author: Alice Feeney
name: Sue
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves:
review:
Nothing in this novel is what it seems. Are there ghosts? Maybe. Are there murderers? Maybe. Is everyone lying? Maybe. A husband and wife in a snowstorm in Scotland in a place called Blackwater. What could go wrong? I’m sure you know the answer to that. I also loved the semi-epistolary insertions. Alice Feeney delivers a chilling story.
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What the Wife Knew 212872338 Darby Kane, author of the #1 international bestseller Pretty Little Wife, returns with another twisty domestic thriller about a wife wondering who tried to kill her husband twice before finally succeedingâ€� because that was supposed to be her Âá´Ç˛ú.Ěý

Dr. Richmond Dougherty is a renowned pediatric surgeon, an infamous tragedy survivor, and a national hero. He’s also very dead—thanks to a fall down the stairs. His neighbors angrily point a finger at the newest Ms. Dougherty, Addison. The sudden marriage to the mysterious young woman only lasted ninety-seven days, and he’d had two suspicious “accidents� during that time. Now Addison is a very rich widow.

As law enforcement starts to circle in on Addison and people in town become increasingly hostile, sides are chosen with Kathryn, Richmond’s high school sweetheart, wife number one, and the mother of his children, leading the fray. Despite rising tensions, Addison is even more driven to forge ahead on the path she charted years ago�

Determined at all costs to unravel Richmond’s legacy, she soon becomes a target—with a shocking note left on her bedroom  You will pay. But it will take a lot more than faceless threats to stop Addison. Her plan to marry Richmond then ruin him may have been derailed by his unexpected death, but she’s not done with him yet.]]>
368 Darby Kane 0063351978 Sue 3 3.75 2024 What the Wife Knew
author: Darby Kane
name: Sue
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves:
review:
I wanted to like this book more, but it just felt like a cheesy imitation of a Raymond Chandler novel, from the dialogue to the action to the characters. I didn’t like any of them. I was probably meant to sympathize with Addison, but she’s just not a sympathetic character. The plot got stretched a little too thin for my taste and there were too many gotcha moments. I still don’t know who to believe on some of them.
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Eleven Numbers 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 Sue 5 4.09 2025 Eleven Numbers
author: Lee Child
name: Sue
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves:
review:
I love the way Lee Child writes. Simple. Clean. Subtly suspenseful. This is an elegantly written short story. Too much description about the premise would spoil it for other readers. But it will leave you smiling at its cleverness.
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The September House 61311377 A woman is determined to stay in her dream home even after it becomes a haunted nightmare in this compulsively readable, twisty, and layered debut novel.

When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street—for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price—they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee.

Margaret is not most people.

Margaret is staying. It’s her house. But after four years Hal can’t take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he’s not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine—who knows nothing about the hauntings—arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep.]]>
352 Carissa Orlando 0593548639 Sue 5 3.99 2023 The September House
author: Carissa Orlando
name: Sue
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves:
review:
WOW! This book! I don’t know where to begin. This is certainly not your typical haunted house tale. And I really didn’t expect to laugh hysterically at the end. That being said, this is not at all a funny book. It’s horrifying and gory and bloody and mystifying. Unreliable narrator is an understatement and actually does the narrator a disservice. You’ll have to read it to find out for yourself what is real and what is reality.
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The Last to Vanish 59345248 New York Times bestselling author Megan Miranda returns with a gripping and propulsive thriller that opens with the disappearance of a journalist who is investigating a string of vanishings in the resort town of Cutter’s Pass—will its dark secrets finally be revealed?

Ten years ago, Abigail Lovett fell into a job she loves, managing The Passage Inn, a cozy, upscale resort nestled in the North Carolina mountain town of Cutter’s Pass. Cutter’s Pass is best known for its outdoor offerings—rafting and hiking, with access to the Appalachian trail by way of a gorgeous waterfall—and its mysterious history. As the book begins, the string of unsolved disappearances that has haunted the town is once again thrust into the spotlight when journalist Landon West, who was staying at the inn to investigate the story of the vanishing trail, then disappears himself.

Abby has sometimes felt like an outsider within the community, but she’s come to view Cutter’s Pass as her home. When Landon’s brother Trey shows up looking for answers, Abby can’t help but feel the town closing ranks. And she’s still on the outside. When she finds incriminating evidence that may bring them closer to the truth, Abby soon discovers how little she knows about her coworkers, neighbors, and even those closest to her.

Megan Miranda brings her best writing to The Last to Vanish, a riveting thriller filled with taut suspense and shocking twists that will keep you guessing until the very end.]]>
323 Megan Miranda 1982147318 Sue 5 3.52 2022 The Last to Vanish
author: Megan Miranda
name: Sue
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/09/04
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves:
review:
Is anyone who they say they are? Why do people keep disappearing from Cutter’s Pass? Is no one safe? Abby, still considered an outsider after 10 years, is finally going to get some answers or else. But is someone trying to implicate her or disappear her, too? She’s not taking no for an answer. I love Megan Miranda novels.
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Thunder Song: Essays 185767242
Drawing on a rich family archive as well as the anthropological work of her late great-grandmother, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe explores themes ranging from indigenous identity and stereotypes to cultural displacement and environmental degradation to understand what our experiences teach us about the power of community, commitment, and conscientious honesty.

Unapologetically punk, the essays in Thunder Song segue between the miraculous and the mundane, the spiritual and the physical, as they examine the role of art--in particular music--and community in helping a new generation of indigenous people claim the strength of their heritage while defining their own path in the contemporary world.]]>
256 Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe 1640096353 Sue 5 4.42 2024 Thunder Song: Essays
author: Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe
name: Sue
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:
First of all, the cover of this book is stunning. Second of all, I had to take my time with these essays. There is a lot to absorb. Thirdly, this is a powerful journey of awakening and discovery and growth and self-embracing and power. And the author offers us the same gifts.
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Beautiful Ugly 211004123 The million-copy bestselling Queen of Twists Alice Feeney returns with a gripping and deliciously dark thriller about marriage. . .
. . . and revenge.

Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.

Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared.

A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible � a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.

Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t.
Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.
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306 Alice Feeney 125033778X Sue 5 3.64 2025 Beautiful Ugly
author: Alice Feeney
name: Sue
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves:
review:
Wow. This is a dark, dark read. Starts out pretty tamely, but we end up in a place that I could never have foreseen. Obsession, disappearance, obfuscation, abduction, cult(?), murder, bombastic gaslighting, Scottish island. This book is one helluva ride.
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Moon of the Turning Leaves 166993495 320 Waubgeshig Rice 0358726417 Sue 0 currently-reading 4.24 2023 Moon of the Turning Leaves
author: Waubgeshig Rice
name: Sue
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[Moon of the Crusted Snow (Moon, #1)]]> 40801462 220 Waubgeshig Rice 1773052462 Sue 5 3.88 2018 Moon of the Crusted Snow (Moon, #1)
author: Waubgeshig Rice
name: Sue
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves:
review:
This novel was not at all what I expected. It was so much better. A dystopian story from Indigenous point of view, expelling the systemic prejudice that tries to take over their lives. In the process, their community grows tighter and stronger as times become more desperate. The final straw will shock you.
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The Blue Hour 207249717 A stylish and immersive new novel of ambition, legacy, and betrayal from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train.

An isolated Scottish island, accessible to the mainland only twelve hours a day. A famous (some might say infamous) artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared after visiting her twenty years ago. A present-day discovery that intimately connects three people and unveils a web of secrets and lies.

 A masterful and propulsive novel that asks searing questions of ambition, power, gender and perception, The Blue Hour recalls the very best of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith and cements Hawkins’s place among the very best of our most nuanced, powerful and stylish storytellers.]]>
Paula Hawkins 0063396564 Sue 5 3.38 2024 The Blue Hour
author: Paula Hawkins
name: Sue
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:
Well that was not the ending I expected. It was probably the only way it could end, but I was hoping for something else. I can’t say that I really liked any of the characters, but it made for a much more interesting story. An island , an artist, her muse(?), an art curator, a wealthy family, murder, the truth masterfully unraveled. This is a subtly chilling novel.
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The Message 211050274
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]>
237 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230396 Sue 5 4.62 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Sue
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves:
review:
This series of essays is thought provoking and disturbing and educational and stirring and you can’t help coming away with a new perspective on the world. My privilege does not exempt me from my own ignorance and I encourage everyone to read and promote Black authors, Indigenous authors, Women authors, and anyone whose voice is underrepresented.
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The Birds: and Other Stories 19521168 The Observer (UK)

A classic of alienation and horror, The Birds was immortalised by Hitchcock in his celebrated film. The five other chilling stories in this collection echo a sense of dislocation and mock man's dominance over the natural world. The mountain paradise of 'Monte VeritĂ ' promises immortality, but at a terrible price; a neglected wife haunts her husband in the form of an apple tree; a professional photographer steps out from behind the camera and into his subject's life; a date with a cinema usherette leads to a walk in the cemetery; and a jealous father finds a remedy when three's a crowd . . .]]>
293 Daphne du Maurier Sue 5 4.16 1952 The Birds: and Other Stories
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Sue
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1952
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves:
review:
These short stories are intense. I have read and loved du Maurier’s novels, but I had no idea she had written short stories or that they would scare the bejesus out of me. It’s a subtle kind of spine tingling scare. You shudder and kind of look over your shoulder. They are so good.
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<![CDATA[The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World]]> 208840291 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.

Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”]]>
112 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1668072246 Sue 5 4.39 2024 The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Sue
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves:
review:
If you can, get a hardcover of this book. It’s small, but it’s gorgeous. From cover to cover, you have to admire the layout and the illustrations. The subtitle, Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, is drawn out in the text. The writer acknowledges that we have to have some consumerism to pay the bills, but that if we combine that with a gift economy, we will live in an infinitely better world. The Serviceberry is the example of the gift economy used throughout. Robin Wall Kimmerer is our collective conscience.
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<![CDATA[The Official CaFae Latte Cookbook (All Things CaFae Latte)]]> 217238443
Here you'll find dozens of easy-to-follow recipes, from Gladiator Dates to Grammy's Extra Crummy Apple Crumble, all inspired by Alongi's characters and mocked by Alongi's mother.

Each recipe is preceded by a quick essay from a CaFae Latte character, while Davidson explains each recipe with her signature humor.

Don't love cooking? Or know much about it? The recipes are simplicity itself, with pictures and easy-to-follow instructions. There's even a pantry/fridge/freezer section so you know what to keep on hand when you've got a craving for Crazy Easy Chewy Chocolate Truffles. There's also a section on how to make homemade syrups and sugars, perfect for gift-giving!

So jump in and get reading, and then get cooking. We know you'll love it. Or at least not hate it.]]>
124 C.M. Alongi Sue 0 currently-reading 4.82 2024 The Official CaFae Latte Cookbook (All Things CaFae Latte)
author: C.M. Alongi
name: Sue
average rating: 4.82
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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A Council of Dolls 63838775 From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried.

Sissy, born 1961: Sissy’s relationship with her beautiful and volatile mother is difficult, even dangerous, but her life is also filled with beautiful things, including a new Christmas present, a doll called Ethel. Ethel whispers advice and kindness in Sissy’s ear, and in one especially terrifying moment, maybe even saves Sissy’s life.

Lillian, born 1925: Born in her ancestral lands in a time of terrible change, Lillian clings to her sister, Blanche, and her doll, Mae. When the sisters are forced to attend an “Indian school� far from their home, Blanche refuses to be cowed by the school’s abusive nuns. But when tragedy strikes the sisters, the doll Mae finds her way to defend the girls.

Cora, born 1888: Although she was born into the brutal legacy of the “Indian Wars,� Cora isn’t afraid of the white men who remove her to a school across the country to be “civilized.� When teachers burn her beloved buckskin and beaded doll Winona, Cora discovers that the spirit of Winona may not be entirely lost.

A modern masterpiece, A Council of Dolls is gorgeous, quietly devastating, and ultimately hopeful, shining a light on the echoing damage of Indian boarding schools, and the historical massacres of Indigenous people.]]>
304 Mona Susan Power 0063281112 Sue 5 4.07 2023 A Council of Dolls
author: Mona Susan Power
name: Sue
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves:
review:
This is a must read. Told from the perspective of the dolls of different generations within a family of Indigenous women, this novel is about “Indian� boarding schools and the damage they have done and continue to do. It is about generational trauma and the healing power of ancestral wisdom. Community is powerful. Identity is powerful. Respect is powerful.
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<![CDATA[The Last Remains (Ruth Galloway, #15)]]> 61799420 The discovery of a missing woman’s bones force Ruth and Nelson to finally confront their feelings for each other as they desperately work to exonerate one of their own in this not-to-be-missed Ruth Galloway mystery from USA Today bestselling author Elly Griffiths.

When builders discover a human skeleton during a renovation of a café, they call in archeologist Dr. Ruth Galloway, who is preoccupied with the threatened closure of her department and by her ever-complicated relationship with DCI Nelson. The bones turn out to be modern—the remains of Emily Pickering, a young archaeology student who went missing in 2002. Suspicion soon falls on Emily’s Cambridge tutor and also on another archeology enthusiast who was part of the group gathered the weekend before she disappeared—Ruth’s friend Cathbad.

As they investigate, Nelson and his team uncover a tangled web of relationships within the archeology group and look for a link between them and the café where Emily’s bones were found. Then, just when the team seem to be making progress, Cathbad disappears. The trail leads Ruth a to the Neolithic flint mines in Grimes Graves. The race is on, first to find Cathbad and then to exonerate him, but will Ruth and Nelson uncover the truth in time to save their friend?


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352 Elly Griffiths 0063286734 Sue 5 4.58 2023 The Last Remains (Ruth Galloway, #15)
author: Elly Griffiths
name: Sue
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/18
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves:
review:
This has got to be one of the best Ruth Galloway mysteries, yet. Have we reached the end? It feels like it, but I think that’s OK. There’s a murder to solve, of course, but, personally, I was more interested in the involvements of all of the characters that I have come to love. No spoilers, but that ending had me bawling. All is as it should be. And I will forever wonder what they are all doing now.
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The Answer Is No 219876684 In a hilarious short story from New York Times bestselling author Fredrik Backman, the absurdities of modern life cause one man’s solitary world to spin suddenly, and comically, out of control.

Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone?

Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

Told in Fredrik Backman’s singular witty style with sharply drawn characters and relatable antics, The Answer Is No is a laugh-out-loud portrait of a man struggling to keep to himself in a world that won’t leave him alone.]]>
68 Fredrik Backman 1662526520 Sue 3 3.94 2024 The Answer Is No
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Sue
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves:
review:
If I were a Fredrik Backman fan, I’m sure I would find this short story hilarious. It has that potential. Unfortunately, I am not a fan, and the absurdity of this short story is merely annoying. It is a commentary on society, that much is plain to see. I read it because it was free and short and got me one book closer to my Kindle reading goal.
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Reliquary (Pendergast, #2) 39030 464 Douglas Preston 0765354950 Sue 4 4.03 1997 Reliquary (Pendergast, #2)
author: Douglas Preston
name: Sue
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2014/01/11
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves:
review:

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Society of Lies 200704039 How far would you go to belong?

Maya has returned to Princeton for her college reunion - it's been a decade since she graduated, and this visit is special because she will also be attending the graduation of her little sister, Naomi.

But what should have been a dream weekend becomes Maya's worst nightmare when she receives the news that Naomi is dead. The police are calling it an accident, but Maya suspects that there is more to the story than they are letting on.

As Maya pieces together what happened in the months leading up to her sister's death, she begins to realise how much Naomi hid from her. Despite Maya's warnings, Naomi had joined Sterling Club, the most exclusive social club on campus - the same one Maya belonged to. And if she had to guess, Naomi was likely tapped for the secret society within it.

Maya knows that her sister isn't the first person in the society to turn up dead. Now every clue is leading Maya back to the past . . . and to the secret she's been keeping all these years.]]>
368 Lauren Ling Brown 0593723368 Sue 4 3.79 2024 Society of Lies
author: Lauren Ling Brown
name: Sue
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves:
review:
Secret societies create unhealthy environments. They look glamorous on the surface, but there’s an ugly worm in the center. This novel switches back and forth between past and present and between 2 different characters. There is murder and intrigue and too many secrets. I felt the story could have been a little shorter and the twists were really just kind of curves, but overall, I enjoyed it.
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White Horse 60652964 White Horse is a gritty, vibrant debut from Erika T. Wurth about an Indigenous woman who must face her past when she discovers a bracelet haunted by her mother’s spirit.

Some people are haunted in more ways than one.

Heavy metal, ripped jeans, Stephen King novels, and the occasional beer at the White Horse have defined urban Indian Kari James’s life so far. But when her cousin Debby finds an old family bracelet that once belonged to Kari’s mother, it inadvertently calls up both her mother’s ghost and a monstrous entity, and her willful ignorance about her past is no longer sustainable�

Haunted by visions of her mother and hunted by this mysterious creature, Kari must search for what happened to her mother all those years ago. Her father, permanently disabled from a car crash, can’t help her. Her Auntie Squeaker seems to know something but isn’t eager to give it all up at once. Debby’s anxious to help, but her controlling husband keeps getting in the way. Kari’s journey toward a truth long denied by both her family and law enforcement forces her to confront her dysfunctional relationships, thoughts about a friend she lost in childhood, and her desire for the one thing she’s always wanted but could never have.]]>
320 Erika T. Wurth 1250847656 Sue 5 3.47 2022 White Horse
author: Erika T. Wurth
name: Sue
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves:
review:
I don’t read a lot of horror because I’m a chicken, but this novel had just the right amount of horror. Kari has never believed in anything so how does she explain her sudden visions? I’m not saying anything more as I don’t want to spoil anything. You will not regret reading this wildly entertaining book, just maybe not at night.
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Where They Last Saw Her 195889542
All they heard was her scream.

Quill has lived on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota her whole life. She knows what happens to people who look like her. Just a girl when Jimmy Sky jumped off the railway bridge and she ran for help, Quill realizes now that she hasn’t ever stopped running. As she trains for the Boston Marathon early one morning out in the woods, she hears a scream. When she investigates, she finds tire tracks and a lone, beaded earring.

Things are different now for Quill than when she was a lonely girl. Her friends Punk and Gaylyn are two women who don’t know what it means to quit; she has her loving husband, Crow, and two beautiful children who challenge her to be better every day. So when she realizes another woman has been stolen, she is determined to do something—and her first stop is the group of men working the pipeline construction just north of their homes.

As Quill closes in on the truth behind the missing woman in the woods, someone else disappears. In her quest to find justice for the women of the reservation, she is confronted with the hard truths of their home and the people who purport to serve them. When will she stop losing neighbors, friends, family? As Quill puts herself, her family, and everything she’s built on the line to make a difference, the novel asks searing questions about bystander culture, the reverberations of even one act of crime, and the long-lasting trauma of being invisible.]]>
313 Marcie R. Rendon 0593496515 Sue 5 4.05 2024 Where They Last Saw Her
author: Marcie R. Rendon
name: Sue
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves:
review:
Marcie Rendon is one of my favorite authors. This is a standalone novel. Quill is fierce and determined and independent and her husband Crow has to come to terms with her nature. There is trauma, mystery, violence to indigenous women, love, loyalty. This is an excellent read. Be sure to read the Author’s Note.
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The Night We Lost Him 207299448
Though the authorities rule Liam's death accidental, Nora and her estranged brother, Sam, believe otherwise. As they form an uneasy alliance to unpack the mystery, they start putting together the pieces of their father’s past and uncover a family secret that changes everything.

With Laura Dave’s “signature blend of pulse-pounding suspense� (PEOPLE) and “trademark emotional heft� (The New York Post), The Night We Lost Him is a “propulsive� (Oprah Daily) must-read, with a heartbreaking final twist you’ll never see coming.]]>
298 Laura Dave 1668002930 Sue 5 3.56 2024 The Night We Lost Him
author: Laura Dave
name: Sue
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves:
review:
This is a gentle mystery, and not really about the mystery, so much, and more about the characters and their relationships. Family, death, love, loyalty, secrets, identity, inheritance, self discovery. This is a fast read and you won’t want to put it down. If you liked the author’s book The Last Thing He Told Me, you’ll like this one even better.
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The Mighty Red 204982648
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 0063277085 Sue 0 currently-reading 4.03 2024 The Mighty Red
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Sue
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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Exposure (Rita Todacheene #2) 204639619 In the follow-up to the National Book Award–longlisted Shutter, Navajo forensic photographer Rita Todacheene grapples with a fanatical serial killer—and the ghosts he leaves behind.

A dual-voice cat-and-mouse thriller, told from the points of view of a killer who has created his own deadly religion and the only person who can stop him, an embattled young detective who sees the ghosts of his Native victims.

In Gallup, New Mexico, where violent crime is five times the national average, a serial killer is operating unchecked, his targets indigent Native people whose murders are easily disguised as death by exposure on the frigid winter streets. He slips unnoticed through town, hidden in plain sight by his unassuming nature, while the voices in his head guide him toward a terrifying vision of glory. As the Gallup detectives struggle to put the pieces together, they consider calling in a controversial specialist to help.

Rita Todacheene, Albuquerque PD forensic photographer, is at a crisis point in her career. Her colleagues are watching her with suspicion after the recent revelation that she can see the ghosts of murder victims. Her unmanageable caseload is further complicated by the fact that half the department has blacklisted her for ratting out a corrupt fellow cop. And back home in Tohatchi on the Navajo reservation, Rita’s grandma is getting older. Maybe it’s time for her to leave policework behind entirely—if only the ghosts will let her.]]>
264 Ramona Emerson 1641294779 Sue 5 4.12 2024 Exposure (Rita Todacheene #2)
author: Ramona Emerson
name: Sue
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/22
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves:
review:
This is a grim, gruesome, gory novel, but it has a joyous ending. Rita Todacheene’s gift may just kill her this time. But she has a secret weapon, a community of love. Will she be able to solve the murders before it’s too late? This is such a fantastic series.
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<![CDATA[The Last Devil to Die (Thursday Murder Club, #4)]]> 63122042
On Boxing Day, a dangerous package is smuggled across the English coast. When it goes missing, chaos is unleashed. The body count starts to rise � including someone close to the Thursday Murder Club--as our gang face an impossible search, and their most deadly opponents yet.

With the clock ticking down and a killer heading to Cooper’s Chase, has their luck finally run out? And who will be “The Last Devil To Die�?]]>
362 Richard Osman Sue 5 4.58 2023 The Last Devil to Die (Thursday Murder Club, #4)
author: Richard Osman
name: Sue
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves:
review:
I had to take a break in the middle of this novel because I knew what was coming and I wasn’t emotionally ready. I’m glad I waited and I’m glad I finished it. I have loved this series and this felt like an ending. I’m sure I’ll continue to wonder how all of the Thursday Murder Club is faring. Maybe we’ll hear from them again.
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Breathe 56755557 A NOVEL OF LOVE AND LOSS FROM BESTSELLING AND PRIZEWINNING AUTHOR JOYCE CAROL OATES

Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA takes residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the husband is stricken with a mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, their lives are uprooted and husband and wife each embarks upon a nightmare journey.  At thirty-seven, Michaela faces the terrifying prospect of widowhood - and the loss of Gerard, whose identity has greatly shaped her own. 

In vividly depicted scenes of escalating suspense, Michaela cares desperately for Gerard in his final days as she comes to realize that her love for her husband, however fierce and selfless, is not enough to save him and that his death is beyond her comprehension.  A love that refuses to be surrendered at death—is this the blessing of a unique married love, or a curse that must be exorcized?

Part intimately detailed love story, part horror story rooted in real life, BREATHE is an exploration of hauntedness rooted in the domesticity of marital love, as well as our determination both to be faithful to the beloved and to survive the trauma of loss.]]>
384 Joyce Carol Oates 006308547X Sue 0 to-read 2.94 2021 Breathe
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Sue
average rating: 2.94
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Identity Unknown (Kay Scarpetta, #28)]]> 205214729
And this victim is sending Scarpetta a message�

Summoned to an unnerving, abandoned theme park to retrieve a body, Dr Kay Scarpetta is devastated to learn that the victim is a man she once loved. While teaching in Rome during the early days of her career, Scarpetta had an intense love affair with Sal Giordano that led to a lifelong friendship.

The murder scene is bizarre, with a crop circle of petals around the body, and Giordano’s skin is strangely red. Scarpetta’s niece Lucy believes he was dropped from an unidentified flying craft. Scarpetta knows an autopsy can reveal the dead’s secrets, but she is shocked to find her friend seems to have deliberately left her a clue.

As the investigators are torn between suspicions of otherworldly forces, and of Giordano himself, Scarpetta detects an explanation closer to home that, in her mind, is far more evil . . .]]>
394 Patricia Cornwell 1538770415 Sue 5 4.34 2024 Identity Unknown (Kay Scarpetta, #28)
author: Patricia Cornwell
name: Sue
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/12
date added: 2024/10/12
shelves:
review:
Once again, Patricia Cornwell has completely captured me. These novels are never better than when Kay Scarpetta is recovering a weird dead body. Is one of her greatest enemies back in play? The Wizard of Oz, UFOs (?), fake moon dust, secret government facilities, mysterious occurrences. The whole wonderful, familiar cast of characters. And an ending that ties everything up and is pretty satisfying. I want more!
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Looking for Smoke 198529101
Instead, a girl from the Giveaway, Samantha White Tail, is found murdered.

Because the members of the Giveaway group were the last to see Samantha alive, each becomes a person of interest in the investigation:

New-girl Mara, who hated Samantha for being particularly cruel.

Grief-stricken Loren Arnoux, who was Samantha’s best friend until her sister’s disappearance drove a wedge between them.

Class-clown Brody Clark, whose unreciprocated crush on Samantha is an open secret.

And tough-guy Eli First Kill, who has his own complicated history with Samantha.

Despite deep mistrust, the four must now take matters into their own hands and clear their names. Even though one of them may be the murderer.

In her powerful debut novel, Looking for Smoke, author K. A. Cobell (Blackfeet) weaves loss, betrayal, and complex characters into a mystery that will illuminate, surprise, and engage readers until the final word.]]>
416 K.A. Cobell 0063318695 Sue 0 currently-reading 4.08 2024 Looking for Smoke
author: K.A. Cobell
name: Sue
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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Green Fuse Burning 194802611 104 Tiffany Morris 1778092675 Sue 5 3.70 2023 Green Fuse Burning
author: Tiffany Morris
name: Sue
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/05
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves:
review:
What part of this novella is imagination and what part is autobiographical (be sure to read the Afterword)? An artist has a, possibly, “hallucinogenic� encounter with a swamp creature, and certainly faces down her own death. This book will make you think and horrify you at the same time. It’s chilling and I loved it.
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<![CDATA[Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition]]> 44578234 National Outdoor Book Awards WinnerWinner of the BANFF Adventure Travel Award�A thrilling and harrowing story. If it’s a cliche to say I couldn’t put this book down, well, too I couldn’t put this book down.� —Jess Walter, bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins“Polar exploration is utter madness. It is the insistence of life where life shouldn’t exist. And so, Labyrinth of Ice shows you exactly what happens when the unstoppable meets the unmovable. Buddy Levy outdoes himself here. The details and story are magnificent.� �Brad Meltzer, bestselling author of The First The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington Based on the author's exhaustive research, the incredible true story of the Greely Expedition, one of the most harrowing adventures in the annals of polar exploration. In July 1881, Lt. A.W. Greely and his crew of 24 scientists and explorers were bound for the last region unmarked on global maps. Their Farthest North. What would follow was one of the most extraordinary and terrible voyages ever made. Greely and his men confronted every possible challenge—vicious wolves, sub-zero temperatures, and months of total darkness—as they set about exploring one of the most remote, unrelenting environments on the planet. In May 1882, they broke the 300-year-old record, and returned to camp to eagerly await the resupply ship scheduled to return at the end of the year. Only nothing came. 250 miles south, a wall of ice prevented any rescue from reaching them. Provisions thinned and a second winter descended. Back home, Greely’s wife worked tirelessly against government resistance to rally a rescue mission.Months passed, and Greely made a drastic he and his men loaded the remaining provisions and tools onto their five small boats, and pushed off into the treacherous waters. After just two weeks, dangerous floes surrounded them. Now new dangers insanity, threats of mutiny, and cannibalism. As food dwindled and the men weakened, Greely's expedition clung desperately to life.Labyrinth of Ice tells the true story of the heroic lives and deaths of these voyagers hell-bent on fame and fortune—at any cost—and how their journey changed the world.]]> 392 Buddy Levy 1250182204 Sue 0 currently-reading 4.60 2019 Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition
author: Buddy Levy
name: Sue
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos—Exploring the Fascinating History of Our Universe and the Possibility of Life Beyond Our Planet]]> 61121586 A dazzling cultural and scientific exploration of alien life and the cosmos, examining how the possibility of life on other planets shapes our understanding of humanity, for fans of Leslie Jamison, Carl Zimmer and Carlo Rovelli.

One of the most powerful questions humans ask about the cosmos is: Are we alone? Yet this very question is inevitably reduced to yes or no, to odds and probabilities that posit answers through complex physics. The science is fascinating, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is a reflection of our values and aspirations, our fears and anxieties, and most importantly, our enduring sense of hope. 

In The Possibility of Life, acclaimed science journalist Jaime Green traces the history of our understanding, from the days of Galileo and Copernicus up through to our contemporary quest for exoplanets in the "Goldilocks zone," where life akin to ours on Earth might exist. Along the way, she interweaves insights from a long-standing tradition of science fiction writers who use the power of imagination to extrapolate and construct worlds that in turn inspire scientists.

Weaving in expert interviews, cutting-edge astronomy research, philosophical inquiry and pop culture touchstones ranging from A Wrinkle in Time łŮ´ÇĚýStar Trek to Avatar,ĚýThe Possibility of Life explores our evolving conception of the cosmos to ask an even deeper question: What does it mean to be human?]]>
288 Jaime Green 0369700015 Sue 4
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It took me quite some time to finish this book. It is very interesting, but it bogs down in some of the longer sections. Should we search for life among the stars or is it enough to try and figure out how life began on earth? Both may seem important and/or improbable, but the advantage we have is that there is already life on our planet, our home.]]>
4.00 2023 The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos—Exploring the Fascinating History of Our Universe and the Possibility of Life Beyond Our Planet
author: Jaime Green
name: Sue
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/25
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves:
review:
It took me quite some time to finish this book. It is very interesting, but it bogs down in some of the longer sections. Should we search for life among the stars or is it enough to try and figure out how life began on earth? Both may seem important and/or improbable, but the advantage we have is that there is already life on our planet, our home.

Merged review:

It took me quite some time to finish this book. It is very interesting, but it bogs down in some of the longer sections. Should we search for life among the stars or is it enough to try and figure out how life began on earth? Both may seem important and/or improbable, but the advantage we have is that there is already life on our planet, our home.
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A tale of two cities 202119270 Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" is a literary masterpiece that weaves a compelling narrative against the tumultuous backdrop of the French Revolution. This historical novel explores themes of resurrection, sacrifice, and the stark contrast between two cities, London and Paris, during a time of upheaval.

The story begins with one of the most famous opening lines in "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." Through the lives of characters like the virtuous Charles Darnay, the dissolute Sydney Carton, and the vengeful Madame Defarge, Dickens paints a vivid picture of a society on the brink of revolution.

Amidst the chaos and violence of revolutionary France, the novel delves deep into the personal struggles and triumphs of its characters. The selfless sacrifice of Sydney Carton, who finds redemption through an act of incredible courage, is a central and moving element of the story.

Dickens' storytelling prowess shines as he masterfully combines historical accuracy with unforgettable characters. His portrayal of the Reign of Terror's brutality and the stark divisions between social classes is both poignant and thought-provoking.

"A Tale of Two Cities" is a tale of love and friendship, of the enduring human spirit, and the hope that even in the darkest of times, there is the possibility of transformation and renewal. It's a classic that continues to resonate with readers, reminding us of the power of compassion and the enduring struggle for justice and equality. This novel is an essential addition to any reader's bookshelf, offering a timeless exploration of the human experience against a backdrop of historical upheaval.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was a world-renowned English writer. He is famous for his novels that depict the social realities of Victorian England. Among his most well-known works are "Oliver Twist" (1837-1839), "David Copperfield" (1849-1850), "Great Expectations" (1860-1861), and "A Christmas Carol" (1843). Dickens was a keen observer of the society of his time, shedding light on inequalities, poverty, and injustices. His writing style was characterized by humor, vivacity, and compassion for marginalized characters. Dickens contributed to shaping English literature, and his legacy still endures today.]]>
0 Charles Dickens 2384613456 Sue 0 currently-reading 4.31 1996 A tale of two cities
author: Charles Dickens
name: Sue
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love]]> 40728267 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER � From the acclaimed author of Signal Fires and host of the hit podcast Family a memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test, an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love. “Memoir a profound and exquisitely rendered exploration of identity and the true meaning of family.� —People In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had casually submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father. Over the course of a single day, her entire history—the life she had lived—crumbled beneath her. Inheritance is a book about secrets. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in, a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. Dani Shapiro’s memoir unfolds at a breakneck pace—part mystery, part real-time investigation, part rumination on the ineffable combination of memory, history, biology, and experience that makes us who we are. Inheritance is a devastating and haunting interrogation of the meaning of kinship and identity, written with stunning intensity and precision.]]> 272 Dani Shapiro 1524732729 Sue 5 4.00 2019 Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love
author: Dani Shapiro
name: Sue
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2018/12/19
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:
Thank you firsttoread.com and Penguin Books for this ARC. I give this book 5 out of 5 stars. I have only read one other book by this author, and I wondered at the time why I just couldn’t connect with her story. Perhaps this book is the explanation. Haunting her for her entire life, a sense of otherness, unconnectedness, must have come through her writing. Filled with painful honesty, Inheritance is a compelling memoir of personal discovery. I strongly recommend this book. It is an intense experience.
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<![CDATA[Blue Labyrinth (Pendergast, #14)]]> 21400881
It begins with murder. One of Pendergast's most implacable, most feared enemies is found on his doorstep, dead. Pendergast has no idea who is responsible for the killing, or why the body was brought to his home. The mystery has all the hallmarks of the perfect crime, save for an enigmatic a piece of turquoise lodged in the stomach of the deceased.

The gem leads Pendergast to an abandoned mine on the shore of California's Salton Sea, which in turn propels him on a journey of discovery deep into his own family's sinister past. But Pendergast learns there is more at work than a ghastly episode of family he is being stalked by a subtle killer bent on vengeance over an ancient transgression. And he soon becomes caught in a wickedly clever plot, which leaves him stricken in mind and body, and propels him toward a reckoning beyond anything he could ever have imagined....]]>
408 Douglas Preston 1455525901 Sue 5 4.38 2014 Blue Labyrinth (Pendergast, #14)
author: Douglas Preston
name: Sue
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2020/10/18
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
review:
Another white knuckle adventure with Agent Pendergast. There were parts of this one that made me glad I was not eating and other parts that had me shouting, “NOOOOO!� It is hard to say much more about this book without giving anything away, so let’s just say that I once again take issue with the authors trying their damndest to kill off my favorite FBI agent. This is by far my favorite mystery/thriller/horror series.
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Cane (New Edition) 19003137 'A breakthrough in prose and poetical writing. This book should be on all readers� and writers� desks and in their minds.' - Maya Angelou

First published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane is an innovative literary work—part drama, part poetry, part fiction—powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer’s impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets.

This iconic work of American literature is published with a new afterword by Rudolph Byrd of Emory University and Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, who provide groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer, place his writing within the context of American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and examine his shifting claims about his own race and his pioneering critique of race as a scientific or biological concept.]]>
254 Jean Toomer 0871403129 Sue 0 started-but-on-hold, to-read 3.83 1923 Cane (New Edition)
author: Jean Toomer
name: Sue
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1923
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: started-but-on-hold, to-read
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<![CDATA[High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread]]> 21936697 Eight stories from the author of A Book of American Martyrs that display her “mastery of imagery and stream of consciousness� (Kirkus Reviews).   Joyce Carol Oates is an unparalleled investigator of human personality. In these eight stories, she deftly tests the bonds between damaged individuals—brother and sister. teacher and student, two lonesome strangers on a subway—in the beautiful, bracing prose that has become her signature.   In the title story, a white, aspiring professor in Detroit tries to shake a black, male shadow during the summer of the city’s 1967 race riots. In “The Rescuer,� a promising graduate student detours to inner-city Trenton, New Jersey, to save her brother from a downward spiral, only to find herself entranced by his dangerous new world. Meanwhile, a young woman prowls the New York City subways in search of her perfect man in “Lorelei.� In each of these short stories, Oates portrays a desperate confrontation with the demons inside us. Sometimes it’s the human who wins, and sometimes it’s the demon.   “Oates offers unexpected glimmers of redemption amid the grotesquerie, degradation, and exploitation that fill this collection’s eight tales.� —Publishers Weekly]]> 224 Joyce Carol Oates Sue 0 currently-reading 3.89 2014 High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Sue
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023]]> 83814902 Award-winning writer, columnist, and journalists Carl Zimmer selects twenty science and nature essays that represent the best examples of the form published in 2022.

A collection of the best science and nature articles written in 2022, selected by guest editor Carl Zimmer and series editor Jaime Green.]]>
267 Carl Zimmer 0063293226 Sue 5
Merged review:

It’s hard to review a book of best American science and nature writing. I love these types of anthologies, for lack of a better word, and I obviously liked or loved certain of the articles. They were all informative and some I cared about more than others. Some are extremely pertinent to the current election and beyond. If you like scientific writing, this will be your jam.]]>
3.82 The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023
author: Carl Zimmer
name: Sue
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves:
review:
It’s hard to review a book of best American science and nature writing. I love these types of anthologies, for lack of a better word, and I obviously liked or loved certain of the articles. They were all informative and some I cared about more than others. Some are extremely pertinent to the current election and beyond. If you like scientific writing, this will be your jam.

Merged review:

It’s hard to review a book of best American science and nature writing. I love these types of anthologies, for lack of a better word, and I obviously liked or loved certain of the articles. They were all informative and some I cared about more than others. Some are extremely pertinent to the current election and beyond. If you like scientific writing, this will be your jam.
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Sleep Tight 218482309
Dark and twisting at every turn, fans of Catriona Ward will love this chilling new tale from the deviously inventive horror author that Peter Farris calls the “clear heir to Stephen King.�

Beware the one who got away . . .

Father Silence once terrorized the rural town of Twisted Tree, disguising himself as a priest to prey on the most vulnerable members of society. When the police finally found his “House of Horrors,� they uncovered nineteen bodies and one survivor–a boy now locked away in a hospital for the criminally insane.

Nearly two decades later, Father Silence is finally put to death, but by the next morning, the detective who made the original arrest is found dead. A new serial killer is taking credit for the murder and calling himself the Outcast.

The detective’s daughter, Tess Claibourne, is a detective herself, haunted by childhood trauma and horrified by the death of her father and the resurgence of Father Silence’s legacy.

When Tess’s daughter is kidnapped by the Outcast, Tess is forced to face her worst fears and long-buried memories. With no leads to follow, she travels back to Twisted Tree to visit the boy who survived and see what secrets might be buried in the tangled web of his broken mind.

With captivating prose and an old-school horror flair, Sleep Tight is a must-read, haunting tale from a true master of the genre.]]>
336 J.H. Markert Sue 5 3.80 2024 Sleep Tight
author: J.H. Markert
name: Sue
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:
GAH! Chilled me to the bone! Tess is a mess but for good reasons as we find out. With all her flaws, you can’t help really loving her. The cult of all cults with far reaching tentacles, characters within characters, murder, torture, mayhem, so, so many twists and turns, flashbacks, a possible hint to a sequel(?), but an ending that ties things up. So good!
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<![CDATA[The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto, #2)]]> 199229118 A serial killer on death row challenges a forensic linguist to solve his final puzzle in a novel of breathtaking mind games by the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Lies You Wrote.

Forensic psychologist Callum Kilkenny lost his wife, Shay, to the very serial killer he’d hunted for five years. When Nathaniel Conrad—known as the Alphabet Man, for his love of tattooing codes onto his victims� bodies—was condemned to death row, Callum thought the game of cat and mouse was over. But just before execution, Nathaniel drops a he’s not the one who murdered Shay.

After analyzing the killer’s taunting, coded letters to authorities—one for each victim—FBI forensic linguist Raisa Susanto believes him. The discrepancies bear it out. So was it a copycat? A partner in crime? Or something more sinister? If Nathaniel knows the answer, Raisa fears he’ll be taking that closely guarded secret to his grave.

As Raisa and Callum are pulled into an investigation to solve Shay’s murder, it reopens old traumas that cut deeper than they could imagine. Before someone else dies, Raisa must decipher the unbelievable truth in an ever-twisting case built on a foundation of lies.]]>
316 Brianna Labuskes 166251137X Sue 0 currently-reading 4.25 2024 The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto, #2)
author: Brianna Labuskes
name: Sue
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: currently-reading
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When We Were Friends 217107993 From New York Times bestselling author Jane Green comes a riveting story about a friendship that turns ugly when a woman realizes her new best friend is not what she seems.

By all accounts, Lucy’s handled her divorce well. She’s finally in the cozy, plant-filled house of her dreams. And although she doesn’t fit in with the other divorcées—all busy looking for their next ex—she’s excited to get down to earth and savor the small joys of life.

When Lucy meets Elle, a hip younger woman who shares her same passions, their connection is instant. Taking a chance on kismet, Lucy forges a friendship that fills her days with meaning. She and Elle are inseparable, from sunup to sundown, enjoying the immediate ease and familiarity of each other’s company.

But as Lucy introduces Elle to her circle, a new side of her friend appears. And try as she might, Lucy can’t ignore her misgivings. Who is Elle really? And can their all-consuming friendship survive closer inspection?]]>
44 Jane Green 1662518897 Sue 5 3.45 2024 When We Were Friends
author: Jane Green
name: Sue
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/15
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves:
review:
What a lovely story. It’s hard even as an adult to make and keep friends. It’s harder still to be your own best friend. The discovery that we, each of us, is enough is so freeing. A bittersweet short story, but with such a lovely, warm ending.
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<![CDATA[We'll Prescribe You a Cat (We'll Prescribe You a Cat, #1)]]> 209895723 A cat a day keeps the doctor away�

Discover the award-winning, bestselling Japanese novel that has become an international sensation in this utterly charming, vibrant celebration of the healing power of cats.

Tucked away in an old building at the end of a narrow alley in Kyoto, the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul can only be found by people who are struggling in their lives and genuinely need help. The mysterious clinic offers a unique treatment to those who find their way it prescribes cats as medication. Patients are often puzzled by this unconventional prescription, but when they “take� their cat for the recommended duration, they witness profound transformations in their lives, guided by the playful, empathetic, occasionally challenging yet endearing cats.

Throughout the pages, the power of the human-animal bond is revealed as a disheartened businessman finds unexpected joy in physical labor, a young girl navigates the complexities of elementary school cliques, a middle-aged man struggles to stay relevant at work and home, a hardened bag designer seeks emotional balance, and a geisha finds herself unable to move on from the memory of her lost cat. As the clinic’s patients navigate their inner turmoil and seek resolution, their feline companions lead them toward healing, self-discovery, and newfound hope.]]>
301 Syou Ishida 059381875X Sue 0 currently-reading 3.93 2023 We'll Prescribe You a Cat (We'll Prescribe You a Cat, #1)
author: Syou Ishida
name: Sue
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)]]> 61246273 In this spectacularly devious novel by New York Times bestselling author Peter Swanson—featuring the smart and complex Lily Kintner from his acclaimed novel, The Kind Worth Killing—a private eye starts to follow a possibly adulterous husband, but little does he know that the twisted trail will lead back to the woman who hired him.

There was always something slightly dangerous about Joan. So, when she turns up at private investigator Henry Kimball’s office asking him to investigate her husband, he can’t help feeling ill at ease. Just the sight of her stirs up a chilling memory: he knew Joan in his previous life as a high school English teacher, when he was at the center of a tragedy.

Now Joan needs his help in proving that her husband is cheating. But what should be a simple case of infidelity becomes much more complicated when Kimball finds two bodies in an uninhabited suburban home with a “for sale� sign out front. Suddenly it feels like the past is repeating itself, and Henry must go back to one of the worst days of his life to uncover the truth.

Is it possible that Joan knows something about that day, something she’s hidden all these years? Could there still be a killer out there, someone who believes they have gotten away with murder? Henry is determined to find out, but as he steps closer to the truth, a murderer is getting closer to him, and in this hair-raising game of cat and mouse only one of them will survive.]]>
320 Peter Swanson Sue 5 3.83 2023 The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)
author: Peter Swanson
name: Sue
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves:
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I think this book is even better than The Kind Worth Killing. I love the odd relationship between Lily and Henry, but Lily Kintner is someone not to be messed with, and the next book in the series, A Talent for Murder, bears this out. Murder, mystery, sociopaths, blurred lines between good and evil. I just love this series.
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The God of the Woods 199700434 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide.

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]>
478 Liz Moore 0593418913 Sue 5 4.10 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Sue
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves:
review:
Take a family that only wants sons named Peter and there’s bound to be issues. The reputation of the family and especially the sons is more important than anything. Well, that’s just a recipe for all kinds of not good. The secret at the heart of this book will cause an explosion in the Van Laar empire. Liz Moore is so good with the family drama.
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The Kind Worth Killing 36509935 The Girl on the Train will love this modern reimagining of Patricia Highsmith’s classic Strangers on a Train from the author of the acclaimed The Girl with a Clock for a Heart—which the Washington Post said “should be a contender for crime fiction’s best first novel of 2014.�

On a night flight from London to Boston, Ted Severson meets the stunning and mysterious Lily Kintner. Sharing one too many martinis, the strangers begin to play a game of truth, revealing very intimate details about themselves. Ted talks about his marriage that’s going stale and his wife Miranda, who he’s sure is cheating on him. Ted and his wife were a mismatch from the start—he the rich businessman, she the artistic free spirit—a contrast that once inflamed their passion, but has now become a cliché.

But their game turns a little darker when Ted jokes that he could kill Miranda for what she’s done. Lily, without missing a beat, says calmly, “I’d like to help.� After all, some people are the kind worth killing, like a lying, stinking, cheating spouse. . . .

Back in Boston, Ted and Lily’s twisted bond grows stronger as they begin to plot Miranda's demise. But there are a few things about Lily’s past that she hasn’t shared with Ted, namely her experience in the art and craft of murder, a journey that began in her very precocious youth.

Suddenly these co-conspirators are embroiled in a chilling game of cat-and-mouse, one they both cannot survive . . . with a shrewd and very determined detective on their tail.]]>
325 Peter Swanson Sue 5 4.02 2015 The Kind Worth Killing
author: Peter Swanson
name: Sue
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/07
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves:
review:
Holy cow! I know I shouldn’t adore the serial killer(?), but how can you not? This is such a morally ambiguous, twisty little tale and the ending made me groan out loud, “oh no.� I already have the next book on deck and I will probably start it immediately. Lily Kintner is one of the most interesting characters I’ve encountered.
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<![CDATA[New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color]]> 61273437 The stunning follow-up to the multiple-award-winning anthology of SFF by people of colour

Octavia E. Butler said, “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.�

New Suns 2 brings you fresh visions of the strange, the unexpected, the shocking—breakthrough stories, stories shining with emerging truths, stories that pierce stale preconceptions with their beauty and bravery. Like the first New Suns anthology (winner of the World Fantasy, Locus, IGNYTE, and British Fantasy awards), this book liberates writers of many races to tell us tales no one has ever told.

Many things come in twos: dualities, binaries, halves, and alternates. Twos are found throughout New Suns 2, in eighteen science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories revealing daring futures, hidden pasts, and present-day worlds filled with unmapped wonders.

Including stories by Daniel H. Wilson, K. Tempest Bradford, Darcie Little Badger, Geetanjali Vandemark, John Chu, Nghi Vo, Tananarive Due, Alex Jennings, Karin Lowachee, Saad Hossain, Hiromi Goto, Minsoo Kang, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Malka Older, Kathleen Alcalá, Christopher Caldwell and Jaymee Goh with a foreword by Walter Mosley and an afterword by Dr. Grace Dillon.]]>
352 Nisi Shawl 1786188589 Sue 5 3.93 2023 New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color
author: Nisi Shawl
name: Sue
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves:
review:
Did this take me a year to read? Yes. Yes it did. It’s an anthology, though and not necessarily intended as a read through. Much like the first volume, this is packed with terrific BIPOC speculative short stories. There’s a particularly disturbing story by Tananarive Due, but what else would you expect (I love her). This anthology is so worth the read!
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The Island 205449889 337 Sarah Goodwin 0008671095 Sue 4 3.43 2024 The Island
author: Sarah Goodwin
name: Sue
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/20
date added: 2024/08/20
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Although I ended up liking her, Jody was a little hard to take sometimes. The arc of the novel necessitated that her character grow, but it was a messy process. Music festival gone off the rails, paranoia, friends who may not be friends, trafficking of all sorts, and a killer ending.
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The Custom o­­f the Country 54112337 - Anita Brookner]]> 500 Edith Wharton 883582785X Sue 0 currently-reading 4.38 1913 The Custom o­­f the Country
author: Edith Wharton
name: Sue
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1913
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/14
shelves: currently-reading
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Jeoffry: The Poet's Cat 55440258 'An inspired an original tale ... Jeoffry is the greatest cat in the English language' Hilary Mantel'Simply unforgettable ... one of the most beautiful and haunting books of recent times' Alexander McCall Smith'A heart-lifting delight; I absolutely loved it. A triumph' Alexandra Harris

Jeoffry was a real cat who lived 250 years ago, confined to an asylum with Christopher Smart, one of the most visionary poets of the age. In exchange for love and companionship, Smart rewarded Jeoffry with the greatest tribute to a feline ever written. 

Prize-winning biographer Oliver Soden combines meticulous research with passages of dazzling invention to recount the life of the cat praised as â€a mixture of gravity and waggeryâ€�. The narrative roams from the theatres and bordellos of Covent Garden to the cell where Smart was imprisoned for mania. At once whimsical and profound, witty and deeply moving, Soden’s biography plays with the genre like a cat with a toy. It tells the story of a poet and a poem, while setting Jeoffry’s life and adventures against the roaring backdrop of eighteenth-century London.]]>
113 Oliver Soden 0750995939 Sue 5 4.14 2020 Jeoffry: The Poet's Cat
author: Oliver Soden
name: Sue
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
review:
Who would guess that this would be such a charming and touching “biography�? Did I cry? Yes, I did. Such a creative imagining of the life of an influential cat (but aren’t they all?). Christopher Smart was a complicated poet but he immortalized his most faithful of companions, who may have indeed led such a life as depicted within.
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<![CDATA[The Bookstore Wedding (The Once Upon a Time Bookshop, #2)]]> 214128304
Isabel, the long-lost Gibson sister, is finally back home on Brinkley’s Island, Maine. With Sophie and Violet, her sister and her niece, she’s got the family bookstore—and with Johnny Lenox, she’s got something even more special.

But even as life settles, not everything is falling into place. Isabel and Johnny have set the date three times, baked three wedding cakes, invited the whole island to three parties, only to have each attempt at matrimony fall apart at the last minute. Disasters seem to be conspiring against their happy ending, and Isabel is starting to wonder if their love is meant to be.

When family history comes back to haunt the Gibson sisters, Isabel knows that if she wants to make it down the aisle with Johnny, first she and Sophie will have to face the pain of their past and their present, and decide what it means for their future.]]>
39 Alice Hoffman 1662522037 Sue 5 3.93 2024 The Bookstore Wedding (The Once Upon a Time Bookshop, #2)
author: Alice Hoffman
name: Sue
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/04
shelves:
review:
What a perfect story! Sisters, books, love, baking, art, an island. I love these stories. Alice Hoffman has such a way with words and I can’t wait for the next installment! Do yourself a favor and start from the beginning. You’ll fall in love.
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<![CDATA[Eight Perfect Murders (Malcolm Kershaw, #1)]]> 49580909 "Fiendish good fun." —Anthony Horowitz

From the hugely talented author of Before She Knew Him comes a chilling tale of psychological suspense and an homage to the thriller genre tailor-made for fans: the story of a bookseller who finds himself at the center of an FBI investigation because a very clever killer has started using his list of fiction’s most ingenious murders.

Years ago, bookseller and mystery aficionado Malcolm Kershaw compiled a list of the genre’s most unsolvable murders, those that are almost impossible to crack—which he titled “Eight Perfect Murders”—chosen from among the best of the best including Agatha Christie’s A. B. C. Murders, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, Ira Levin’s Death Trap, A. A. Milne's Red House Mystery, Anthony Berkeley Cox's Malice Aforethought, James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, John D. Macdonald's The Drowner, and Donna Tartt's A Secret History.

But no one is more surprised than Mal, now the owner of the Old Devils Bookstore in Boston, when an FBI agent comes knocking on his door one snowy day in February. She’s looking for information about a series of unsolved murders that look eerily similar to the killings on Mal’s old list. And the FBI agent isn’t the only one interested in this bookseller who spends almost every night at home reading. There is killer is out there, watching his every move—a diabolical threat who knows way too much about Mal’s personal history, especially the secrets he’s never told anyone, even his recently deceased wife.

To protect himself, Mal begins looking into possible suspects . . . and sees a killer in everyone around him. But Mal doesn’t count on the investigation leaving a trail of death in its wake. Suddenly, a series of shocking twists leaves more victims dead—and the noose around Mal’s neck grows so tight he might never escape.

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288 Peter Swanson 0062838210 Sue 5 3.75 2020 Eight Perfect Murders (Malcolm Kershaw, #1)
author: Peter Swanson
name: Sue
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/04
shelves:
review:
I’m glad I read the 8 books that the author spoils before reading this book. I feel it added to my enjoyment of this book, and I did enjoy this book, very much. Unreliable narrator, lots of books mentioned, many murders, other quite likable characters. I really like the way this author composes a story.
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The Red House Mystery 158984461 The narrative transports readers to the Red House, Mr. Mark Ablett's bachelor pad in the tranquil English countryside. While visiting this welcoming location, amateur investigator Anthony Gillingham and his friend Bill Beverley look into the disappearance of their kind host and its connection to a covert gunshot.
In a humorous sequence of pranks, Gillingham and Beverley explore the probabilities of intriguing undersea evidence, secret passageways, and other atmospheric devices in between complex endeavours. This unique gem will enchant readers who enjoy mysteries with its sparkling dialogue, deft writing, and fascinating cast of characters.]]>
219 A.A. Milne Sue 5 4.03 1922 The Red House Mystery
author: A.A. Milne
name: Sue
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1922
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/29
date added: 2024/07/30
shelves:
review:
I would not have guessed that the author of Winnie the Pooh could write such a thoroughly masterful murder mystery. Clever, funny, mysterious, murdery, tricky, with extremely likable characters. A very satisfying read with a Sherlockian twist.
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<![CDATA[The Drowner (Murder Room Book 623)]]> 23229047 164 John D. MacDonald Sue 5 4.04 1963 The Drowner (Murder Room Book 623)
author: John D. MacDonald
name: Sue
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:
This book is a twisty thriller. It starts out quite tamely, but, oh, that ending. The Florida heat is a major character in this murdery tale. Beware those with a rigid moral code.
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Double Indemnity 11036868 roman noir, gives us a tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful story in Double Indemnity,Ěýan X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. 

Walter Huff was an insurance salesman with an unfailing instinct for clients who might be in trouble, and his instinct led him to Phyllis Nirdlinger. Phyllis wanted to buy an accident policy on her husband. Then she wanted her husband to have an accident. Walter wanted Phyllis. To get her, he would arrange the perfect murder and betray everything he had ever lived for.]]>
116 James M. Cain Sue 5 4.12 1936 Double Indemnity
author: James M. Cain
name: Sue
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1936
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/07/20
shelves:
review:
Holy smokes! This book hit me hard! I’ve never seen the movie and I’m glad because it just can’t be as good as this book. It’s shocking what people will do for money. I certainly wasn’t expecting that ending, either. Oh boy.
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<![CDATA[A Talent for Murder (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #3)]]> 199116301
Martha Ratliff conceded long ago that she’d likely spend her life alone. She was fine with it, happy with her solo existence, stimulated by her job as an archival librarian, constantly surrounded by thought-provoking ideas and the books she loved. But then she met Alan, a charming and sweet-natured divorcee with a job that took him on the road for half the year. When he asked her to marry him, she said yes, even though he still felt a little bit like a stranger.

A year in and the marriage was good, except for that strange blood streak on the back of one of his shirts he’d worn to a conference in Denver. Her curiosity turning to suspicion, Martha investigates the cities Alan visited over the past year and uncovers a disturbing pattern—five unsolved cases of murdered women.

Is she married to a serial killer? Or could it merely be a coincidence? Unsure what to think, Martha contacts an old friend from graduate school for advice. Lily Kintner once helped Martha out of a jam with an abusive boyfriend and may have some insight. Intrigued, Lily offers to meet Alan to find out what kind of man he really is . . . but what Lily uncovers is more perplexing and wicked than they ever could have expected.]]>
255 Peter Swanson 0063205033 Sue 5 3.58 2024 A Talent for Murder (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #3)
author: Peter Swanson
name: Sue
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/19
date added: 2024/07/19
shelves:
review:
This book caught me completely off guard. It started off as one book and morphed into another book, but still the same book. Also, how was I not aware that this was the 3rd book in a series? So now I have to start with book 1. Anyway, murder, murder, who’s done the murder(s)? And don’t mess with Lily Kintner. Wow.
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Malice Aforethought 41843432 "Possibly the best shocker ever written." � The English Review
Dr. Edmund Bickleigh married above his station. Although popular and well respected in his little Devonshire community, he seethes with resentment at the superior social status of his domineering wife, Julia. Bickleigh soothes his inferiority complex by seducing as many of the local women as he possibly can � but with the collapse of his latest fling and a fresh dose of sneering contempt from Julia, the doctor resolves to silence his wife forever and begins plotting the perfect murder.
With Malice Aforethought, Francis Iles produced not just a darkly comic narrative of psychological suspense but also a landmark in crime fiction: for the first time, the murderer's identity was revealed at the start of the tale. Hailed as a tour de force by the British press of its day, the book retains its shock value and stands at #16 in the Crime Writers' Association ranking of the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time.
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289 Francis Iles 0486834611 Sue 5 4.03 1931 Malice Aforethought
author: Francis Iles
name: Sue
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1931
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves:
review:
This was a very cat and mouse mystery. We are in the mind of the murderer but there are outside forces arrayed against him that we are not privy to. So, who is the mouse and who is the cat? I did not really like any of the characters but that’s part of the fun of trying to piece it all together.
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Strangers on a Train 16008208 Strangers on a Train, galvanized the reading public. Here we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. “Some people are better off dead,� Bruno remarks, “like your wife and my father, for instance.� As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.

The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith on a prolific career of noir fiction, proving her a master at depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.]]>
292 Patricia Highsmith Sue 5 3.73 1950 Strangers on a Train
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Sue
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1950
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/07/08
shelves:
review:
I’ve never seen the movie and I’m glad because this book is so devilishly, maddeningly, twistedly clever. That ending sent chills down my spine. I don’t think I really liked any of the characters and I don’t know that we’re meant to but we do get a look at what guilt can do to a person’s mind. Brrrrr.
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Forgotten Sisters 181840762 A city’s haunted history and fairy-tale horrors converge for two women in an addictive novel of psychological suspense by a multiple Bram Stoker Award–nominated author.

Sisters Anna and Jennie live in a historic bungalow on the Chicago River. They’re tethered to a disquieting past, and with nowhere else to go, nothing can part them from their family home. Not the maddening creaks and disembodied voices that rattle the old walls. Not the inexplicable drownings in the area, or the increasing number of bodies that float by Anna’s window.

To stave off loneliness, Anna has a podcast, spinning ghostly tales of Chicago’s tragic history. But when Anna captures the attention of an ardent male listener, she awakens to the possibilities of a world outside.

As their relationship grows, so do Jennie’s fears. More and more people are going missing in the river. And then two detectives come calling.

They’re looking for a link between the mysteries of the river and what’s housed on the bank. Even Anna and Jennie don’t understand how dreadful it is—and still can be—when the truth about their unsettled lives begins to surface.]]>
298 Cynthia Pelayo 1662513909 Sue 5 3.37 2024 Forgotten Sisters
author: Cynthia Pelayo
name: Sue
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/04
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves:
review:
From the beginning of this novel, I felt all at sea, but drawn inexorably forward. I didn’t know who or what to believe. Was this a ghost story? What was real? Who was real? Would it all end in disaster or would we get a happy ending or at least not a tragic one? Wow, I didn’t see the end coming.
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<![CDATA[The Lost Symbol (Robert Langdon, #3)]]> 8421746 An alternate cover edition for ISBN 9781400079148 can be found here.

In this stunning follow-up to the global phenomenon "The Da Vinci Code," Dan Brown demonstrates once again why he is the world's most popular thriller writer. The Lost Symbol is a masterstroke of storytelling--a deadly race through a real-world labyrinth of codes, secrets, and unseen truths . . . all under the watchful eye of Brown's most terrifying villain to date. Set within the hidden chambers, tunnels, and temples of Washington, D.C., The Lost Symbol accelerates through a startling landscape toward an unthinkable finale.

As the story opens, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned unexpectedly to deliver an evening lecture in the U.S. Capitol Building. Within minutes of his arrival, however, the night takes a bizarre turn. A disturbing object--artfully encoded with five symbols--is discovered in the Capitol Building. Langdon recognizes the object as an ancient invitation . . . one meant to usher its recipient into a long-lost world of esoteric wisdom.

When Langdon's beloved mentor, Peter Solomon--a prominent Mason and philanthropist--is brutally kidnapped, Langdon realizes his only hope of saving Peter is to accept this mystical invitation and follow wherever it leads him. Langdon is instantly plunged into a clandestine world of Masonic secrets, hidden history, and never-before-seen locations--all of which seem to be dragging him toward a single, inconceivable truth.]]>
639 Dan Brown Sue 5 3.70 2009 The Lost Symbol (Robert Langdon, #3)
author: Dan Brown
name: Sue
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2012/02/19
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[The ABC Murders (Hercule Poirot, #13)]]> 54085631 There’s a serial killer on the loose, working his way through the alphabet and the whole country is in a state of panic.

A is for Mrs. Ascher in Andover, B is for Betty Barnard in Bexhill, C is for Sir Carmichael Clarke in Churston. With each murder, the killer is getting more confident—but leaving a trail of deliberate clues to taunt the proud Hercule Poirot might just prove to be the first, and fatal, mistake.

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240 Agatha Christie Sue 5 4.24 1936 The ABC Murders (Hercule Poirot, #13)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Sue
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1936
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/21
date added: 2024/06/21
shelves:
review:
How can one not rate an Agatha Christie mystery anything but 5 stars? And especially with Hercule Poirot as the detective. I particularly love the cleverness of his mysteries. I was fooled right up to the end. Of course, I always picture David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, which just added to my delight in reading this book.
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The Tremor of Forgery 13182634 292 Patricia Highsmith Sue 0 currently-reading 3.96 1969 The Tremor of Forgery
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Sue
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/21
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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Tiger Chair 209608728 When China invades America, guerrilla warfare explodes on the streets of Los Angeles in this provocative short story about the future of war from Max Brooks, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of World War Z.

China thought it would be a quick war, an easy war. But now, years later, as the insurgency on the streets of Los Angeles escalates but the propaganda never changes, a Chinese officer can’t keep silent any longer. Torn between loyalty to his country and loyalty to his troops, he writes a brutally honest—and possibly suicidal—letter home to unmask the truth.

Brooks combines his signature meticulous research with unforgettable characters in this landmark work of speculative fiction.]]>
50 Max Brooks 1662524161 Sue 5 3.56 2024 Tiger Chair
author: Max Brooks
name: Sue
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/25
date added: 2024/05/25
shelves:
review:
China has initiated WWIII. They have attacked the U S A. Evidently, this has been the beginning of their undoing. There is a chasm of cultural understanding. And the occupiers are just beginning to realize their mistake. Dissent from within may be their final undoing. This powerful short story reminded me of All Quiet on the Western Front.
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Winter Counts 50387703 An addictive and groundbreaking debut thriller set on a Native American reservation

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s own nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.

They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.

Winter Counts is a tour-de-force of crime fiction, a bracingly honest look at a long-ignored part of American life, and a twisting, turning story that’s as deeply rendered as it is thrilling.

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331 David Heska Wanbli Weiden 0062968963 Sue 0 currently-reading 4.00 2020 Winter Counts
author: David Heska Wanbli Weiden
name: Sue
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/20
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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Wandering Stars 174162974 A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK � The Pulitzer Prize-finalist and author of the breakout bestseller There There delivers a masterful follow-up to his already classic first novel. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous.

Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle,where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in There There—warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts—asking what it means to bethe children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of Tommy Orange’s monumental gifts.]]>
337 Tommy Orange 0593318269 Sue 0 currently-reading 3.91 2024 Wandering Stars
author: Tommy Orange
name: Sue
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/18
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another]]> 54369981 A “timely, informative, and fascinating� study of 8 inventions—and how they shaped our world—with “totally compelling� insights on little-known inventors throughout history (Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction) In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines 8 inventions and reveals how they shaped the human   � Clocks • Steel rails • Copper communication cables • Photographic film • Light bulbs • Hard disks • Scientific labware • Silicon chips   Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer. She describes how our pursuit of precision in timepieces changed how we sleep; how the railroad helped commercialize Christmas; how the necessary brevity of the telegram influenced Hemingway’s writing style; and how a young chemist exposed the use of Polaroid’s cameras to create passbooks to track black citizens in apartheid South Africa. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies. Ramirez shows not only how materials were shaped by inventors but also how those materials shaped culture, chronicling each invention and its consequences—intended and unintended. Filling in the gaps left by other books about technology, Ramirez showcases little-known inventors—particularly people of color and women—who had a significant impact but whose accomplishments have been hidden by mythmaking, bias, and convention. Doing so, she shows us the power of telling inclusive stories about technology. She also shows that innovation is universal—whether it's splicing beats with two turntables and a microphone or splicing genes with two test tubes and CRISPR.]]> 328 Ainissa Ramirez 0262358085 Sue 5 4.11 2020 The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another
author: Ainissa Ramirez
name: Sue
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/18
date added: 2024/05/18
shelves:
review:
This eminently readable book about science lets the humanness behind science shine through. From the woman who literally walked the time of day to people through to modern computers. I learned so much. Science belongs to the people.
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Cut and Thirst 209411839 Three women scheme to avenge an old friend in a darkly witty short story about loyalty, ambition, and delicious retribution by Margaret Atwood, the #1 bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Myrna, Leonie, and Chrissy meet every Thursday to sample fine cheeses, to reminisce about their former lives as professors, and lately, to muse about murder. Decades ago, a vicious cabal of male poets contrived—quite publicly and successfully—to undermine the writing career, confidence, and health of their dear friend Fern. Now, after Fern has taken a turn for the worse, her three old friends decide that it’s finally time to strike back—in secret, of course, since Fern is far too gentle to approve of a vendetta. All they need is a plan with suitably Shakespearean drama. But as sweet and satisfying as revenge can be, it’s not always so cut and dried.]]>
35 Margaret Atwood 1662523335 Sue 5 3.13 2024 Cut and Thirst
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Sue
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
shelves:
review:
This is such a funny short story. A harmless version of the Thursday Murder Club, sort of. A vignette of old friends trying on revenge for one of their own, with hilarious consequences. I just love Margaret Atwood.
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<![CDATA[A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters]]> 56688837
The story of our home planet and the organisms spread across its surface is far more spectacular than any Hollywood blockbuster, filled with enough plot twists to rival a bestselling thriller. But only recently have we begun to piece together the whole mystery into a coherent narrative. Drawing on his decades of field research and up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest science, renowned geologist Andrew H. Knoll delivers a rigorous yet accessible biography of Earth, charting our home planet's epic 4.6 billion-year story. Placing twenty first-century climate change in deep context, A Brief History of Earth is an indispensable look at where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Features original illustrations depicting Earth history and nearly 50 figures (maps, tables, photographs, graphs).]]>
272 Andrew H. Knoll 0062853937 Sue 5 4.28 2021 A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters
author: Andrew H. Knoll
name: Sue
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
shelves:
review:
This is a very clearly written narrative about our earth, our home, and what we need to do to preserve her. It lays out the prehistory and history of the changes our world had already experienced and spells out recurring cycles, but clearly shows that the human influence is accelerating the natural cycles of climate change. Is it already too late? We had better hope not.
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Extinction 126917757 384 Douglas Preston 1250909767 Sue 5 4.34 2024 Extinction
author: Douglas Preston
name: Sue
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/07
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves:
review:
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should, is the theme of this novel, or at least it should be. This is a horrible lesson in just how we humans can out clever ourselves. Agent Cash and Sheriff Colcord are flawed but sympathetic protagonists and face impossible situations with intelligence and compassion. This novel will scare the hell out of you and the afterword proves that truth may be stranger than fiction. Beware the human being. We have met the enemy and he is us.
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<![CDATA[A Skeleton in Bone Creek (A Nash Running Bear Mystery Book 1)]]> 75721312 288 Baer Charlton Sue 3 3.59 A Skeleton in Bone Creek (A Nash Running Bear Mystery Book 1)
author: Baer Charlton
name: Sue
average rating: 3.59
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/26
date added: 2024/04/26
shelves:
review:
This novel was a solid mystery but could have used some editing. There were times I lost the narrative, but it had a really heartfelt ending. I really like Nash Running Bear and her wife Mina. Lots of federal agencies, drugs, a serial killer, tribal lore, a dog named Powder (does not die), small town politics. There are more books in this series and I may try another.
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Orbital 123136728 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Sue 5 3.56 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Sue
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/25
date added: 2024/04/25
shelves:
review:
This is a difficult book to review. It is a novel and yet it reads more like a memoir. It is about everything and nothing. We share the inner and outer lives of 6 astronauts/cosmonauts as they orbit the planet in an international space station. The descriptions of the earth from space and the 16 ascending/descending orbits that make up a day and a night are beautiful and enigmatic and otherworldly and unimaginable and this novel is unlike any other I have read. It leaves you with a feeling of peace.
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