The first half of the book was good, I was reading along and enjoying the story, but the second half, I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough! No Bad Deed by Heather Chavez will blow your mind. WHAT IS GOING ON?
The author did such a fantastic job of creating tension and really making you wonder who you can trust here. An innocent woman is caught up in something after she tries to help a woman one dark night. By trying to do a good deed, she gets involved in something she shouldn’t have. Or was it inevitable that she would be drawn to the woman in question?
Driving home one rainy night, Cassie Larkin sees a man and woman fighting on the side of the road. After calling 911, the veterinarian makes a split-second decision that will throw her sedate suburban life into chaos. Against all reason and advice, she gets out of her minivan and chases after the violent man, trying to help his victim. When Cassie physically tries to stop him, he suddenly turns on her and spits out an ominous threat: “Let her die, and I’ll let you live.”
A veterinarian trained to heal, Cassie can’t let the woman die. But while she’s examining the unconscious victim, the attacker steals her car. Now he has her name. Her address. And he knows about her children. Though they warn her to be careful, the police assure her that the perpetrator—a criminal named Carver Sweet—won’t get near her. Cassie isn’t so sure.
The next day—Halloween—her husband disappears while trick-or-treating with their six-year-old daughter. Are these disturbing events a coincidence or the beginning of a horrifying nightmare? Her husband has been growing distant—is it possible he’s become involved with another woman? Is Cassie’s confrontation with the road-side attacker connected to her husband’s disappearance? With all these questions swirling in her mind Cassie can trust no one, maybe not even herself. The only thing she knows for sure is that she can’t sit back while the people she loves are in danger.
As she desperately searches for answers, Cassie discovers that nothing is as random as it seems, and that she is more than willing to fight—to go the most terrifying extremes—to save her family and her marriage.
Honestly, the end of the book was such a crazy ride, I love it when an author knows exactly how to amp up the tension! This was a fantastic thriller.
Order here, will be out on Feb. 18!
Shuggie Bain is a novel about Hugh “Shuggie” Bain taking place in 80s/90s Scotland and it paints a bleak and gray picture of this era. I found it to be gripping and gritty, sad, well written and captivating.
It drew memories of Angelas Ashes, due to extreme poverty but there is always a thin, constant thread of hope. Of course, Angelas Ashes was a memoir and this is fiction though I could easily imagine everything happening in real life.
Here’s the plot:
Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher’s policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city’s notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie’s mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie’s guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good–her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor.
But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion’s share of each week’s benefits–all the family has to live on–on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs. Agnes’s older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is “no right,” a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her–even her beloved Shuggie.
Though its not a happy book, but it’s so well written (this is a DEBUT novelist!) that you will long remember it.
Published on Feb. 11! Pr-order here.
Right away you will be intrigued with Pretty As A Picture by Elizabeth Little. From page one this book offers a sinister vibe and a sense of dark foreboding. When Marissa a film editor, and her partner decide to parts ways, Marissa is left in need of a job and is willing to take anything. She ends up working on a creepy true crime film in a remote location. On set, there are rumors and strange things happen.
Is this the job of her dreams- or nightmares? All she wants is to do her job but of course, nothing can be easy…
Marissa Dahl, a shy but successful film editor, travels to a small island off the coast of Delaware to work with the legendary–and legendarily demanding–director Tony Rees on a feature film with a familiar logline. Some girl dies.
It’s not much to go on, but the specifics don’t concern Marissa. Whatever the script is, her job is the same. She’ll spend her days in the editing room, doing what she does best: turning pictures into stories. But she soon discovers that on this set, nothing is as it’s supposed to be–or as it seems. There are rumors of accidents and indiscretions, of burgeoning scandals and perilous schemes. Half the crew has been fired. The other half wants to quit. Even the actors have figured out something is wrong. And no one seems to know what happened to the editor she was hired to replace.
Then she meets the intrepid and incorrigible teenage girls who are determined to solve the real-life murder that is the movie’s central subject, and before long, Marissa is drawn into the investigation herself. The only problem is, the killer may still be on the loose. And he might not be finished.
This novel is from Marissa’s point of view as well as her ongoing interview with a podcast, I imagined My Favorite Murder as I read the podcast interviews.
For those who like a “who done it” thriller, this is for you!
Out on February 25! Order here.
If I didn’t have such a bad short term memory, if I wasn’t terrible at keeping a secret, and if I wasn’t so anxious and sensitive, I would have made an excellent spy! Thankfully I can live vicariously through this wonderful book, The Unexpected Spy by Tracy Walder.
I am very intrigued by the idea of being a spy and wow, this book offered us the opportunity to see what really goes on with working for the CIA and the FBI. Can you imagine the stress of that job? It takes a very special person to do that work.
Check it out:
When Tracy Walder enrolled at the University of Southern California, she never thought that one day she would offer her pink beanbag chair in the Delta Gamma house to a CIA recruiter, or that she’d fly to the Middle East under an alias identity.
The Unexpected Spy is the riveting story of Walder’s tenure in the CIA and, later, the FBI. In high-security, steel-walled rooms in Virginia, Walder watched al-Qaeda members with drones as President Bush looked over her shoulder and CIA Director George Tenet brought her donuts. She tracked chemical terrorists and searched the world for Weapons of Mass Destruction. She created a chemical terror chart that someone in the White House altered to convey information she did not have or believe, leading to the Iraq invasion. Driven to stop terrorism, Walder debriefed terrorists–men who swore they’d never speak to a woman–until they gave her leads. She followed trails through North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, shutting down multiple chemical attacks.
Then Walder moved to the FBI, where she worked in counterintelligence. In a single year, she helped take down one of the most notorious foreign spies ever caught on American soil. Catching the bad guys wasn’t a problem in the FBI, but rampant sexism was. Walder left the FBI to teach young women, encouraging them to find a place in the FBI, CIA, State Department or the Senate–and thus change the world.
I was nervously biting my nails while reading this book and have such respect for those who work in this arena. I’ve heard about women experiencing sexism in this job and Tracy writes about dealing with this. There are some redactions so be forewarned that areas are blacked out.
Out on February 25! Get it here.
In Georgia, the main character in The Antidote For Everything by Kimmery Martin, we have a smart urologist who is also witty and honest. I found this book to be an emotional read and one that stayed with me. Bravo to the author for tackling a sensitive subject.
Georgia Brown’s profession as a urologist requires her to interact with plenty of naked men, but her romantic prospects have fizzled. The most important person in her life is her friend Jonah Tsukada, a funny, empathetic family medicine doctor who works at the same hospital in Charleston, South Carolina and who has become as close as family to her.
Just after Georgia leaves the country for a medical conference, Jonah shares startling news. The hospital is instructing doctors to stop providing medical care for transgender patients. Jonah, a gay man, is the first to be fired when he refuses to abandon his patients. Stunned by the predicament of her closest friend, Georgia’s natural instinct is to fight alongside him. But when her attempts to address the situation result in incalculable harm, both Georgia and Jonah find themselves facing the loss of much more than their careers.
This book exemplifies why I love to read. I was able to get in someone else’s shoes and experience life in a different way than what I am used to. It opened my eyes and made me feel deep empathy. The Antidote for Everything is absolutely not to be missed.
I’m really excited to share Raised in Ruins by Tara Neilson with you. This is a beautifully written book about Tara’s childhood growing up in Alaska. Not just any run of the mill childhood however, Tara lived on a float house in a remote area with the threats of bears and wolves that were very real and very frightening.
She lived in a rugged and primitive home and her journey to school involved a boat even in the harshest weather.
Take a look:
In the 1980s the Neilson family moved out on a floathouse to the remote site of a former cannery in Southeast Alaska that had burned to the ground before statehood. They were miles away from any neighbors, surrounded on all sides by wolves, bears and other wildlife, entering the world of subsistence living in an uninviting land of dangerous weather and storms; yet the Neilsons were able to make themselves a home where few others would have found possible. Led by a jack-of-all-trades handyman for a father and a mother who was afraid of everything in the wilderness, Tara and her four siblings cleared the rough terrain to build atop the blackened, rusty ruins a new way of life that was completely their own.
From a young age, Tara learned that anything was possible, so long as one can imagine it and then make it happen. When given her mother’s impractical design of a six-bedroom house, her father picked up his tools and crafted it into a reality. To reach the closest community, they built a wooden boat sixteen feet long for the perilous journey on the water. The Alaska wilds required independence and self-sufficiency from the family, and in return it provided a natural landscape that inspired romantic passion and unlimited dreams. With endless forest on one side and the wide ocean on the other, Tara embraced the lonesomeness of the burned cannery ruins that she called home, and often wondered what it once was with its people inside, their stories, where they went, and what happened to them.
It astounds me that Tara not only managed to survive but thrive. I loved this glimpse into a vastly different childhood experience and learning how she grew up in the wilderness. If you enjoy memoirs as I do, this one is a must-read.
Out on April 7, pre-order here!
If you love to laugh (and if you don’t- why?) and enjoy an insider glimpse of Hollywood lives, get your hands on Been There, Married That by Gigi Levangie! She writes such fun books and I always love her humor.
SYNOPSIS:
Agnes Murphy Nash is the perfect Hollywood wife – she has the right friends, the right clothes, and even a side career of her own as a writer. Her husband Trevor is a bigshot producer, and from the outside it looks like they’re living a picture-perfect celebrity life, complete with tennis tournaments and lavish parties.
But the job description of a Hollywood wife doesn’t cover divorce, which is the way Agnes’ life is headed after she comes home one day to find her credit cards cancelled and the security passwords to get into her enormous LA home changed. Oh, and there’s a guy there whose job it is to tase her if she tries to enter…which she does.
Needless to say, Agnes’ husband is dead set on making sure she loses big time, but Agnes isn’t the type to just lie down and take it. In a world of fremenies and hot nannies, personal psychics and “skinny” jello shots, Agnes may be losing her husband, but could that mean getting her own life back?
Because I have really enjoyed every other book written by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, I didn’t need to know much before going into You Are Not Alone. Sometimes I just jump in, knowing very little about a book ahead of time.
This had me engaged from the very beginning when we first meet Shay. She doesn’t have a whole lot going for her so when she meets the glamorous sisters Jane and Cassandra, she is thrilled to be swept up into their lives. Shay is also big on numbers and statistics and writes these things down in her journal.
Are the sisters too good to be true? For Shay, who is lonely and in need of some friends, she is happy to be included in their world but soon, we the reader, get a vibe that maybe not all is great with the sisters. Could they be setting Shay up for something?
Here is the official synopsis:
You probably know someone like Shay Miller.
She wants to find love, but it eludes her.
She wants to be fulfilled, but her job is a dead end.
She wants to belong, but her life is so isolated.You probably don’t know anyone like the Moore sisters.
They have an unbreakable circle of friends.
They live the most glamorous life.
They always get what they desire.Shay thinks she wants their life.
But what they really want is hers.
This was a solid five-star read, it left me eager to get my hands on whatever these brilliant authors write next! This is a Book of the Month Club pick and if you belong to that subscription service, I highly recommend you grab You Are Not Alone.
Pre-Order it here, this book will be published on March 3!
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