Book Reviews2022-05-01T17:16:16+00:00

The Crash (Freida McFadden; 2025)

Full disclosure: Freida McFadden has become one of my favorite secular suspense-thriller authors. She never fails to entertain, and she writes in a straightforward way that makes you feel the characters are talking to you.
With her new suspense thriller, The Crash, she’s done it again. Tegan is a single woman in her eighth month of pregnancy, who makes an ill-advised decision to leave town to visit her brother, Dennis. After surviving a snowy crash, she’s rescued by a couple who live off the grid. Tegan assumes she’s been rescued, but could she be wrong? Could she be imprisoned? And, even worse, with a severe injury? The protagonist, Tegan, and the cast of characters–Dennis, her friend Jackson, her “rescuers,” Polly and Hank, and a little girl, Sadie– evoke visceral responses to their personalities and motives.
McFadden takes the reader down a road […]

By Any Other Name (Jodi Picoult; 2024)

Melina Green is a playwright struggling to gain purchase in an industry dominated by men. Similarly, her distant relative from the Elizabethan era, Emilia Bassano, is a struggling writer unable to have her work taken seriously by the men who dominate the theater industry. Two women with similar problems, separated by almost four hundred fifty years.
Jodi Picoult is at her best in this fascinating novel that cleverly intertwines two predicaments separated by so many years. She switches from one timeline to the other, back and forth, as she weaves a tale of how both of these women made ill-advised choices regarding how to get their “foot in the door” of a male-dominated industry.
No spoiler alert, but for any of you who are Shakespeare lovers, some interesting questions are raised about his career […]

Camino Ghosts (John Grisham; 2024)

Camino Ghosts is the concluding novel in John Grisham’s Camino trilogy: Camino Island, Camino Island, and Camino Ghosts. Mercer Mann, a college professor and rapidly-emerging, successful novelist, returns to Camino Island to marry the man of her dreams and glean inspiration for a new manuscript. Of course, she encounters Bruce Cable, proprietor of Bay Books and former underworld dealer in priceless manuscripts, with whom she has a strong professional relationship and once had a brief romantic fling.

While desperately looking for a story line for her next novel, she encounters Dark Isle, a sliver of land off the coast of Florida, whose last inhabitant is Lovely Jackson–also the sole owner of the island, in her opinion. When Lovely goes up against a huge land developer, Mercer has her story … and her fight.

You’ll enjoy the twists and turns this book takes, […]

When Cicadas Cry (Caroline Cleveland; 2024)

Zach Stander, a down-and-out attorney, is called by Eli Jenkins, a free-clinic Black client of his, to represent Eli’s nephew Sam in a murder case. Sam was found covered in blood at the scene of Jessica Gadsden’s murder in a country church on Cicada Road, outside Walterboro, South Carolina. A Black man found at the murder scene of a young white woman in the deep South brings to mind John Grisham’s A Time to Kill and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

To complicate matters, Jessica’s father Buford Gadsden, a powerful and somewhat corrupt local yokel, is seething with anger and thirsting for revenge for his daughter’s murder. This is Stander’s opportunity to either win a case that will restore his reputation or risk losing, sending him farther down the road to destitution or possibly death. He enlists the aid of […]

The Lost Bookshop (Evie Woods; 2023)

Join Opaline, Henry, and Martha on a magical journey that will take you places you hadn’t anticipated. Is the bookshop on a quiet street in Dublin actually there …  or not? If not, where did it go? This novel intertwines mystery, romance, and magical thinking in a delightful way that will take the reader on a somewhat different reading experience.

Evie Woods is an Irish author who has scored another bestseller with this novel, first published in 2023. For us Americans, it’s always a treat to read the writing of an international writer, as their style differs somewhat from what we typically expect. The Lost Bookshop is no exception.

You will enjoy this delightful novel!

Reviewed July 2024

The Crash (Freida McFadden; 2025)

Full disclosure: Freida McFadden has become one of my favorite secular suspense-thriller authors. She never fails to entertain, and she writes in a straightforward way that makes you feel the characters are talking to you.
With her new suspense thriller, The Crash, she’s done it again. Tegan is a single woman in her eighth month of pregnancy, who makes an ill-advised decision to leave town to visit her brother, Dennis. After surviving a snowy crash, she’s rescued by a couple who live off the grid. Tegan assumes she’s been rescued, but could she be wrong? Could she be imprisoned? And, even worse, with a severe injury? The protagonist, Tegan, and the cast of characters–Dennis, her friend Jackson, her “rescuers,” Polly and Hank, and a little girl, Sadie– evoke visceral responses to their personalities and motives.
McFadden takes the reader down a road […]

By Any Other Name (Jodi Picoult; 2024)

Melina Green is a playwright struggling to gain purchase in an industry dominated by men. Similarly, her distant relative from the Elizabethan era, Emilia Bassano, is a struggling writer unable to have her work taken seriously by the men who dominate the theater industry. Two women with similar problems, separated by almost four hundred fifty years.
Jodi Picoult is at her best in this fascinating novel that cleverly intertwines two predicaments separated by so many years. She switches from one timeline to the other, back and forth, as she weaves a tale of how both of these women made ill-advised choices regarding how to get their “foot in the door” of a male-dominated industry.
No spoiler alert, but for any of you who are Shakespeare lovers, some interesting questions are raised about his career […]

Camino Ghosts (John Grisham; 2024)

Camino Ghosts is the concluding novel in John Grisham’s Camino trilogy: Camino Island, Camino Island, and Camino Ghosts. Mercer Mann, a college professor and rapidly-emerging, successful novelist, returns to Camino Island to marry the man of her dreams and glean inspiration for a new manuscript. Of course, she encounters Bruce Cable, proprietor of Bay Books and former underworld dealer in priceless manuscripts, with whom she has a strong professional relationship and once had a brief romantic fling.

While desperately looking for a story line for her next novel, she encounters Dark Isle, a sliver of land off the coast of Florida, whose last inhabitant is Lovely Jackson–also the sole owner of the island, in her opinion. When Lovely goes up against a huge land developer, Mercer has her story … and her fight.

You’ll enjoy the twists and turns this book takes, […]

When Cicadas Cry (Caroline Cleveland; 2024)

Zach Stander, a down-and-out attorney, is called by Eli Jenkins, a free-clinic Black client of his, to represent Eli’s nephew Sam in a murder case. Sam was found covered in blood at the scene of Jessica Gadsden’s murder in a country church on Cicada Road, outside Walterboro, South Carolina. A Black man found at the murder scene of a young white woman in the deep South brings to mind John Grisham’s A Time to Kill and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

To complicate matters, Jessica’s father Buford Gadsden, a powerful and somewhat corrupt local yokel, is seething with anger and thirsting for revenge for his daughter’s murder. This is Stander’s opportunity to either win a case that will restore his reputation or risk losing, sending him farther down the road to destitution or possibly death. He enlists the aid of […]

The Lost Bookshop (Evie Woods; 2023)

Join Opaline, Henry, and Martha on a magical journey that will take you places you hadn’t anticipated. Is the bookshop on a quiet street in Dublin actually there …  or not? If not, where did it go? This novel intertwines mystery, romance, and magical thinking in a delightful way that will take the reader on a somewhat different reading experience.

Evie Woods is an Irish author who has scored another bestseller with this novel, first published in 2023. For us Americans, it’s always a treat to read the writing of an international writer, as their style differs somewhat from what we typically expect. The Lost Bookshop is no exception.

You will enjoy this delightful novel!

Reviewed July 2024

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