In Audrey Ingram’s The River Runs South, Camille Taylor has worked for and created a seemingly perfect life: a job she likes, a daughter she cherishes, and a husband she loves. Unexpectedly, her husband dies and Camille’s life is thrown into a tailspin. Hoping to grieve and then recover, she and her daughter retreat to the safety of her parents’ home in Mobile Bay, Alabama. Camille’s back home . . . finally.

As she slowly recovers from tragedy, Camille meets Mack Phillips, a fisherman and environmentalist. She learns Phillips is suing the company affiliated with her dad for run-off damage to the waters of the bay. Suddenly, Camille’s thrown into the middle of a fight between her father and Mack, between corporate greed and the public good, and between right and wrong. How she navigates those fights makes for a compelling […]

Reading a Nicholas Sparks novel is like booking a room at a Hampton Inn–you pretty much know what you’re going to get. In a typical Sparks book, boy meets girl, boy and girl fall for each other, the relationship comes up against headwinds, and it all works out by the end of the story. Not so much with Dreamland, however.

Colby Mills, the male protagonist, is a farmer in Washington, NC, but we find him on St. Pete Beach, Florida at the novel’s beginning. Colby, who’s also a wannabe musician, has a several-weeks gig on the beach. There he meets Morgan Lee, a new college graduate who also writes and sings songs and has plans to make it professionally in Nashville. And, yes, boy meets girl–Colby and Morgan have a fleeting encounter that […]

Ruth Ware’s Zero Days is her latest mystery novel, and it’s another five-star hit for this New York Times bestselling author. Diving into it, you’ll quickly learn why Ware is touted as today’s Agatha Christie.

Gabe and Jacintha (“Jack”) are a married couple who work together. You’ll think they’re up to no good from the very beginning, but quickly learn they are penetration experts. Companies hire them to physically break into their offices and hack their technology, revealing vulnerabilities in both physical and tech firewalls.

Returning home from her most recent job, Jack finds Gabe in a shocking situation that ignites the arc of the entire story. Ware takes the reader through twists and turns as Jack begins a mission to discover the truth behind the sudden change in her marital relationship. I can’t […]

A Novel Proposal, best-selling author Denise Hunter’s latest release, is a fun beach read. In fact, most of the novel’s action takes place on a South Carolina beach, where the writer Sadie Goodwin has retreated to pen her first romance novel. While staying at her best friend’s mom’s beach house, she encounters a grumpy neighbor and the challenge of switching from western novels to the romance genre.

After putting out a neighborhood library box, she comes across a book hiding a very secret treasure. That sends Sadie on a mission to find its owner and, along the way, gives her plenty of material for her manuscript’s love story. Her winsome personality also sparks a change in her neighbor, and plays a key role in the book.

The book is light and fun, with plenty […]

Notwithstanding the older release of this book, it deserves a review. If you were a fan of Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill, you’ll love this second of a trilogy with young lawyer Jake Brigance as the protagonist. (The third novel is A Time for Mercy, published in 2020.) After his big but controversial win in the Hailey trial, Jake and his wife, Carla, have suffered through harassment and arson, and are now living in a rental after their house was burned to the ground. Thinking the Hailey verdict would set him on the path to legal infamy, he has actually struggled to find cases, few of which have been challenging. And then, everything changes.

A wealthy old white man, Seth Hubbard, takes his own life once he knows he’s in the final stage of a terminal illness. In a […]