This is the first (and most likely the last) James Patterson book I’ll ever read. It’s not that I didn’t like it, in fact I enjoyed it, it was highly entertaining and I flew through the pages. Still, I finished the book and thought, what was the point of this? The 19th Christmas by James…
Although it’s difficult to write in the voice of a child, I’ve had pretty good luck finding authors that do it well. This is why I had such high hopes for All The Lost Things by Michelle Sacks, a work of fiction about a Dad abducting his 7-year-old daughter Dolly. It seemed like it would…
If you read Nicole Lundrigan’s last book The Substitute, you’ll have a good idea of what you’re in for in her latest novel, Hideaway. Both books deal with traumatized children, neglectful parents, and big family secrets. These sound like heavy topics, and they are, but the unsettling atmosphere that made The Substitute such an enticing…
I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m getting sick and tired of the unreliable female narrator trope in thrillers these days. This cliché is so overused that I can feel my temper rising as I make my way through a novel that uses this technique to generate cheap twists. Thankfully, I am so happy to…
I originally read A Good Enough Mother by Bev Thomas with the intentions of including it in a mother’s day book recommendations wrap-up. I thought it would be perfectly suited for this purpose; it has the word “mother” in the title and it’s all about a woman who’s a mom trying to be ‘good enough’…
When Transcription by Kate Atkinson came out in September 2018, there was lots of buzz around it. Many said this was Atkinson’s best book to date, and it has been on a bunch of ‘best of 2018’ lists. Despite this hoopla (and I use the word ‘despite’ on purpose, because book buzz tends to be…
This is the first book I’ve ever read that has been published by Amazon Crossing. After a bit of research googling I’ve discovered that Amazon Crossing is the translation arm of Amazon Publishing, so it’s not self-publishing, but you can propose a book to be translated on their website. Regardless, I was fairly happy with…
I’m beginning to think I’m the only one who hasn’t heard of Steve Cavanagh. This book, Thirteen has been tucked into my TBR shelf for far too long, as I had scanned the premise when I received it last year then promptly forgot about it, even though I was intrigued at the time. Over the…
There are so many domestic thrillers lurking around my bookshelves at the moment, it’s hard to be truly impressed by anything in the genre at this point because everything seems to be ‘done’. So authors are going to greater and greater lengths to surprise the reader, or put a unique twist on a story that…
There’s something about mysteries that take place on a mode of transportation that seem to get people excited. This is most likely due to the fact that when there is a murder (as there inevitably is in most mysteries), the suspect list is quite limited, making the capture of the criminal imminent. Most recently I…
Since I started this blog in 2013, I’ve made a few observations about the book blogging community as a whole. They are as follows: most of us love drinking tea while reading cats are our favourite animal we love holidays romance and YA bloggers are easy to find and are very passionate about these genres…
It all starts with a little lab rat named ‘Buddy’. And this little rat appears in very unusual places, including a few pages of Jay Hosking‘s debut novel Three Years with the Rat. But what’s shocking about this rat is the fact that he disappears for a few weeks at a time, but then appears…
