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Reviews

Reviews

by Kelley Armstrong - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

May 20, 2019: Homicide detective Mallory Atkinson is in Edinburgh to be with her dying grandmother. While out on a jog one evening, Mallory hears a woman in distress. She is drawn to an alley, where she is attacked and loses consciousness. May 20, 1869: Housemaid Catriona Mitchell had been enjoying a half-day off, only to be discovered that night in a lane, where she had been strangled and left for dead...exactly 150 years before Mallory was strangled in the same spot. When Mallory wakes up in Catriona's body in 1869, she must put aside her shock and adjust quickly to the reality: life as a housemaid to an undertaker in Victorian Scotland.

by Chanel Cleeton - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Barcelona, 1964. Exiled from Cuba after the revolution, Isabel Perez goes to Spain in search of her missing sister, Beatriz. But it’s an unearthed piece of family history that ultimately transforms her life. Barcelona, 1936. Alicia Perez arrives in Barcelona after a difficult voyage from Cuba, her marriage in jeopardy and her young daughter, Isabel, in tow. When Cubans journey to Spain to join the International Brigades, Alicia’s past comes back to haunt her as she is unexpectedly reunited with the man who once held her heart. Alicia and Isabel’s lives intertwine, and the past and present collide, as a mother and daughter are forced to choose between their family’s expectations and following their hearts.

by Sarai Walker - Fiction, Gothic, Women's Fiction

Iris Chapel and her five elegant sisters, all of them heiresses to the Chapel firearms fortune, live cloistered in a lavish Victorian mansion. Neglected by both a distant, workaholic father and a mentally troubled mother --- who believes their home is haunted by the victims of Chapel weapons --- the sisters have grown up with only each other for company. They long to escape the eerie fairy tale of their childhood and move forward into the modern world, but for young women in 1950s Connecticut, the only way out is through marriage. Yet it soon becomes clear that for the Chapel sisters, marriage equals death. When the eldest sister walks down the aisle, tragedy strikes. This is just the beginning of a chain of disasters that will make each woman wonder if true love will kill her, too.

by Jennifer Weiner - Fiction, Women's Fiction

When her 22-year-old stepdaughter announces her engagement to her pandemic boyfriend, Sarah Danhauser is shocked. Headstrong Ruby has already set a date and spoken to her beloved safta, Sarah’s mother Veronica, about having the wedding at the family’s beach house in Cape Cod. Veronica is thrilled to be bringing the family together one last time before putting the big house on the market. But when the wedding day arrives, lovers are revealed as their true selves, misunderstandings take on a life of their own, and secrets come to light. There are confrontations and revelations that will touch each member of the extended family, ensuring that nothing will ever be the same.

by Mary Kay Andrews - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Hattie Kavanaugh went to work restoring homes for Kavanaugh & Son Restorations at 18, married the boss’s son at 20, and became a widow at 25. When Hattie falls head-over-heels for a money pit of a house, she’s determined to make it work. But disaster after disaster occurs, and her dream might cost Kavanaugh & Son their livelihood. When a slick Hollywood producer shows up in her hometown of Savannah, she gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: star in a beach house renovation reality show, cast against a male lead who may be a love interest or the ultimate antagonist. But during the demolition, evidence comes to light that points to the mysterious disappearance of a young wife and mother years before.

by Allison Brennan - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

A bomb explodes on a sunset charter cruise out of Friday Harbor at the height of tourist season and kills everyone on board. Now this fishing and boating community is in shock and asking who would commit such a heinous crime. Was the explosion an act of domestic terrorism, or was one of the dead the primary target? That is the first question Special Agent Matt Costa, Detective Kara Quinn and the rest of the FBI team need to answer, but they have few clues and no witnesses. Accused of putting profits before people after leaking fuel endangered an environmentally sensitive preserve, the West End Charter company may itself have been the target. As Matt and his team get closer to answers, they find one of their own caught in the crosshairs of a determined killer.

by Bonnie Garmus - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Humor

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. It’s the early 1960s, and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel Prize-nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with her mind. True chemistry results. But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later, Elizabeth finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show. Her unusual approach to cooking proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.

by Tara M. Stringfellow - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Ten-year-old Joan, her mother and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass --- only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected. As she grows up, Joan finds relief in her artwork. One of her subjects is their enigmatic neighbor Miss Dawn, who claims to know something about curses, and whose stories about the past help Joan see how her passion, imagination and relentless hope are, in fact, the continuation of a long matrilineal tradition.

by Blair Fell - Fiction, Romance

Arlo Dilly is young, handsome and eager to meet the right girl. He also happens to be DeafBlind, a Jehovah’s Witness and under the strict guardianship of his controlling uncle. His chances of finding someone to love seem slim to none. And yet, it happened once before. Many years ago, at a boarding school for the Deaf, Arlo met the love of his life --- a mysterious girl with onyx eyes and beautifully expressive hands that told him the most amazing stories. But tragedy struck, and their love was lost forever. Or so Arlo thought. After years trying to heal his broken heart, Arlo is assigned a college writing assignment that unlocks buried memories of his past. Soon he wonders if the hearing people he was supposed to trust have been lying to him all along, and if his lost love might be found again.

by Jess Montgomery - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery

Sheriff Lily Ross and her family look forward to the opening of an amusement park created by Chalmer Fitzpatrick. When Lily is alerted to the possible drowning of a girl, she discovers schisms going back several generations, in an ongoing dispute over the land on which Fitzpatrick has built the park. Lily's family life is soon rattled with the revelation that before he died, her brother had a daughter, Esme, and arrangements have been made for Esme to immigrate to the U.S. to live with them. But Esme never makes it to Kinship, and soon Lily discovers that she has been kidnapped. A young woman is indeed found murdered in the fishing pond on Fitzpatrick's property, at the same time that a baby is left on his doorstep. As the two crimes interweave, Lily must confront the question of what makes family.