Books

Book and literature reviews. Interviews with authors. Book-related blog posts. A focus on fiction including suspense, thrillers and crime fiction. I love a good mystery.

Book review: Something He Did by SK Lynch

Book review: Something He Did by SK Lynch

3 min read

Something He Did by SK Lynch came at an interesting time in my life and gave me pause. Again and again. It’s centred around an incident (car accident involving a brief moment of road rage… well, rage masking a whole heap of other emotions) which changes the lives of those involved… with neither party knowing its effect on the other.

My mother has been in hospital for almost six weeks following a fall. It’s been stressful as she now needs to leave her home of 62 years and go into an aged care facility. Long story short… the stress has manifested in me via alternating anger or weepy tears. I’m becoming angry at the drop of a hat. I’ve sworn and treated people horribly, only to apologise later. I’m incredibly wound up, but it’s no excuse.
(Apologies for the long blurb… akin to someone telling their life story in a recipe blog before sharing the actual recipe!)

four-stars

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Book review: It Ends Here by Heidi Perks

Book review: It Ends Here by Heidi Perks

2 min read

It Ends Here by Heidi Perks is a twisty puzzle to-be-solved. It’s centred around a hostage situation in a coffee shop. Rather than understanding what the hostages are going through we spend time with their loved ones, as well as a police officer (DI Aaron Field) working the case. More interestingly though, our final narrator is – in fact – the person in the cafe holding the gun on fellow early morning coffee-lovers.

four-stars

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Book review: Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley

Book review: Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley

I don’t like historical fiction and that includes historical crime fiction. I do however, love all-things Agatha Christie and had a huge collection of her books bought from second-hand bookstores in the late 1980s or early 1990s. In recent years we’ve seen Sophie Hannah revisit Hercule Poirot and now Lucy Foley has resurrected Miss Marple. On checking old posts here – looking for one which references my absolute fave TV Miss Marple – I was reminded that in 2022 Harper Collins UK had twelve different authors re-imagine Dame Agatha’s Miss Marple so I wonder if that was some sort of ‘try-out’ before Foley got the guernsey. Who knows… either way, I think she does a good job at enacting the original.

three-half-stars

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Book review: The Reckoning by Vikki Petraitis

Book review: The Reckoning by Vikki Petraitis

I received The Reckoning by Vikki Petraitis for review a while ago and dived on in shortly after it arrived. It was only then I realised I’d not read the second in the series featuring Detective Antigone Pollard and the opening pages made it seem like I’d missed some juicy stuff. So I put it aside with the intention of getting hold of book two. I’d enjoyed book one and was reminded how much I liked Antigone the first time I was introduced… but then time passed and life happened (my mum broke her hip!) and all of my writing and reading disappeared into the ether. When I finally found time nothing else on my reading list tempted me, so I returned to Deception Bay despite having missed some of the more recent happenings.

four-stars

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Book review: Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason

Book review: Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason

I didn’t read the much-lauded and loved Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason but now that I’ve read her second book, Sophie, Standing There, I know I need to rectify that. While it may have been the plot (a writers festival sound technician fan-girling a well-known but potentially prickly author) that led me to purchase her latest release, Mason’s writing is stunning. There’s a depth or weightiness to her prose making them profound and poignant… all at once.

four-half-stars

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Book review: It’s Not Her by Mary Kubica

Book review: It’s Not Her by Mary Kubica

2 min read

I had a strange sense of deja-vu as I read It’s Not Her by Mary Kubica. The electronic version I received for review is published in late August, but I noted other versions were published earlier this year so I wondered if perhaps I’d read it then. Of course Goodreads is my go-to source of info, as my own mind is akin to a sieve, and it’s not listed in my ‘read’ books. Perhaps I read a similar book, featuring brutally murdered parents of three children (aged 17, 14 and 10), with the oldest girl (17yr old Reese) missing. Feared abducted… though also unfortunately with motivation to be the killer herself.

three-half-stars

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Book review: The One Who Walked Away by Karen Rose

Book review: The One Who Walked Away by Karen Rose

2 min read

The One Who Walked Away by Karen Rose reminded me why I used to be such a fan of romantic suspense. I read a stack of her books back in the early 2000s, along with Nora Roberts, Sandra Brown, Elizabeth Lowell, Jayne Ann Krentz and Suzanne Brockmann. Although I’m not a fan of straight romance (ie. solely romance, not non-gay romance!) romantic suspense kinda ticks a few boxes for me, those books becoming a comfort-read of sorts. This is marked as Mendocino #1 so presumably the start of a new linked series… our main characters here being a family lawyer turned bounty hunter and a small town detective.

four-stars

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Book reviews: Irish intrigue with Andrea Mara

Book reviews: Irish intrigue with Andrea Mara

3 min read

I recently received a little gift box, including two books… promising some Irish intrigue from Andrea Mara. Mara is new to me as an author and I’m always happy to find a new author with a good backlist. I’m interested to know more about them though as both books here are similarly themed around children going missing… as is All Her Fault,  a miniseries I recently watched, based on Mara’s book of the same name. I think the whole not having kids myself and not relating to parenting stuff means I’m less into books about that as it’s not a fear I’ve had to deal with IRL…

three-half-stars

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