A Sharp Solitude, a novel of suspense by Christine Carbo
Available from Amazon for $12.99

Best Book I’ve Read All Year!

I picked up this book at random while perusing the library shelves and gave it little thought as I tossed the audio book into the front seat of my car.  It turned out to be the best book I’ve read all year.

In the Flathead region of Montana, a journalist has been murdered and FBI Agent Ali Paige is determined to find the killer. Unfortunately, the detectives with the County Sheriff’s Office have fingered Reeve Landon, the father of her child, as a person of interest, resulting in a conflict of interests that keeps her off the case. As the noose tightens, Ali must decide if she is willing to betray her partner’s trust in order to save the father of her child.  To avoid the law, Reeve escapes into the wilderness where he ultimately meets with disaster and needs to be rescued of the very agencies he’s been trying to aviod.  Continue reading →

Snow City, a novel by G. A. Kathryns  
Available on Amazon for $12.99

Hooked from the first sentence!

“Sometimes one has to dream very hard to keep oneself sane.”  From the moment I read the opening line in the prologue, I was hooked.  As the book progressed I wondered, who is really doing the dreaming?  What reality is she trying to escape?  Is this a futuristic dystopian SciFi novel or an exposé on mental illness?  And who is that dead girl?

Snow City is the creation of Echo Japonica, a reclusive guitarist, who strives to live in a perfect world.  A world that she created.  Unfortunately, the nightmares of reality spill into Echo’s dream of perfection for Snow City.  Those nightmares threaten to cause the entire system to collapse, taking Echo with it.  As Echo puts is, “Here [at the Blue Rose] I can be the simple, black-garbed and blonde-braided guitarist I was months ago, before gangsters and lost ghost have entered my life.  But gangsters and lost ghosts have entered my life . . .” Continue reading →

This Darkness Mine.  A novel by Mindy McGinnis.
Price: $17.99
Set for release October 10, 2017.

A blind date gone bad . . .

This Darkness Mine is the story of Sasha Stone, a highly disturbed over-achieving teen.  Mental illness and medical malady turns Sasha’s well organized life into chaos as she tumbles from grace.  She manipulates her parents, makes friends and enemies while waiting for a heart transplant, and manages to cost a social worker her job.  Absolutely no character growth occurs in the novel, so that in the end, Sasha is just as twisted as she was at the beginning of the book.

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A Culinary Journey through Time: A Cookery Book with Recipes from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages,
by Sabine Karg, Regula Steinhauser-Zimmermann, and Irmgard Bauer.
Price: 20 euros

A Culinary Journey through Time is a must have for adventurous cooks, European history enthusiast, and period writers.  The recipes in the book are based on actual archeological finds and analysis of food remains found in cook pots and the charred food remains found near hearths during archaeological excavations.  All recipes are marked by period: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman Times, Viking Age, and Middle Ages.  Also, recipes are color coded by season according to when ingredients are naturally available.

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The Vanishing Throne, a novel by Elizabeth May (Book 2 of The Falconer Trilogy.)
Set for release June 7, 2016.
Suggested Price; $17.99 USD.

The end is only another beginning.

The Falconer, Aileana Kameron, wakes up trapped on a cliff in a strange world with no idea how she got there.  Tortured repeatedly by her captor, Lonnrach, over daysweeksmonthsyears Aileana loses her memories and nearly loses hope.  Rescued by her lover and his sister, Aileana escapes her prison and returns to the human world only to find that Scotland has been decimated by war.  The few humans who survived now live in a Fairy city, hidden deep underground.  But life isn’t as safe or comfortable as it was before the war, nor has the war really ended.  The fae may have won, but Lonnarch will stop at nothing until the last Falconer is killed and in the process he may destroy them all.

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Beware That Girl, a novel by Teresa Toten.
Set for release May 31, 2016.
Suggested Price; $17.99 USD.

Beware That Girl is a rags to riches story that left me shaking my head.

Kate O’Brien, a pauper and con-artist with a brilliant mind, gains admission to Waverly, an elite all girl high school in New York City.  Despite the fact that it’s not a boarding school and all the characters are high school students, everyone’s parents are neatly tucked away on foreign business trips, living in London, deceased, or incarcerated, leaving the girls unattended to ruin their lives.  Oh, and all their parents let them drink, and so do all the restaurants in the city, actual laws be damned.

If the author doesn’t have the girls engaged in a cascade of bad decisions, then she’s busy dropping names of designer labels.  Tiffany’s, Doc Martins, Jimmy Choo, Chloé, Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Patek Philippe; please kill me now.  And don’t get me started about the name dropping of artists.  It served as a constant reminder that nearly all the characters in this book are shallow and unlikable.

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Blood in the Sand was a gripping read from beginning to end.

Philip Entwistle doesn’t believe in God and he certainly doesn’t believe in witches. But all that changes when the mild mannered history professor goes up for promotion and needs a Hail Mary to advance his career. Finding himself at the center of a trumped up sexual assault charge that nearly cost him his job, deliverance comes in the form of the occult as he researches the life of the famed English explorer, Sir Francis.

The book is full of delightful surprises, starting with the poem in the table of contents. Easy to read prose speaks to the heart of our humanity. Never shying away from difficult questions, the author takes the reader on a journey through time as Sir Francis’s experiences cause Philip to question his own doubts about religion, “After all, I am just a crazy man in the desert, hearing voices. Isn’t that how religions start?”  And then moves on to confront the stigmas of interracial marriages, “He has gone native, they will say and sneer. And I have. Gladly, with all my heart.”

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