Weekly Reading Thread: April 23-29

I read the second in The Bellinger sister series Hook, Line and Sinker by Tessa Bailey.
This book was about Hannah (Piper's sister) and Fox (Brendan's shipmate).
Hannah is feisty, hard working, vinyl record lover and Fox is handsome, hard working and shy of settling down. Their banter, attraction to each other and loyalty to their town, family and friends makes this book wonderful along with the steam which there is plenty of.

I've had some medical issues this week and been off work and on rest, so lots of reading time for me ( for reading...but  for body parts wearing out!)

First up this week was If I Let You Go by Charlotte Levin.
Set in the UK about middle aged Janet, a cleaner who is in an unhappy marriage and still mourning the loss of her young daughter in an accident several years earlier.
Then in a strange sequence of events she finds herself involved in a train accident where she saves the daughter of a celebrity couple.
I thought this was going to be one of those heart-warming books…but I was wrong. At first I felt sorry for Janet, but then I ended up disliking her. Then I realised that none of the characters were likeable.
I only gave this 2 stars and isn’t one I’d recommend.

Ah, but the next one hit the sweet spot…everyone needs to read about Vera Wong!
Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
Vera is a widowed 60yo Chinese lady who owns a dilapidated tea house that no longer has many customers. Then one day she finds a dead body in her shop. Vera knows she’s going to have to help the police find the killer – so she draws an outline of the body with a sharpie before they get there (and goes through his pockets with her dishwashing gloves on!)
After the police leave people start turning up at her shop to ask about the murdered man, a young male reporter, a girl with a podcast and his wife & his twin brother…Vera knows one of these must be the killer (because killers always go back to the scene of the crime), so she decides to get to know them all to find out which one of them did it.
I loved this book, it made me laugh out loud and everyone will love Vera!
5 stars


Stone Maidens by Lloyd Devereux Richards.
I heard about this book a few weeks ago – it’s quite a story in its own right.
The author started writing this book in 1998 and finished it 12 years ago, and it was turned down 80 times before finally being published, but even then it didn’t get much attention. Then in in Feb this year his daughter made a TikTok about it…which went viral and got millions of views and one week later it was a best seller on Amazon.
How can you resist that backstory?




The book is about Christine Prusik a forensic anthropologist at the FBI who starts to investigate a series of murders of young girls who are found near rivers with their internal organs missing and a stone lodged in their throats.

This is a good serial killer/thriller book and while you have suspend belief for a few parts (like all of these types of books) it definitely kept me reading and interested. Even though it’s about a serial killer there’s not too much violence or gore, no detailed descriptions etc.
The author has been working on a sequel for the last 4 years which I assume will now be published, and I’ll definitely read that too, and there’s apparently a film version in the works too (and it’s a prefect book to turn into a movie).
I gave this 4 stars and would recommend it.

and finally
Stranded by Sarah Goodwin
Maddie signs up to do a year long reality TV show with 7 other people where they are stranded on a deserted island. They have no contact with the outside world.
A few months later there's in fighting and divisions within the group - this is Gilligan's island on acid!
It's a survival thriller, and it kept me reading.
It's a solid entertaining 3.5 stars but I rated it 3 on GR.

I'm listening to Mad Honey by Jody Picoult. I'm about half way through. It's good and I'm interested to see how it all plays out. Learning a lot about honey bees too!

3 Stars for the Magician's Daughter by HG Parry. in 1912, magic has all but disappeared from the world. Biddy (Bridget) is on the hidden island of Hy-Brasil (off the coast of Ireland) with Rowan and his familiar Hutchincroft the rabbit. When Rowan doesnt return one night, Biddy is able to connect to him in a dream, and learn where he's been going. While the premise was interesting, the story was just too slow.

Now, I am reading Pandora by Susan Stokes-Chapman. Taking place in London, 1799, i believe it is a retelling of the Greek Myth.

I finished Wonderland by Jennifer Hillier 4.5 / 5 stars from me.
Welcome to Wonderland. By day, it's a magical place boasting a certain retro charm. Excited children, hands sticky with cotton candy, run frenetically from the Giant Octopus ride to the Spinning Sombrero, while the tinkling carnival music of the giant Wonder Wheel--the oldest Ferris wheel in the Pacific Northwest--fills the air. But before daybreak, an eerie feeling descends. Maybe it's the Clown Museum, home to creepy wax replicas of movie stars and a massive collection of antique porcelain dolls. Or maybe it's the terrifyingly real House of Horrors. Or...maybe it's the dead, decaying body left in the midway for all the Wonder Workers to see.

Vanessa Castro's first day as deputy police chief of Seaside, Washington, is off to a bang. The unidentifiable homeless man rotting inside the tiny town's main tourist attraction is strange enough, but now a teenage employee--whose defiant picture at the top of the Wonder Wheel went viral that same morning--is missing. As the clues in those seemingly disparate crimes lead her down a mysterious shared path of missing persons that goes back decades, she suspects the seedy rumors surrounding the amusement park's dark history might just be true. She moved to Seaside to escape her own scandalous past, but has she brought her family to the center of an insidious killer's twisted game?

I finished Miracle Creek and it is a miracle that I did finish it. No likeable characters, too many characters, too much switching timelines.

How far will you go to protect your family? Will you keep their secrets? Ignore their lies?

In a small town in Virginia, a group of people know each other because they’re part of a special treatment center, a hyperbaric chamber that may cure a range of conditions from infertility to autism. But then the chamber explodes, two people die, and it’s clear the explosion wasn’t an accident.

I was reading The Soulmate, but am having a hard time getting into it. I may just skip it and read something else as I have a few books.

I am so bad at remembering what I just read. I read one regular book, one kindle book and an audio book, so I can't keep the titles straight! So that's why I haven't posted my books lately. I really need to write them down or something, haha!

Last week we went gothic.

I read The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz.  If you were a Lois Duncan fan, the book atmospherics and setup will ring a bell -- a number of twenty-something writers are called to a retreat in an historic home with a fabled writer, and things aren't what they seem.  I was really into the setup for this book -- among other things, the narrator is stuck at the retreat with the best friend with whom she had a dramatic falling-out -- but the characters weren't particularly well-thought-out and about 3/4 of the way in it went from mystery to horror as a genre.  Oh well.

I also read 48 Clues into the Disappearance of my Sister, by Joyce Carol Oates.  Also set in upstate NY, this is a relatively short JCO work that I would consider a rumination on the missing-girl-industrial complex.  The narrator's sister went missing in the early 1990s, and it's ambiguous throughout both what happened and how much the sister knows.  I enjoyed this, although I don't want to give away the ending by saying why I found the ending a little disappointing.

I am still on a Freida McFadden kick! 

I really enjoyed Want to Know a Secret 

My latest of hers that I have finished are...

The Perfect Son

The Surrogate

The Locked Door

I'd never heard of this so I looked it up.
I'll admit it piqued my interest BUT when I saw it was about two queer women...written by a man, it became a hard pass for me.