March & April 2025
4 books for March and 3 books for April. The 3 books from March were borrowed from my local library. From all the years living in this small town, I finally decided to get a Library Card. It took me long enough, HAH! I have a Library card from another town where we lived at when we first moved to North Carolina after we left the military yearsssss ago. My children and I utitlized that card for sure then we moved to another town and kinda didn’t bother getting one from where we’re at now. Just been enjoying buying my own and the Amazon Kindle from my tablet. So anyway, how’s your reading so far?
“Touch & Go” by Lisa Gardner. This is book 2 of the Tessa Leoni series. I’ve read book 1 – Love You More – yearssss ago. While this is book 2 it’s very much a standalone story so no worries if you haven’t read the 1st one. 5⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
What happens when a whole family of 3 gets kidnapped? It’s a whodunnit story. It’ll keep you guessing with how the storyline takes you through it but more like trying to confuse you coz if you trust your gut instinct, you might have an inkling who, or maybe not. 🙆🏻♀️🧐🤔
This is my family: Vanished without a trace…
Justin and Libby Denbe have the kind of life that looks good in the pages of a glossy magazine. A beautiful fifteen-year old daughter, Ashlyn. A gorgeous brownstone on a tree-lined street in Boston’s elite Back Bay neighborhood. A great marriage, admired by friends and family. A perfect life.
This is what I know: Pain has a flavor…
When investigator Tessa Leoni arrives at the crime scene in the Denbes’ home, she finds scuff marks on the floor and Taser confetti in the foyer. The family appears to have been abducted, with only a pile of their most personal possessions remaining behind. No witnesses, no ransom demands, no motive. Just an entire family, vanished without a trace.(GOODREADS)
“A Simple Murder” by Eleanor Kuhns. 4⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Set in 1795, #asimplemurder is a historical mystery with plenty of twists. It delves onto the Shakers(accdg to Wiki, “a millenarian restorationist Christian sect founded c. 1747 in England and then organized in the United States in the 1780s.“) and that time period which is quite interesting. The twists kinda felt too long at some point but I still enjoyed the book. 👍🏻 This is actually part of a series so I might read the other books if they’re available at my local Library.
Five years ago, while William Rees was still recovering from his stint as a Revolutionary War soldier, his beloved wife died. Devastated, Will Rees left his son, David, in his sister’s care, fled his Maine farm, and struck out for a tough but emotionally empty life as a traveling weaver. Now, upon returning unexpectedly to his farm, Rees discovers that David has been treated like a serf for years and finally ran away to join a secluded religious sect–the Shakers.
Overwhelmed by guilt and hoping to reconcile with his son, Rees immediately follows David to the Shaker community. But when a young Shaker woman is brutally murdered shortly after Rees’s arrival, Rees finds himself launched into a complicated investigation where the bodies keep multiplying, a tangled web of family connections casts suspicion on everyone, and the beautiful woman on the edge of the Shaker community might be hiding troubling ties to the victims. (GOODREADS)
“The One & Only” by Emily Giffin. 2 ⭐️⭐️
😔It pains me to rate this book so low because Emily Giffin is one of my favorite authors. I just could not shake off the cringe-fest and how pretty much all of the characters are so unlikeable. I just can’t get past Shea’s infatuation with her bestfriend’s father, recently widowed at that, who practically raised her too, who greets her “Hey, Girl.” And all the morality & injustices blah blah and then to conveniently forget everything because of “loyalty” and oh it’s Coach Carr. UGH!
If you are a football fan then you might enjoy the premise. Trigger Warnings, just FYI!
Thirty-three-year-old Shea Rigsby has spent her entire life in Walker, Texas–a small college town that lives and dies by football. Raised alongside her best friend Lucy, the daughter of Walker’s legendary head coach Clive Carr, Shea was too devoted to her hometown team to leave. Instead she stayed in Walker for college, even taking a job in the university athletic department after graduation, where she has remained for more than a decade. But when an unexpected tragedy strikes the tight-knit Walker community, Shea’s comfortable world is upended, and she begins to wonder if the life she’s chosen is really enough for her. As she gives up her safety net to set out on an unexpected path, Shea discovers unsettling truths about the people and things she has always trusted most–and is forced to confront her deepest desires, fears, and secrets. (GOODREADS)
“The Blue Hour” by Paula Hawkins – 4⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Eris, an island with only one house, one inhabitant, one way out. Unreachable from the Scottish mainland for twelve hours each day.
Once home to Vanessa. A famous artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared twenty years ago.
Now home to Grace. A solitary creature of the tides, content in her own isolation.
But when a shocking discovery is made in an art gallery far away in London, a visitor comes calling.
And the secrets of Eris threaten to emerge . . . (GOODREADS)
“His Hidden Wife” by Wendy Clarke – 5⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The first time you see them, out for an evening walk on the cliffs, you’ll think they’re the perfect family. You’ll see a wife who looks so happy, strolling peacefully beside her husband in his dark winter coat, holding her daughter’s hand. But you have no idea what’s really happening in their house…
If you come a little closer you might hear the way the man speaks to his wife.
You might notice that the woman doesn’t have any close friends. That sometimes her husband doesn’t want her to leave the house. You might wonder if that’s a scar her beautiful daughter is hiding on her neck.
When you read the local newspaper and hear the news that the wife has fallen from the cliffs, you’ll question whether it was really an accident at all. (GOODREADS)
“The Nothing Man” by Catherine Ryan Howard. 5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
WOWOWOW! A crime-mystery novel within a crime-mystery novel. Perfectly written to not confuse the readers with details from the “present” time to the “book” within. So captivating and so visceral that my brain was restless when I try to go to sleep. I keep wanting to finish it right away but I couldn’t ‘coz, yah know, I needed sleep 🤨😴. Pick it up when you get a chance. 👍🏻👍🏻
I was the girl who survived the Nothing Man.
Now I am the woman who is going to catch him…
You’ve just read the opening pages of The Nothing Man, the true crime memoir Eve Black has written about her obsessive search for the man who killed her family nearly two decades ago.
Supermarket security guard Jim Doyle is reading it too, and with each turn of the page his rage grows. Because Jim was – is – the Nothing Man.
The more Jim reads, the more he realises how dangerously close Eve is getting to the truth. He knows she won’t give up until she finds him. He has no choice but to stop her first…(GOODREADS)
“56 Days” by Catherine Ryan Howard. I didn’t like this as much as I liked “The Nothing Man” from the same author. It felt slow and the ending was a bit underwhelming. 3⭐️⭐️⭐️
No one knew they’d moved in together. Now one of them is dead. Could this be the perfect murder?
56 DAYS AGO
Ciara and Oliver meet in a supermarket queue in Dublin the same week Covid-19 reaches Irish shores.
35 DAYS AGO
When lockdown threatens to keep them apart, Oliver suggests that Ciara move in with him. She sees a unique opportunity for a new relationship to flourish without the pressure of scrutiny of family and friends. He sees it as an opportunity to hide who – and what – he really is. (GOODREADS)
