![]() ![]() And then there is Grace Fulwell, a strange, uncommunicative young woman with plenty of her own secrets to hide. Botanist Anne Preece, on the other hand, sees it as a chance to indulge in a little deception of her own. Three women who, in some way or another, know the meaning of betrayal.For team leader Rachael Lambert the project is the perfect opportunity to rebuild her confidence after a double-betrayal by her lover and boss, Peter Kemp. "Ann Cleeves is one of my favorite mystery writers."-Louise Penny Three very different women come together to complete an environmental survey on the Northumberland countryside. From Ann Cleeves- New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of the Vera and Shetland series, both of which are hit TV shows-comes The Crow Trap, the first in the Vera Stanhope series. ![]()
0 Comments
![]() To Hazel, this is terrifying but intriguing. During one shift, Investigator Nikolai Kole’s alluring “Hello, Transcriber” fills her headphones-and Hazel’s drug-addled neighbor, Sam, writes a message in the frost on her office window with a severed finger that isn’t his. When she takes a night shift job as a transcriber at the police department, Hazel hopes to find fodder for the novel-in-progress she believes will help her escape Black Harbor at last. Her vivacious influencer/radio DJ sister, Elle, is no safe harbor: The two are often at odds, not least because Hazel feels bland by comparison. Their lives orbit around his drinking and hunting, and the terrible sex he demands every three days. ![]() They’ve been together since they were 16, but romance has long since departed. ![]() The 26-year-old has been in Black Harbor for two years as the trailing spouse of aquatic ecologist Tommy. ![]() People frequently leap from Forge Bridge, a spot that Hazel Greenlee finds herself drawn to time and again. ![]() “Welcome to Black Harbor, you’ll love it here!” said no one ever, as quickly becomes evident in Hannah Morrissey’s gritty gothic-noir thriller, Hello, Transcriber, which is set in a fictional Wisconsin city with the highest crime rate in the state and a rising suicide rate to match. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() You see, the Other had appeared again-jumping rope and singing its mournful song. When Cassie and Shawn did not return, Haley was suspicious and frightened. The same jump rope that had been around Alex's hands? Cassie unfortunately agreed to an illicit rendezvous with Shawn at midnight in the woods. The Other was jumping a red striped rope and singing. When her 15-year old sister Cassie led the older kids to try to contact Alex through a s ance, an apparition looking exactly like Haley suddenly appeared. How could he have slashed his wrists in the bathtub and then slit his own throat? And why did the police not recognize that a rope around his hands had been removed? Young, sensitive Haley had seen the rope and the "Other", but kept it to herself. GRISLY CONSEQUENCES Amanda was shocked and mystified when Alex apparently committed suicide. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Over half a century later, troubled film star Hadley Baxter is drawn inexorably to play the enigmatic pilot on screen. ![]() Now, as she is about to fulfil her greatest ambition, to circumnavigate the globe from pole to pole, Marian crash lands in a perilous wilderness of ice. But it is an obsession with flight that consumes her most. For fans of TAYLOR JENKINS REID, WILLIAM BOYD and ANN PATCHETTįrom her days as a wild child in prohibition America to the blitz and glitz of wartime London, from the rugged shores of New Zealand to a lonely iceshelf in Antarctica, Marian Graves is driven by a need for freedom and danger.ĭetermined to live an independent life, she resists the pull of her childhood sweetheart, and burns her way through a suite of glamorous lovers. 'A gripping historical adventure that feels sharp, fresh and modern'Ī soaring, breathtakingly ambitious novel that weaves together the astonishing lives of a 1950s vanished female aviator and the modern-day Hollywood actress who plays her on screen. SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022Ī Book of the Year for The Times, Telegraph, Daily Express, New Statesman, Good Housekeeping, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Time, Esquire, The Economist, Oprah Daily and Woman and Home ![]() ![]() An incredible novel encompassing the wide-ranging effects of class on love, relationships, and self-knowledge, Nobel Prize winner Ishiguro earned the Booker Prize for this work in 1989. When you reach the end, it really does seem as if you've lost a friend" (Beech). Bit by bit you learn to look for the real emotions running beneath the buffed surface of the prose.The Remains of the Day does that most wonderful thing a work of literature can do: it makes you feel you hold a human life in your hands. Ishiguro, instead, likes to give us unwitting narrators: speakers who remain trapped in self-preserving fictions, mysteries even to themselves. Stevens is chief of staff at an English stately home as the novel opens, in the summer of 1956, he is set to undertake a motoring trip to visit Miss Kenton, a housekeeper who left 20 years earlier to get married.Unreliable narrators are ten a penny in fiction. "A lack of restraint is perhaps the best response to Ishiguro's novel, which is the tale of a man so burdened by propriety that he lets the love of his life slip through his fingers. ![]() Fine copy of the book in like jacket jacket. ![]() ![]() ![]() But it’s fun, I promise.Īnd yet, as much as this book made me laugh at these parts of the world I recognized as being mocked, it also made me wish I recognized less of it. The lulls between bouts give readers a beat to think about all the ways they’ve been conditioned to enjoy such a story, by any number of America’s perversions: its narcotic televised pastimes, its singular talent for mass incarceration, its steady innovation in violence technology, its racial caste system, its eternal appetite for retribution. Even readers who acknowledge the brazen evil of the dystopian premise - these televised duels offer prisoners a path to freedom - might find themselves titillated by its depiction, which functions as both satire and straight-up sportswriting. Instead, it lures you in, as if to demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick. ![]() It is an act of protest, but it does not straightforwardly preach. Adjei-Brenyah is so good at writing fight scenes that our moral disgust never definitively stamps out the primitive thrill of reading them. To enjoy the action is to share in the guilt of the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside at the live-broadcast death matches between prison inmates. Should I be having this much fun? This is one queasy testament to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s talent: You cannot applaud his debut novel, “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” without getting blood on your hands. CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ![]() ![]() ![]() Ayla and Jondalar have decided to leave the Mamutoi and make the trip back to Jondalar's home. I always enjoy this series, and this book is my favorite. Fourth in the acclaimed Earth's Children(R) series … ( more)Ī reread of this book. ![]() But Ayla, with no memory of her own people, and Jondalar, with a hunger to return to his, are impelled by their own deep drives to continue their trek across the spectacular heart of an unmapped world to find that place they can both call home. Some will be intrigued by Ayla and Jondalar, with their many innovative skills, including the taming of wild horses and a wolf others will avoid them, threatened by what they cannot understand and some will threaten them. Their odyssey spans a beautiful but sparsely populated and treacherous continent, the windswept grasslands of Ice Age Europe, casting the pair among strangers. With her companion, Jondalar, Ayla sets out on her most dangerous and daring journey-away from the welcoming hearths of the Mammoth Hunters and into the unknown. Auel returns us to the earliest days of humankind and to the captivating adventures of the courageous woman called Ayla. ![]() ![]() In a brilliant novel as vividly authentic and entertaining as those that came before, Jean M. Auel's enthralling Earth's Children series has become a literary phenomenon, beloved by readers around the world. ![]() ![]() ![]() But he seeks to explain some of the worst excesses of the prisoners as rational means of survival in their caged environment. He does not condone the crimes committed outside prison. ![]() Burger's recent challenge to reform its prisons - in the spirit, it must be hoped, of Winston Churchill's earlier challenge: "The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of any country."īy such a test, America fails abysmally in the eyes of Abbott. His allegations, self-serving though they often are, ought to be part of the debate, as the United States takes up Chief Justice Warren E. His indictment of the treatment of prissoners by the authorities, and by each other, is as harsh, profane, and explicit as they come. ![]() Who could read Solzhenitsyn on the Soviet prison system and be struck by how lenientm it is? Jack Henry Abbott did - after spending most of his life since boyhood in American prisons, much of the time in solitary confinement. ![]() ![]() ![]() My Takeaway: Get yourself a Michael Larsen. So I read The Bride Test before this book and I ended up liking The Kiss Quotient much more! My Reactions:īringing the Heat: □□□□ – lots of sexy moments in this oneĬreativity: I love the Asperger’s representation and how Stella propositions Michael instead of the other way around (Pretty Woman reversal!) And the pattern that emerges will convince Stella that love is the best kind of logic… Soon, their no-nonsense partnership starts making a strange kind of sense. The Vietnamese and Swedish stunner can’t afford to turn down Stella’s offer, and agrees to help her check off all the boxes on her lesson plan - from foreplay to more-than-missionary position…īefore long, Stella not only learns to appreciate his kisses, but to crave all the other things he’s making her feel. Which is why she hires escort Michael Phan. Her conclusion: she needs lots of practice - with a professional. It doesn’t help that Stella has Asperger’s and French kissing reminds her of a shark getting its teeth cleaned by pilot fish. She comes up with algorithms to predict customer purchases - a job that has given her more money than she knows what to do with, and way less experience in the dating department than the average thirty-year-old. Stella Lane thinks math is the only thing that unites the universe. ![]() Categories: Contemporary, Romance, Adult, Autism, Fake Dating, Asian Rep ![]() ![]() ![]() But among the Saxons I was another Saxon, and among the Saxons I did not need another man's generosity. Yet pride grows in Uhtred: "I understood that among the Danes I was as important as my friends, and without friends I was just another landless, masterless warrior. His Celtic mistress foretells victory for Alfred, but Uhtred can scarcely believe that the bedraggled king, camped in isolated marshes with a handful of supporters, can repel the invaders and unite England. But when the Danes invade Wessex, Uhtred's loyalties are further divided. ![]() But Uhtred sees a better chance of recovering his lost estate if he finds a way to join the Danes, who raised him and whose simple life of "ale, women, sword, and reputation" he finds more congenial than Alfred's Christian piety and military caution. ![]() It tells the astonishing and true story of how Alfred, forced to become a fugitive in a few square miles of swampland, fights his enemies against overwhelming odds. Logically, Uhtred should now ally himself with Alfred, whose Wessex kingdom alone has successfully resisted Danish control. Bernard Cornwell's The Pale Horseman, like The Last Kingdom, is rooted in the real history of Anglo-Saxon England. 877, and the dispossessed Northumbrian noble Uhtred has just routed the Danes in a battle at Cynuit in southern England. Summary: Outnumbered Saxon forces continue battling Danish invaders in this sequel to The Last Kingdom. ![]() |