Almost a month since my last “It’s Monday” post. 🙁
While I’m was waiting for my hold on Lethal White by Robert Galbraith to come on OverDrive through my library, I started listening to a crime fiction series by Sarah Graves on audio — the Lizzie Snow books — starting with Winter at the Door.
Maine author Sarah Graves writes the cozy Home Repair Is Homicide series, so the Lizzie Snow police procedurals are a departure for her. Much darker than a cozy, Winter at the Door features a tough, female Boston police detective who takes a job in Bearkill, Maine. She has her own reasons for relocating from the big city to the small rural town, but she tackles the job of community police officer with spirit, finding way more crime to investigate than she thought she would.
Winter at the Door got excellent reviews when it came out in 2015, and was followed by The Girls She Left Behind in 2016. Hope to see a third book come out soon!
This week, I’m listening to a young-adult vampire novel in preparation for my genre study group meeting next month — The Hunt by Andrew Fukuda — which I just realized is first in a trilogy. Darn! I’m two-thirds of the way through and was starting to think the author was going to have trouble wrapping everything up in the amount of the story that was left.
The setting of The Hunt is a future when vampires have taken over, hunted humans into virtual extinction, and are considered people, while humans (disparagingly called “Hepers”) are considered animals that can be killed and devoured, if discovered. The main character of The Hunt — an unnamed high school student at first — is hiding in plain sight by pretending to be a person, covering up all his Heper attributes with subterfuge and smarts.
Last Week in Print
Read Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng for book club last week. Immediately added to my Favorites list for 2019. The themes were laid on thicker than in her first book, Everything I Never Told You, I thought, but the story and the characters were so realistic and each so sympathetic and flawed in his or her own way that I literally hated having to put it down to do things like work or sleep.
I just finished a novel by Brunonia Barry set in Salem, Mass. — The Fifth Petal. Yes, it has a lot to do with the historic Salem witch trials, but it’s a contemporary story centered on the mysterious Halloween deaths in 1989 of three beautiful, promiscuous young women known collectively as The Goddesses. They were killed, but who killed them? Twenty-five years later, with a new Halloween murder to solve which quickly turns into a modern-day witch hunt, Salem Police Chief John Rafferty revisits Salem’s most infamous cold case.
Though it has elements of both mystery and horror, The Fifth Petal is mainly the character-driven story of Callie, the daughter of one of The Goddesses, who returns to Salem in an attempt to overcome the childhood trauma she experienced and understand her own mysterious (supernatural?) healing powers, flashbacks of memory, and hallucinatory nightmares. If you liked the author’s earlier books, The Map of True Places and The Lace Reader, you will probably like this one, as well.
This Week in Print
I need to refresh my memory of City of Bones by Cassandra Clare for my YA Fantasy genre study group meeting next week. When I first read it, probably about ten years ago, I remember recommending it as a good follow-up to Harry Potter. Urban fantasy is my favorite subgenre of fantasy, anyway, and I read several books into Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments sequence until I finally got tired of the characters.
What are you reading this week????
It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? (#IMWAYR) is hosted by Kathryn at Book Date. It’s a place to meet up and share what you have been, are, and about to be reading over the week. It’s a great post to organize yourself. It’s an opportunity to visit and comment, and er… add to that ever-growing TBR pile! This meme started with J Kaye’s Blog and then was taken up by Sheila from Book Journey. Sheila then passed it on to Kathryn at Book Date.