The Drowning Kind by Jennifer McMahon

Hello everyone.  I hope your day is going well.

I have to confess, I am behind on reviews.  I try not to post too many a month, not to pester you.  How many times do you want to read these before I make your teeth itch or you roll your eyes at what I'm saying for the gazillionth time? (My mother would say not to do that or they'll stay that way.) The issue is that I've read so many books lately. Thrillers are making me very happy.  It seems for the longest time we've had lots of domestic thrillers, you know, wife is secretly someone else, hubby is a serial killer, or the kindly next door neighbor has fifteen bodies planted in his garden hoping they'll fertilize his roses.  Aah you say, but April you love those. I do indeed! However, all of the sudden there are a batch of books out that take my thriller addiction out of the neighborhood and into interesting locations or have a smidge of supernatural thrown in...something different.  Honestly, I'm reading them faster than I am reviewing them as I'm basically having thriller-paloosa here. Still I'll try not to slap gobs of reviews up but sometimes I can't help myself.

I recently read The Drowning Kind by Jennifer McMahon.  This book features two time lines, the current day and 1929. Both time periods have a story that surrounds a natural spring.  Supposedly you can talk to this water, tell it what you want, basically make a wish and it comes true.  But the water gives at a price.  

In the current day there are two sisters Lexie and Jax.  Lexie has been written off by Jax, who believes her sister is having mental issues and has stopped taking her medication. In fact, Jax is receiving multiple calls from Lexie that are gibberish, so they go ignored.  Sadly, shortly after, Jax discovers that Lexie has died, drowned in the pool on the family's estate she now owns. When returning home for the funeral, Jax is flooded with memories of her sister and the beloved pool, remembering what a strong swimmer she was.  Things are complicated when Jax finds the estate house a disaster, things are everywhere, dirty dishes, belongings, and tons of paper.  It seems that before she died Lexie was researching the estate and her own family.  Did that play a part in her mental break or death?

In 1929, Will and Ethel are newly weds and very much want to have a baby.  Unfortunately Ethel hopes each month that she is pregnant only to be disappointed.  Will decides to ease the stress by taking them away to a beautiful resort.  Ethel discovers that the waters of the resort are supposed to heal, cure and may even be able to grant wishes.

Clear your schedule for this one.  Opening the book will have you instantly hooked and you'll ignore your loved ones until it's over.  Loved this, hope you do too.

The Burning Girls by C.J. Tudor

Hello everyone. I hope your week is going well.

How do you feel about religion?  Do you believe in a higher power, a creator or an afterlife?  I believe in God.  All I have to do is look at a baby, that cannot be an accident or evolution.  What makes one person love turkey sandwiches and the next hate them...hubby would say the person that hates turkey sandwiches is just flat out nuts but consider the source! Also, all the people throughout history who have seen a ghost are lying or suffering from mass hallucinations?  For thousands of years? Highly doubtful.  I know what I heard and saw in my own house!  Anyway, I recognize everyone's choice to believe what they want and frankly, I find religion a very personal thing.  

I recently read The Burning Girls by  C.J. Tudor.  This is the story of a vicar in England who has been transferred to a very small church in the countryside.  The town is close-knit and not very accepting of strangers. When the new leader of the small church arrives with their daughter, a welcome present is left.  You know this book is going to be good when the gift left for the new religious leader to make them feel at home is an exorcism kit.  Oh yes, you read that correctly!  

The reader quickly finds out that the burning girls are two young women who were burned as martyrs during the Protestant revolution.  Little twig dolls representing these young woman start appearing. I won't spoil it for you but I want to warn you if you are thinking of skipping this book, don't!  It is a super fast read, with lots of twists.  It isn't about witchcraft, it isn't too scary, and if you're not a fan of religion you'll still enjoy this book...the religion isn't the point just the setting for a this heart pounding supernatural mystery.

This book is so good you'll asked to be "blessed" with more books by C.J. Tudor.

No Exit by Taylor Adams

***Just a warning.  I usually try to avoid telling you anything specific about the book so you can discover it on your own, in this review I reveal something that happens. This fact I talk about doesn't ruin the story for you but I can't tell you how I feel about the book without explaining why in this way.  So I guess it's a tiny spoiler but not for the whole book and certainly not for the ending.  What I tell you here happens early on.

Hello everyone.  I hope you're having a good day.

How important is a characters connection to you?  Can you love a book if you don't care for any of the people or doesn't it matter?  I've seen so many book reviews where people say they couldn't connect with the characters so they hated the book.  I think that's really interesting and I wonder if that opinion varies by genre.  I would imagine in a romance you must really care about the people involved so you can root for them to fall in love.  For a thriller, I am unsure if that is so true. I think perhaps thriller readers are looking for twists and not so much character development.  Don't get me wrong, thrillers with uninteresting characters kill a story but I think perhaps it's less important.

I recently read No Exit by Taylor Adams.  This is the story of a college student, Darby, who is going home to see her dying mother.  Darby gets stuck in a snowstorm in the Colorado Rockies and must pull over and spend the night at a Rest Area along with four others already stranded. While outside trying to find a signal for her cell phone, Darby discovers a van with a small girl locked in a cage in the back, obviously having been kidnapped.  The dilemma who of the four others inside is the kidnapper.

While I thought this book might be boring given its limited scene of the Rest Area and cast, it isn't.  In fact, it is action packed and very much a page turner. I thought I had read a total of thirty minutes yet was on page 197...obviously an engrossing book.  Ah, not only engrossing but gross, this has lots of violence and gore and it's all very graphic.  Do not read with a weak stomach.  While I enjoyed the book and loved the pacing the main character drove me crazy.  I found myself yelling at the book.  When Darby gets to speak to the kidnapped girl, does she ask any of the important questions that any normal, sane person would ask? NO, she doesn't.  I kept yelling ask the question, ask the question. Instead of asking which of the four was her kidnapper and more importantly are they armed, Darby wastes time on her name and where she's from.  If tf wasn't so annoying it would sound like a bar pick up line..."Hey, where you from?"  It happened repeatedly throughout the book. At one point Darby was so dumb and annoying I found myself actually rooting for the kidnapper!

No Exit was a great read, especially for any thriller lover.  Just beware of the dumbest heroine in history and that it is not for the squeamish.

Every Last Fear by Alex Finlay

Hello everyone.  I hope you're enjoying your day.

When there is a lot of buzz about a book are you driven to read it or do you refuse, not wanting to follow the crowd. If the book is something I "must" read, look out, that book is coming my way and everyone around me must leave me alone until it is complete.  But sometimes when there is a big buzz around a book I wonder how good it really is and how much is hype and I refuse to read it.  However, when it's rumored to possibly be the hit thriller of the summer (you know how I love thrillers), AND when the identity of the author is a secret and everyone is guessing who it might be.  You cave in, order the novel, read it and every time it gets really good you cuss at the book.  How dare anything with such buzz actually be entertaining!

I recently read Every Last Fear by Alex Finlay.  This is the story of a family who has died of carbon monoxide poisoning in Mexico.  There are two surviving sons, Matt is in college in NY and Dan is in prison for killing his girlfriend.  With the FBI's help it's determined that perhaps the family's death wasn't so simple and could somehow be linked to Dan, despite him being in jail. The writing is fast paced, weaving easily from the past to present day, pushing us to discover what really happened and why.  Often the chapters end on a cliff hanger, which propels the reader forward for answers.  While the story includes government and police corruption, cartels and a boy that won't take no , be assured that these often unpleasant topics are brief and are necessary to the story.   

Okay, I admit it, I really enjoyed this book, I didn't want to but I did. Now I'll go hang my head in shame for following the crowd, at least it was to a book store.

ps.  Who do you think the author really is?

Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson

Hello everyone.  I hope you're having a nice day.

As a history lover, nothing in the US could be better than Virginia, which is loaded with both revolutionary and civil war sites.  People used to stand on the site of todays Tidewater Community College to watch the clash between the two iron-clad ships, the Monitor and the Merrimac.  The Merrimac becoming an iron-clad in Portsmouth. Virginia is home to lots of native American sites, the famous Pocahontas for starters and is also the site of the real first Thanksgiving, not the pilgrims. There is the historic triangle of Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown.  Jamestown the site of the first permanent English settlement, Williamsburg the first colonial capital, and Yorktown where the revolutionary war came to an end. These sites are just a few of those in southeastern Virginia, not the entire state. It is really quite amazing. To get from Williamsburg to the next major town, Richmond, you might take Route 5, which parallels the James River. It was first a native American trail, then a carriage path, now a state route.  This road runs through a small area you've probably never heard about, Charles City County.  The James River Plantations live here, where some of our most famous founding citizens owned farms.  In fact, not only are there several signers of the Declaration of Independence residences but two Presidents who were next door neighbors.  Bet you never heard that before! If you go to Williamsburg or Virginia Beach on vacation, be sure to stop and tour some of these sites.  Sometimes, however, with the sweet comes the sour and with beautiful large plantations that means slaves.  People ripped from their lives, their families, and their homes to be forced to work without pay, often brutally. 

I recently read Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson.  This book follows the life of Pheby Delores Brown, a slave, who lives on a plantation is Charles City County.  The story is well written and grabs you immediately.  The author is very successful where many authors often fail, in making you care and connect with the characters.  No matter your age or race, you will hurt and root for Pheby and all the other people in this tale.  Be warned that this book doesn't sugar coat the slaves' treatment and frankly, I wonder if it got much worse...in fact, I know it did.  Most of all, this book will make you cry for our past and hope for our future.  I am amazed that a black woman could bear to write this but I cannot imagine it being penned by anyone else.  While not a feel good book, I promise you that if you read Yellow Wife, you will not regret it.

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

Hello everyone. I hope your day has been a pleasant one.

I wasn't always a housewife, I used to actually work (outside the home). I worked in the credit cards industry for years, doing everything from starting a new card program to seeing it sold off and all aspects in between. Want to know about credit card fraud or merchant services, I'm your girl. For real fun, (read with a sexy whisper) I'll show you how to compute an average daily balance. 

When it became more practical for me to stay home, I wanted to do the housewife job well.  I wanted to clean like a dream (I'm laughing so hard now I might fall out of my chair). I wanted to know all the little tricks from packing the perfect suitcase, to making silver shine.  I wanted to be able to cook like a world class chef, but just for my family.  Let's face it, I wanted to be a Stepford Wife, heck I still do I just start to lose my lunch every time I even think about dusting.

I recently read The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin. Now if you are a youngster and have only seen the more recent movie, it's nothing like the book. The original movie, however, sticks much closer to the novel.  We see how the women of the town of Stepford only have time to clean their homes and take care of their husbands and children. The reader witnesses Joanna desperately trying to get the women to do something together that doesn't involve dirt removal.  Like the movie, it doesn't work and she is left without friends except for one, Bobbie. Sadly, one day all Bobbie wants to do is clean her house. As Joanna's dissatisfaction grows, so does the distance between her and her husband, Walter.  Now, she's sure he and others from the town are up to something nefarious.  This fun book is  rapidly read, requiring barely more than an hour as it's just over one hundred pages.  Interesting to note, Ira Levin also wrote several other books including Rosemary's Baby.

Think I'll see if I can get someone to hypnotize me so I love cleaning house and want to do nothing else.....or better yet, hypnotize my husband.  I bet he can dust with the best of them!

The Minders by John Marrs

Hello everyone.  I hope all is well with you. 

Would you like to know all your government's secrets? Not me, I'm chicken, yep blissful ignorance for me. My dad, however, held top secret clearance. He would go on a business trip and not be able to tell anyone where he was going.  He worked for a major computer company that put systems in various types of vehicles for the federal government.  Funny thing is, my dad was the least tech savvy person I've ever seen, if you asked him: windows were to look out of, apples were to eat and a c prompt was the latest laxative in tv commercials. Yet my mild mannered dad helped negotiate to price for selling and installing these systems.  He went to "areas" that, until recently, the government said didn't exist. He only told me about it after it was declassified, probably good thing... my ignorance is comforting and had my mother known she would have had to have been sedated!

I recently read The Minders by John Marrs. I'm not a fan of fantasy or science fiction but Marrs has just a hint of them in his books but in general they are intense thrillers, which I love. The Minders is about the stealing of government secrets and how to prevent it from happening. The United Kingdom has tried many things which haven't worked so now they are implanting all their secrets into the brain of five people, these are the Minders.  This book is about what happens to these people while trying to protect these secrets and what happens when those people have secrets of their own.  This story is exactly the kind of pace I like, where the author doesn't let you catch your breath with twist after shocking twist.  The book references two of his earlier books The Passengers and The One but they are absolutely not necessary to completely understand and enjoy this book but fans of Marrs will find it amusing. If you love fast paced thrillers, this is for you!

My husband always jokes about my dad going to buy a new car, a normal, everyday customer and the poor salesman who had no idea what Dad did for a living.