Tag: book review

Thriller Thursday: Dominance by Will Lavender

Thriller Thursday: Dominance by Will Lavender

Dominance is a novel about a puzzle game about a novel. Sounds confusing, but it’s not. And it’s not just any game, it’s a deadly one. One that Harvard professor Alex Shipley will have to solve very quickly before the killer catches up to her.

Fifteen years earlier, Alex was part of a night class called Unraveling a Literary Mystery, taught by famed professor Richard Aldiss. Aldiss was teaching the class remotely from his prison cell where he was serving time for the brutal murders of two female grad students. The women were killed with an axe and their bodies decorated with the novels of reclusive author Paul Fallows. The night class’ assignment was to solve the mystery of Paul Fallows’ identity using his novels as their map. The way to follow the map was through a mysterious game called The Procedure.

Book Review: Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

Book Review: Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

I’m an avid Stephen King fan, and I can honestly say I’ve read every book he’s written. I always like Stephen King’s long stories. While they lack the satisfying caramelly-nougaty goodness of his longest novels, they are no candied popcorn, either.

This time, King explorers the human mind and takes on the conscience. Each person does or ponders something of questionable integrity, and each action is something all of us have considered at some point.

Click the blog title to read the full review.

Book Review: Long Gone by Alafair Burke

Book Review: Long Gone by Alafair Burke

What if everything you thought you knew turned out to be a lie?

After a layoff and months of struggling, Alice Humphrey finally lands her dream job managing a new art gallery in Manhattan’s trendy Meatpacking District.

According to Drew Campbell, the well-suited corporate representative who hires her, the gallery is a passion project for its anonymous, wealthy, and eccentric owner. Drew assures Alice that the owner will be hands off, allowing her to run the gallery on her own. Her friends think it sounds too good to be true, but Alice sees a perfect opportunity to make a name for herself beyond the shadow of her famous father, an award-winning and controversial film maker.

Everything is perfect until the morning Alice arrives at work to find the gallery gone – the space stripped bare as if it had never existed – and Drew Campbell’s dead body on the floor. Overnight, Alice’s dream job has vanished, and she finds herself at the center of police attention with nothing to prove her innocence. The phone number Drew gave her links back to a disposable phone.

The artist whose work she displayed doesn’t seem to exist. And the dead man she claims is Drew has been identified as someone else.

Book Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Book Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

What would it take to grow all our own food?

This is the question the Kingsolver family asked themselves after moving from the hard Arizona desert to lush hill country in the Appalachians of Virginia. Over the next year, the family of four embarked on a quest that would change the way they eat forever.

This thoughtful novel journals their first year being totally food-independent, starting with the first signs of spring (the Asparagus) through the last pumpkin harvest, describing in poignant detail the pleasure one derives from the hard work of gardening, canning, and responsibly raising food.

Book Review: Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Book Review: Wither by Lauren DeStefano

What would it be like to know you would die in four years?

WITHER, author Lauren DeStefano’s debut young adult novel and Book 1 in The Chemical Garden Trilogy, brings us into just such a dystopian world where modern science has created a genetic time bomb.

In a botched effort to perfect the human race, scientists have released a virus into the DNA that has left all males with a lifespan of just twenty-five years and females with only twenty years to live. While geneticists are searching for a miracle cure to restore a normal lifespan, girls as young as thirteen are being kidnapped and sold into polygamous marriages to keep the population going until an antidote is found.