Robin Loves Reading
Book reviews, blog tours, cover reveals and wrap ups.
Sunday, November 10, 2024
Review - Murder and Mamon
Review - Flashback
Kendra Michaels uses her heightened powers of deduction to draw out a serial killer who has not been seen or heard from in over fifteen years.
Chloe and Sloane Morgan were only children when their mother was the second victim of the Bayside Strangler. Now, after spending fifteen years trying to discover his identity, the sisters have suddenly vanished. Were they getting too close to the truth? The police consider their interest in the crime to be just a coincidence and have little motivation to pursue the cold case.
Armed with the box of photos, videos, police reports, and notes gathered by the sisters over the years—plus the extraordinary senses from being blind before recovering her sight via a revolutionary surgical procedure—Kendra follows the sisters’ trail of clues. Little does she realize that her search is about to unleash a long-dormant killer on San Diego. With help from government agent-for-hire Adam Lynch and private eye Jessie Mercado, Kendra must race to discover the identity of an infamous killer, not only to save the lives of the two sisters but also untold others.
Johansen began writing after her children left home for college. She first achieved success in the early 1980s writing category romances. In 1991, Johansen began writing suspense historical romance novels, starting with the publication of The Wind Dancer. In 1996 Johansen switched genres, turning to crime fiction, with which she has had great success. She had seventeen consecutive New York Times bestsellers as of November 2006.
Johansen lives near Atlanta, Georgia and is married. Her son, Roy Johansen, is an Edgar Award-winning screenwriter and novelist. Her daughter, Tamara, serves as her research assistant.
BLOG TOUR - Jackpot Summer
The four Jacobson children were raised to respect the value of a dollar. Their mother reused tea bags and refused to pay retail; their father taught them to budget before he taught them to ride a bike. And yet, as adults, their financial lives—as well as their personal lives—are in complete disarray.
The siblings reunite when their newly widowed father puts their Jersey Shore home on the market. Packing up their childhood isn’t easy, especially when they’ve all got drama brewing back home. Matthew is miserable at his corporate law job and wishes he had more time with his son; Laura’s marriage is imploding in spectacular fashion; Sophie’s art career is stalled while her boyfriend’s is on the rise; and Noah’s total failure to launch has him doing tech repair for pennies.
So when Noah sees an ad for a Powerball drawing, he and his sisters go in on a ticket. Matthew passes but the ticket is a winner and all hell breaks loose as the infusion of cash causes sibling rivalries and family secrets to resurface. Without their mother, and with their father busy playing pickleball in a Florida retirement village, the once close-knit siblings search for comfort in shiny new toys instead of each other.
It’s not long before the Jacobson's start to realize that they’ll never feel rich unless they can pull their family back together.
BLOG TOUR - Murder at the Tea Shop
Having left the big city behind, Sarah Vane is fully embracing her calmer life in the quaint coastal town of Merstairs. With more time for hobbies, she joins a very popular life drawing class at the local tea shop. But when their usual model, the ever-punctual Mr Williams, doesn’t turn up, Sarah’s worried. He’d been complaining of a cough just last week so she decides to check up on him.
Arriving at his crooked little cottage, it appears the front door isn’t quite shut. Stepping inside, Sarah is shocked to find Mr Williams slumped in his armchair. Casting her eyes down to his coffee table she sees a generous slice of Victoria sponge with one perfectly sized bite taken from it. Is this a case of death by cake?
As Sarah hunts around the cluttered cottage for clues, she finds that Mr Williams had a rather peculiar hobby. It seems that he was an avid collector of ladies’ delicates, and from the looks of it, all the washing lines of Merstairs have been raided. But could his quirky collection really be a motive for murder?
But then the case takes a darker turn when another elderly resident is found dead after eating a slice of red velvet cake. Sarah starts to wonder – why would anyone target pensioners with a sweet tooth? And in a village known for some of the best cakes in the county, can Sarah find the culprit before another life is taken?
A delightfully cozy, utterly compulsive and gripping murder mystery, perfect for fans of Agatha Christie, Betty Rowlands and Katie Gayle who are looking for their next addictive read.
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Saturday, November 9, 2024
Review - Coming Home to Paradise
No. of Pages: 317
All seven sisters are finally home for Christmas, but can the last two find love like the others?
As Endora Simmons plans her Christmas wedding, she's delighted to have her last two sisters, Rae and Bo, finally back in Spanish Fort, Texas. Endora figures if she keeps them busy, they won't have time to think about leaving again. So, Endora talks Rae into teaching Sunday school; as a former police officer, surely Rae can corral the rowdy kids—the most high-spirited being Sheriff Gunner's twin daughters—into making Christmas decorations for the upcoming pageant. Bo helps out by taking over the community Christmas program. She's also been working with Aunt Bernie on her new venture, a monthly speed-dating night at a bar just over the river in Oklahoma—and boy, does she have her eye on that handsome bartender. With all the Christmas preparations in high gear, will Rae and Bo still find time to fall in love?
Praise for New York Times bestseller Carolyn Brown:
"Fans...will flip for this charming small-town tale."—Woman's World for The Sisters Café
"Brown's characters easily inspire readers to care what happens to them."—Publishers Weekly for Bride for a Day
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
A plaque hangs on her office wall that says I know the voices are not real but they have such great ideas. That is her motto and muse as she goes through the days with quirky characters in her head, telling their stories, one by one, and loving her job.
She has been married almost half a century to a retired English teacher that she calls Mr. B and he does not read her books before they are published because she cannot afford a divorce. They have three grown children.—and enough grandchildren to keep them busy and young.
When Carolyn is not writing she likes to sit in the back yard and watch the two tom cats protect the yard from all kinds of wicked varmints like crickets, other cats, spiders and blue jays.
Review - You Know What You Did
Annie “Anh Le” Shaw grew up poor but seems to have it all now: a dream career, a stunning home, and a devoted husband and daughter. When Annie’s mother, a Vietnam War refugee, dies suddenly one night, Annie’s carefully curated life begins to unravel. Her obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she thought she’d vanquished years ago, comes roaring back—but this time, the disturbing fixations swirling around in Annie’s brain might actually be coming true.
A prominent art patron disappears, and the investigation zeroes in on Annie. Spiraling with self-doubt, she distances herself from her family and friends, only to wake up in a hotel room—naked, next to a lifeless body. The police have more questions, but with her mind increasingly fractured, Annie doesn’t have answers. All she knows is this: She will do anything to protect her daughter—even if it means losing herself.
With dizzying twists, You Know What You Did is both a harrowing thriller and a heartfelt exploration of the refugee experience, the legacies we leave for our children, and the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters.
Review - Passions in Death
Homicide Detective Eve Dallas hunts a killer who turns a wedding party into a murder scene in the latest novel by the #1 New York Times bestselling author, J.D. Robb.
On a hot August night, Lt. Eve Dallas and her husband, Roarke, speed through the streets of Manhattan to the Down and Dirty club, where a joyful, boisterous pre-wedding girls’ night out has turned into a murder scene. One of the brides lies in a pool of blood, garroted in a private room where she was preparing a surprise for her fiancée—two scrimped and saved-for tickets to Hawaii.
Despite the dozens of people present, useful witnesses are hard to come by. It all brings back some bad memories for Eve. In her uniform days, she’d suffered an assault in the very same room—but she’d been able to fight back and survive. She’d gotten justice. And now she needs to provide some for poor young Erin.
Eve knows that the level of violence and the apparent premeditation involved suggest a volatile mix of hidden, heated passion and ice-cold calculation. This is a crime that can be countered only by hard detective work and relentless dedication—and Eve will not stop until she finds the killer who destroyed this couple’s dreams before the honeymoon even began…
MY THOUGHTS:
Review - This is Why We Lied
Everyone here is a liar, but only one of us is a killer…
A secluded cabin retreat
For GBI investigator Will Trent and medical examiner Sara Linton, McAlpine Lodge seems like the ideal getaway to celebrate their honeymoon. Set on a gorgeous, off-the-grid mountaintop property, it’s the perfect place to unplug and reconnect. Until a bone-chilling scream cuts through the night.
A murderer in their midst
Mercy McAlpine, the manager of the Lodge, is dead. With a vicious storm raging and the one access road to the property washed out, the murderer must be someone on the mountain. But as Will and Sara investigate the McAlpine family and the other guests, they realize that everyone here is lying….Lying about their past. Lying to their family. Lying to themselves.
Who killed Mercy McAlpine?
It soon becomes clear that normal rules don’t apply at McAlpine Lodge, and Will and Sara are going to have to watch their step at every turn. Trapped on the resort, they must untangle a decades-old web of secrets to discover what happened to Mercy. And with the killer poised to strike again, the trip of a lifetime becomes a race against the clock…