Happy Easter everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful break and time with your families!
It was a family weekend over here, and a lazy one — and I tried my best not to think about work. I kept thinking Tuesday was Wednesday, wondered why it wasn’t Thursday on Wednesday, and on Thursday kept thinking Friday was Saturday.
So it’s been a bit of a confusing week, to say the least 🙂
When the Stars Go Dark
A detective hiding away from the world. A series of disappearances that reach into her past. Can solving them help her heal?
Anna Hart is a seasoned missing persons detective in San Francisco with far too much knowledge of the darkest side of human nature. When overwhelming tragedy strikes her personal life, Anna, desperate and numb, flees to the Northern California village of Mendocino to grieve. She lived there as a child with her beloved foster parents, and now she believes it might be the only place left for her. Yet the day she arrives, she learns a local teenage girl has gone missing. The crime feels frighteningly reminiscent of the most crucial time in Anna’s childhood, when the unsolved murder of a young girl touched Mendocino and changed the community forever. As past and present collide, Anna realizes that she has been led to this moment. The most difficult lessons of her life have given her insight into how victims come into contact with violent predators. As Anna becomes obsessed with the missing girl, she must accept that true courage means getting out of her own way and learning to let others in.
Weaving together actual cases of missing persons, trauma theory, and a hint of the metaphysical, this propulsive and deeply affecting novel tells a story of fate, necessary redemption, and what it takes, when the worst happens, to reclaim our lives–and our faith in one another.
I did not expect the ending to this blurb: I am impressed that there’s actual cases of missing persons in this, and the metaphysical? There’s a lot more happening than just a mystery, and I sincerely hope the author pulls it off.
Glimmer of Death
ward-winning author Valerie Wilson Wesley launches a thrilling new mystery series set in New Jersey, featuring a multicultural cast, and starring a caterer-turned-realtor with the gift of second sight…
In the first of a thrilling new series, one woman’s extraordinary psychic gift plunges her already-troubled present into chaos–and puts her future in someone’s deadly sights…
Until now, Odessa Jones’ inherited ability to read emotions and foretell danger has protected her. But second sight didn’t warn her she would soon be a widow–and about to lose her home and the catering business she’s worked so hard to build. The only things keeping Dessa going are her love for baking and her sometimes-mellow cat, Juniper. Unfortunately, putting her life back together means taking a gig at an all-kinds-of-shady real estate firm run by volatile owner Charlie Risko…
Until Charlie is brutally killed–and Dessa’s bullied co-worker is arrested for murder. Dessa can’t be sure who’s guilty. But it doesn’t take a psychic to discover that everyone from Charlie’s much-abused staff to his long-suffering younger wife had multiple reasons to want him dead. And as Dessa follows a trail of lies through blackmail, dead-end clues, and corruption, she needs to see the truth fast–or a killer will bury her deep down with it.
Oh hello, Dessa is intriguing — and a psychic to boot! I need a good cozy to sink my teeth into.
The Second son
Duty always has a price.
When Ivan Novak is shot dead putting out his garbage bins in Sydney’s west, his family wants revenge, especially his father Milan, a notorious crime boss. It’s a job for the second son, Ivan’s younger brother Johnny.
But Johnny loves his wife Amy and their son Sasha. And she’s about to deliver her ultimatum: either the three of them escape this wave of killing or she’ll leave, taking Sasha.
Torn between loyalty to his family and love for his wife, Johnny plans the heist of a lifetime and takes a huge risk. Is he prepared to pay the price? And what choice will Amy make?
The Second Son is a brilliant action-packed crime debut that creates a world where honour is everything, violence is its own language, and love means breaking all the rules
The family aspect running through this grabbed my attention rightaway — moreso than the mystery part.. I feel like this isn’t going to be an easy choice at all for Johnny,…
The Quiet Girl
Good girls keep quiet. Quiet girls won’t stay silent forever.
When Alex arrives in Provincetown to patch things up with his new wife, he finds an empty wine glass in the sink, her wedding ring on the desk, and a string of questions in her wake. The police believe that Alex’s wife simply left, his marriage crumbling before it truly began. But what Alex finds in their empty cottage points him toward a different reality:
His wife has always carried a secret. And now she’s disappeared.
In his hunt for the truth, Alex comes across Layla, a young woman with information to share, who may hold the key to everything his wife has kept hidden. A girl without a clear recollection of her own past. A strange, quiet girl whose memories may break them all.
To find his wife, Alex must face what Layla has forgotten. And the consequences are anything but quiet
Hm, secrets and lies and husbands and wives. And Layla — how is she linked to Alex’s wife? I can’t help wondering about this as well: Quiet girls won’t stay silent forever — it’s the kind of ominous tag line that sticks in my head and won’t let me goooo!
Mind you, I laughed when I realised the title of the last book in this week’s post was going to be, and i couldn’t resist.
The Quiet Boy
From the bestselling author of Underground Airlines and Golden State, this sweeping legal thriller follows a sixteen-year-old who suffers from a neurological condition that has frozen him in time—and the team of lawyers, doctors, and detectives who are desperate to wake him up.
In 2008, a cheerful ambulance-chasing lawyer named Jay Shenk persuades the grieving Keener family to sue a private LA hospital. Their son Wesley has been transformed by a routine surgery into a kind of golem, absent all normal functioning or personality, walking in endless empty circles around his hospital room. In 2019, Shenk—still in practice but a shell of his former self—is hired to defend Wesley Keener’s father when he is charged with murder . . . the murder, as it turns out, of the expert witness from the 2008 hospital case. Shenk’s adopted son, a fragile teenager in 2008, is a wayward adult, though he may find his purpose when he investigates what really happened to the murdered witness.
Two thrilling trials braid together, medical malpractice and murder, jostling us back and forth in time.
The Quiet Boy is a book full of mysteries, not only about the death of a brilliant scientist, not only about the outcome of the medical malpractice suit, but about the relationship between children and their parents, between the past and the present, between truth and lies. At the center of it all is Wesley Keener, endlessly walking, staring empty-eyed, in whose quiet, hollow body may lie the fate of humankind.
The image of Wesley Keener stuck with me in this blurb — what a sad picture he makes, and what a story that surrounds him — and his father. As much as this sound like a wonderful legal thriller, this is going to be heartbreaking I think.
That’s it for me today!
