Don’t ask me how or why, but I am watching Big Shot
Which is about a former college basketball coach who gets fired and starts coaching a high school girl’s basketball team, and he has already fat-shamed a young girl (though he didn’t mean to) and made two of his girls cry. So stellar start. But given that the show is tackling fat shaming, and girls who may be exploring their sexuality I’m curious to see how this goes.
And this also reminds me of this gem
I adored this show and it got cancelledddddd!!! Does anyone else miss it?
In other news, here are the books I’m on the look out for this week.
Two Week Wait: an IVF story
An original graphic novel based on the IVF stories of its husband-and-wife authors and the 1-in-50 couples around the world like them.
Conrad and Joanne met in their final year of university and have been virtually inseparable since then. For a while, it felt like they had all the time in the world. Yet now, when they are finally ready to have kids, they find that getting pregnant isn’t always so easy.
Ahead of them lies a difficult, expensive, and emotional journey into the world of assisted fertility, where each ‘successful’ implantation is followed by a two-week wait to see if the pregnancy takes. Join Joanne and Conrad, their friends, their family, their coworkers, and a stream of expert medical practitioners as they experience the highs and the lows, the tears and the laughter in this sensitive but unflinching portrayal of the hope and heartbreak offered to so many by modern medicine.
I was offered this to review, and jumped at the chance for two reasons: there’s an emotional story to be told here, and I got a hint of it in the excerpt that was shared with me. And second, that this is a graphic novel makes me curious to see how the authors make this emotional story work in a graphic novel.
These Toxic Things
Mickie Lambert creates “digital scrapbooks” for clients, ensuring that precious souvenirs aren’t forgotten or lost. When her latest client Nadia Denham, a curio shop owner, dies from an apparent suicide, Mickie honors the old woman’s last wish and begins curating her peculiar objets d’art. A music box, a hair clip, a keychain–twelve mementos in all that must have meant so much to Nadia who collected them on her flea market scavenges across the country.
They mean a lot to someone else, too. Mickie has been getting threatening messages from a long-dormant serial killer to leave Nadia’s past alone.
It’s becoming a mystery Mickie is driven to solve. Who are the women, now dead or disappeared, who once owned these odd treasures? How did Nadia really come to possess them? Who is the killer watching every move Mickie makes? Discovering the truth means navigating the secrets of a sinister past. One, Mickie fears, might be inescapably entwined with her own.
Given the title of this book, and the blurbs, I am sincerely hoping that these toxic things have an epic story to them. I think this is an original premise, and I hope it works!
A Slow fire Burning
THE SCORCHING NEW THRILLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN
‘What is wrong with you?’
Laura has spent most of her life being judged. She’s seen as hot-tempered, troubled, a loner. Some even call her dangerous.
Miriam knows that just because Laura is witnessed leaving the scene of a horrific murder with blood on her clothes, that doesn’t mean she’s a killer. Bitter experience has taught her how easy it is to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Carla is reeling from the brutal murder of her nephew. She trusts no one: good people are capable of terrible deeds. But how far will she go to find peace?
Innocent or guilty, everyone is damaged. Some are damaged enough to kill.
Look what you started.
Honestly, this blurb and these women are so random I immediately want to know how Hawkins is going to pull this all together!
Gone for Good
Gone For Good is the first in a new mystery series from award-winning author Joanna Schaffhausen, featuring Detective Annalisa Vega, in which a cold case heats up.
The Lovelorn Killer murdered seven women, ritually binding them and leaving them for dead before penning them gruesome love letters in the local papers. Then he disappeared, and after twenty years with no trace of him, many believe that he’s gone for good.
Not Grace Harper. A grocery store manager by day, at night Grace uses her snooping skills as part of an amateur sleuth group. She believes the Lovelorn Killer is still living in the same neighborhoods that he hunted in, and if she can figure out how he selected his victims, she will have the key to his identity.
Detective Annalisa Vega lost someone she loved to the killer. Now she’s at a murder scene with the worst kind of déjà vu: Grace Harper lies bound and dead on the floor, surrounded by clues to the biggest murder case that Chicago homicide never solved. Annalisa has the chance to make it right and to heal her family, but first, she has to figure out what Grace knew―how to see a killer who may be standing right in front of you. This means tracing his steps back to her childhood, peering into dark corners she hadn’t acknowledged before, and learning that despite everything the killer took, she has still so much more to lose
That this is a new one from Joanna Schaffhausen grabbed me rightaway. Her Ellery Hathaway series is a favourite of mine! Strong female characters, both linked to a murder and I wat to know hooooow!
Felonious Monk
Meet Tommy Martini, the monk with an anger management problem. Since killing somebody with a single punch is not a needed talent in a monastery, he spends his time praying, meditating, and taking his anger management medicine. But his meditations are interrupted by a legacy from his uncle, a crooked priest. Arriving in a New Age Arizona town to claim his inheritance, Brother Tommy meets a charismatic, smoking-hot cult leader who claims that women are being impregnated by alien beings while they sleep. Tommy’s own sleep is disturbed–by cartel hitmen, Mafia bill collectors, and women intrigued by his vow of chastity. He loses his anger management medicine in time to deal with the hitmen, but the women present an uphill battle.
William Kotzwinkle’s quicksilver touch has produced an effervescent piece of entertainment filled with suspense, turns you won’t see coming, and the humor for which he is famous.
Okay, this just made me laugh out loud! A monk with an anger management problem is a first for me!
