Crawl inside the mind of a devious femme
fatale as she plots her promotion from life as a con artist to wife of the heir
to one of America’s largest fortunes.
In this 2023 debut novel, screenwriter
Rachel Koller Croft deploys a first-person wise-cracking narrative by her
unscrupulous antagonist, Bea, to explore Bea’s seduction of the heir and Bea’s
battle of wits with his suspicious mother and his longtime gal pal, Gale.
Through Bea, Croft imagines an audacious infiltration of a circle of bluebloods
with a long con designed to provide a retirement plan by marriage into a life
of luxury. Did I root for Bea as she overcame the obstacles to her plot? Of
course, I did, unable to stop turning pages until it played out to an
unpredictable climax.
Bea truly touched my soft spot for femmes fatale and
novels made for film noir.
A perfectly wicked debut thriller about an ambitious woman who, after a lifetime of conning alongside her mother, wants to leave her dark past behind and marry the heir to one of the country's wealthiest families.
Like any enterprising woman, Bea knows what she’s worth and is determined to get all she deserves—it just so happens that what she deserves is to marry rich. Filthy rich. After years of forced instruction by her mother in the art of swindling men, a now-solo Bea wants nothing more than to close and lock the door on their sordid partnership so she can…
I find stimulation, knowledge and
entertainment in a wide range of reading material, from crime fiction to true crime,
horror and westerns and science fiction.
This tale of a space ship named
Providence and its four-member crew battling a new alien species ranks among my
science fiction favorites, alongside Justin Cronin’s Passage trilogy and the
Wool books now being serialized on Apple TV as Silo. Published in 2020 by
veteran SciFi author Max Barry, it recounts a future voyage into deep space to
scout the new species after first contact 17 years before.
Besides non-stop
action and in-depth character development for each member of the crew, Barry
also provides a greedy corporate villain with a secret agenda using an AI to
actually control the ship.
Following characters as they face survival
challenges and solve problems offers the kind of inspirational reading experience
that lingers long after I finish a book. But you won’t need to reflect deeply
to appreciate Providence.
If you’d rather come for the deep space adventure, that will be enough.
I ordered this 1977 horror novel for free
download from an e-book distributor on a lark and received a satisfying
surprise. In Bonegrinder, veteran St. Louis mystery author John Lutz introduced
me to a monster different from the normal run of zombies, werewolves, or
vampires.
I had encountered a similar monster once before in my literary
travels, as a kid in the 1950s watching the television series “Cheyenne.” So, I
had suspicions about the Bonegrinder before Lutz ultimately unveiled it near
the end of the book. But I enjoyed the search.
Set in the Missouri Ozarks, the
book follows an ensemble cast of interesting characters trying to solve the
unexplainable series of gruesome murders terrifying the rural community, with
the local sheriff leading the hunt.
Besides the suspense of solving the
mystery, Lutz employs several dramatic subplots for his characters that allow the
reader to explore the emotions of adultery, failed marriage, lost love, and
blind ambition.
When the men find him, the boy’s legs look like they were run through a wood-chipper. He’s bleeding heavily and near death, but he still has strength to tell them of the monster that attacked a dark, massive creature that emerged from the bottom of the lake. The child dies before he can say more.
Sheriff Billy Wintone has seen too much superstition, drunkenness, and rage in this small Ozarks town to believe the delirious boy’s tale of a monster lurking under the lake’s dark waters. Like it or not, however, Wintone must scour the woods for the man or…
In this true crime memoir, former Houston Post reporter Gary Taylor recounts his true-life fatal attraction involvement in the trail of violence that has dogged Texas attorney Catherine Mehaffey Shelton for nearly three decades, prompting coverage by newspapers, TV, movies, and even Oprah Winfrey.
Now Taylor invites readers to grab a seat on the wild ride of an obsessive relationship: erotic beginning to violent end and the trials required to clean up the mess. The result is an adventure odyssey of self-discovery through an encounter that nearly cost him his life.
