Foreboding, gripping, anxiety-inducing, intense, and absolutely brilliant. This nail-biter of a thriller kept me completely off-kilter (in a good way) from the first sentence to the last page. The premise in itself is frightening . . . being home alone with young children during a home invasion. But at its heart, this is a story of survival and resilience, of trusting your instincts and empowerment. The tension and suspense are palpable (and goosebump-inducing) in both the two main settings: the claustrophobic confines of a secret room and a bone-chilling snow field. As the reader, we are privy to the protagonist's inner dialog as she responds to an intruder, hatches a plan to protect her children, reflects on her life, and questions her resolve . . . as we question her sanity. Be warned: once you pick this up, it will be very, very hard to put down.
“Nightwatching is like nothing I've read before. I wolfed it down in two sittings; it's amazing.”—Lisa Jewell
A footstep on the stairs. A second to react. What happens next will determine everything.
Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. She hears a noise—old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and…
If you like being emotional destroyed by a book (I do!), then I highly recommend All The Colors of the Dark. Whitaker sure knows how to breath life into his characters. Although the story is centered around Patch and Saint, the cast of characters that move in and out of their lives are so richly-drawn and equally compelling that you can imagine them as protagonists in their own stories. Every single character is complex, flawed, vulnerable. A poignant portrayal of the aftermath of a shared trauma which take Patch and Saint on divergent journeys to resolve issues of loss, grief, obsession, powerlessness, then eventually finding hope and redemption along the way. Although there are elements of mystery and suspense that propel the plot (with a twist at the end I did not see coming), at its core, this is a character-driven survival story, both heartbreaking and joyous.
A missing persons mystery, a serial killer thriller, and an epic love story - with a unique twist on each...
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Late one summer, the town of Monta Clare is shattered by the abduction of local teenager Joseph 'Patch' Macauley. Nobody more so than Saint Brown, who is broken by her best friend's disappearance. Soon, she will eat, sleep, breathe, only to find him.
But when she it will break her heart.
Patch lies in a pitch-black room - all alone - for days or maybe weeks. Until he feels a hand in his. Her name…
Satire is very hard to pull off (a balancing act where the outrageous must be rooted in reality), so hats off to Kirstin Miller on this brilliant, witty, timely, thought-provoking, laugh-out-loud take on book banning. I listened to the audiobook narrated by January LaVoy and was completely drawn in by her melodious southern drawl, keeping me firmly planted in the fictional town of Troy, Georgia. I'm a sucker for books with a large cast, as long as each character is multi-dimensional, compelling, and has an arc worth following. And this book delivers solidly on that front. The myriad characters and various subplots are seamlessly woven together to propel the primary narrative, namely how lives are transformed when opposing viewpoints about censorship and freedom burst out into full view. Oddly enough, my favorite storyline was that of the 10-year-old boy who inadvertantly plucks out Are You There God, It's Me Margaret from Lula Dean's Little Library.
“Kirsten Miller has that rare ability to take a serious subject and make it very, very funny. I enjoyed this novel and you will too.”--James Patterson
The provocative and hilarious summer read that will have book lovers cheering and everyone talking! Kirsten Miller, author of The Change, brings us a bracing, wildly entertaining satire about a small Southern town, a pitched battle over banned books, and a little lending library that changes everything.
Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Now Beverly is on the…
The summer of ’69: memorable for some, murder for others... Detective Susan Ford and her new partner, Detective Jack Tomelli, are called to a crime scene at the local summer stock theater where they find the director of Murder on the Orient Express gruesomely murdered―naked, face caked in makeup, pillow at his feet, wrists and ankles bound by rope. When Susan describes the murder to her dad, retired detective Will Ford, he recognizes the MO of a 1969 serial killer . . . a case he worked fifty years ago.
Will remembers a lot of things about that summer―the Woodstock Festival, the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Miracle Mets―yet he is fuzzy on the details of the decades-old case. But when Susan and Jack discover the old case files, his memories start trickling back. And with each old and new clue, Susan, Jack, and Will must narrow down the pool of suspects before the killer strikes again.
