Wonder Woman: Dead Earth by Daniel Warren Johnson (2019)

 

Throughout the years, Wonder Woman has had many dramatic storylines, but maybe none as dire as this. After hundreds of years in a deep sleep, Diana   awakens to find herself in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Her friends, the Justice League, gone…or dead. The reason why, wiped from her memory.

Wonder Woman must find others in the wasteland; she needs to know what catastrophe took place, and why. Most importantly, she needs to find her way home to Themyscira, to her mother. The mythical island must have survived this desolation, right?

Daniel Johnson, writer and illustrator, creates a strikingly visual tale of fallen gods and monsters. His tale of destruction and death still holds tight to forgiveness and hope, making for one of the more captivating short runs in DC comics.

While, we know that this is just one version of Wonder Woman, one of the many in an infinite pool of dimensions, it is still a heartbreaking ode to one of DC’s most powerful heroes.

4.04 stars on Goodreads, 4.8 on Amazon

A Beautiful Blue Death (Charles Lenox Mysteries #1) by Charles Finch (2007)

 

Agatha Award for best new mystery nominee 2007

One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2007

In this his first novel, Charles Finch introduces the reader to Charles Lenox, an amateur detective in Victorian London. Charles is the wealthy younger brother of a baronet who likes nothing more than dry feet and relaxing by the fire with his tea and his books. But he can’t help himself when an opportunity to investigate presents itself. Lenox is aided in these investigations by a host of characters including his brother Edmund, his best friend Lady Jane Grey, his assistant and friend Dr. Thomas McConnell, and his faithful butler Graham.

In A Beautiful Blue Death, the investigation begins when Lady Jane requests Lenox’s aid in discovering how a former maid died while working in another household. Lenox discovers he is dealing with a murder by poison rather than suicide and we are introduced to a plethora of potential suspects. Like any good mystery writer, Finch drops small clues throughout the book, some relevant, others misdirects.

The book’s characters are fully developed, and you’ll feel you actually know them.  The same attention to detail is given to the customs, events, buildings, and neighborhoods of historical London.  If you are familiar with the city, you can travel along with Lenox during his investigation. Some might find the book slow going because of all the detail but I appreciated it.  If you are looking for a fast read, this is not it.

Currently there are 14 Charles Lenox Mysteries. I’ve already started book #2, which takes place at Oxford.

3.63 stars on Goodreads, 4.2 on Amazon

Dirt (Stone Barrington series #2) by Stuart Woods (1999)

 

Stone Barrington is a former cop, forced into retirement by a department in which he never fit. Stone holds a law degree and after passing the Bar he is hired by a prestigious New York law firm to handle special cases.  He also maintains his own office where his services are more of an investigative than legal nature. And Stone sleeps with every woman he meets, all of whom are beautiful. As I was reading, I couldn’t help but wonder if Stone and James Bond had ever compared notes.

In the fast-paced Dirt, Stone takes on a blackmail scheme involving Amanda Dart, a nationally syndicated gossip columnist known as "the High Bitch Queen". Amanda receives a fax entitled Dirt containing details of her very private life and learns it has been sent to everybody who is anybody. The fax scheme soon expands to include Amanda's publisher, who also hires Stone, and the gay but closeted editor of a sleazy L.A. tabloid.

Stone is tasked with finding out who is behind the faxes and enlists the help of a former cop who ends up murdered. Stone finds answers hard to come by and his clients begin to take matters into their own hands without Stone’s knowledge. Tension builds as Stone discovers the seemingly random murder of his friend is related to the case.  There is a large cast of potential suspects introduced throughout the book.

Dirt is fast moving story with enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing until the surprising reveal.

If you like Dirt and want to read more about Stone Barrington’s cases, there are currently 59 other titles in this series. By the looks of it, Stuart Woods isn’t done yet. Each can be read as a standalone title.

3.89 stars on Goodreads, 4.4 on Amazon

The Search by Nora Roberts (2011)

 

When we first meet Fiona Bristow, she is happily living her life on an island off Seattle's coast, where she runs a thriving dog-training school, and has three labs of her own. Fiona also heads up a search and rescue team with the dogs. The reader soon finds Fiona has struggled to find this idyllic life after her escape from the Red Scarf Killer, the serial killer who then killed her K-9 officer fiancé and his four-legged partner.

Fiona’s peaceful existence is interrupted by the arrival of grumpy artist Simon Doyle and his out-of-control puppy, Jaws. Jaws is the glue that brings these two very different people together. Just when all is going well, Fiona finds herself being hunted by a copycat killer, with a possible connection to the Red Scarf Killer. Will she be able to escape this time?

Reviewers either love or hate the Fiona/Simon dynamic, but all agree the dogs steal the show. The Search is one intense read.

4.15 stars on Goodreads, 4.7 on Amazon

Code Name: Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII's Most Highly Decorated Spy by Larry Lofts (2019), 940.54 L

 

Code Name Lise is the true story of Odette Sansom, a British spy operating in occupied France during World War II, who fell in love with her commanding officer, Captain Peter Churchill. In 1942, Odette’s British husband is off fighting and she leaves her three daughters behind to become a SOE agent and spy for her adopted country. Peter and Odette are eventually captured by the German secret police. The pair are sent to Paris’s Fresnes prison, and from there to concentration camps in Germany where they are starved, beaten, and tortured. No matter how bad it gets, Peter and Odette never give up hope, their colleague’s whereabouts, or their love for each other.

The author seamlessly weaves together the growing romance between Odette and Peter and their many missions which put them in the crosshairs of the secret police. Although non-fiction, Code Name: Lise contains all the elements of WWII spy thriller.

3.94 stars on Goodreads, 4.6 on Amazon

Circe by Madeline Miller (2018)

 From the author of The Song of Achilles, Circe is the most recent book from Madeline Miller. In this novel Miller takes various myths where Circe appears, and retells her story in a cohesive novel. With regards to the mythology we see Circe as a side character in various stories. For instance, when Circe meets Odysseus and his men in books 10 and 11 of the Odyssey, and changes his crew into pigs. While in this novel Miller tells of Circe’s life and how she is exiled to the island of Aiaia. While on the island of Aiaia meets with various characters from Greek myth such as Daedalus, Jason, Medea, and Odysseus among others. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest I Greek myth, along with The Song of Achilles, especially if the idea of reading a translation text such as the Odyssey.  Miller presents the material in the form of a novel written for a current audience. 

 4.26 Stars on Goodreads, 4.6 on Amazon

Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2) by Nicholas Petrie (2017)

 

Peter Ash spent eight years in Afghanistan and Iraq as a Marine lieutenant. He has returned to civilian life with severe claustrophobia which Peter calls “white static”. As a result, he has spent the last two years backpacking through the west, camping, and living out of his truck. Throughout the series, Peter uses his skills to help others and Burning Bright is no different.

When escaping a large grizzly bear by climbing a tall tree, Peter discovers a series of climbing ropes moving from tree to tree. As the bear has no intention of leaving, Peter follows the ropes to a hanging platform. There he meets June Cassidy,  an investigative journalist who has just escaped a kidnapping attempt. June’s mother, a prominent software designer for the Department of Defense has recently been killed in a hit and run accident. Given the mysterious events that followed her death, June comes to believe her mother was murdered for one of her many projects. Could the kidnapping attempt have something to do with that project? But which one?

There are several references to the plot in the first book, The Drifter, but it is not necessary to have read it to enjoy this well-developed story and cast of characters.

Reviewers have compared Peter Ash to Jack Reacher and Jason Bourne.

Profanity throughout.

The sixth book is the series, The Breaker, was recently published.

4.10 stars on Goodreads, 4.5 on Amazon

Death of an American Beauty (Jane Prescott #3) by Mariah Fredericks (2020)

 

Death of an American Beauty is Fredericks’ third novel about lady’s maid Jane Prescott who has a knack for becoming involved in and solving mysteries. The series takes place in New York in the early 1900s. The year of this book is 1913, the fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation speech and Dolly Rutherford, wife of the wealthy owner of Rutherford’s Department Store, has gathered society’s ladies to put on a play in honor of the anniversary.  The star is Jane’s employer Louise Tyler.

Jane is on holiday, staying with her uncle who runs a refuge for fallen women where Jane grew up. Her uncle is the only family she knows. When one of the women from the refuse is horribly murdered, Jane’s uncle falls under suspicion.  Jane is determined to prove her uncle’s innocence and is assisted by old friends and new acquaintances.  At the same time Jane finds herself helping with the costuming for the play and is drawn into the drama of Rutherford’s, including the annual pageant for Miss Rutherford, the face of the department store for the coming year.

The writing is very detail oriented; Fredericks’ characters are independent, intelligent, and resourceful. The book is a well-paced whodunit full of amateur sleuthing, red herrings, family dynamics, duty, racial inequality, sexism, romance, violence, and murder. Readers would benefit by reading the first two books in the series beforehand, but Death of an American Beauty can stand on its own. All three books are in the library’s collection.

3.83 stars on Goodreads, 4.4 on Amazon

The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by VE Schwab

 

A young woman in France, during the 1700s, fears how short a lifetime can be and how little can be accomplished. Addie is unwilling to settle down and accept small-town life in the 1700s. Instead she discovers what happens when you pray to the gods at night, and why you never make deals with them. In exchange for never ending life, Addie will have to live a life where no one can remember her. Everyone who knew Addie up until this point in her life has now completely forgotten her existence. Also, anyone new Addie  meets will forget her after she leaves their presence. Until 300 years later, when Addie encounters a boy in a bookstore who doesn’t forget.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it. While this novel can easily be labeled as Fantasy, I would say it is light on those elements, and can easily be enjoyed by those who don’t want to be bogged down in fantasy worlds. The book also has elements of historical fiction and recounts moments of Addie’s life over the 300 year span. If you enjoy this book, and want something with more fantasy elements I’d suggest checking out VE Schwab’s Shades of Magic Trilogy.

4.39 stars on Goodreads, 4.6 on Amazon

The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel (2020)

 

Inspired by an amazing true story, a young woman with a talent for forgery helps hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis during World War II. Eva Traube Abrams is that woman.  When we meet Eve, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, she happens across an image of a book she hasn’t seen in sixty-five years—a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names.

The accompanying article discusses the Nazis’ looting of libraries across Europe during World War II and the search to reunite the true owner with these stolen texts. The book in question is an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France near the end of the war.

The book is now housed in Berlin’s Berlin Central and Regional Library and appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from—or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer, but it will mean confronting her buried past, a past not even her son knows about.

As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. She finds refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone and begins forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But changing a person’s identity comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva finds a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.

The Book of Lost Names is an utterly captivating read.

4.36 stars on Goodreads, 4.7 stars on Amazon.

The Forgotten Room by Karen White, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig (LT) (2016)

 

Three stories, told by three different authors, with one common thread, an address in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Combined their stories become a complex mystery connecting three generations of women in one family to a single extraordinary room in the Gilded Age mansion at that address.

In 1945 the mansion is being used as a private hospital to which a critically wounded Captain Cooper Ravenal is brought. He carries a portrait miniature featuring a woman who looks very much like his young doctor Kate Schuyler. And the ruby pendant she is wearing looks a lot like the pendant handed down to Kate by her mother.

In their pursuit of answers, the pair find themselves drawn into the turbulent history of the mansion. The reader learns about Olive Van Alen, a woman driven from riches to rags in the latter 1800s, who hires out as a servant in the very mansion her father designed. During the 1920s Lucy Young comes to the house in pursuit of the father she had never known.

Are Kate and Cooper ready for the secrets that will be revealed in the Forgotten Room? Find out for yourself.

White, Williams, and Willig have written two other historical novels together and each of them are very prolific as  solo authors in the field of historical fiction.

3.90 stars on Goodreads, 4.4 on Amazon.

Winter Garden by Kristen Hannah (2010)

 

“Mesmerizing from the first page to the last, Kristin Hannah's Winter Garden is one woman’s sweeping, heartbreaking story of love, loss, and redemption. At once an epic love story set in World War II Russia and an intimate portrait of contemporary mothers and daughters poised at the crossroads of their lives, it explores the heartbreak of war, the cost of survival and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit. It is a novel that will haunt the reader long after the last page is turned.” So starts the Amazon review and I couldn’t agree more.

Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her children and manage the family business while the other followed her dream and traveled the world becoming a famous photojournalist. The sisters find themselves reunited when their beloved father turns ill. They are also reunited with their cold, disapproving mother, Anya, who even now, offers no comfort to her daughters. As children, the only connection with their mother was the Russian fairy tale she sometimes told them at bedtime about a beautiful Russian girl who lived in Leningrad a lifetime ago….

On his deathbed, their father extracts a promise from the women: the fairy tale will be told one last time— and all the way to the end. Alternating between the past and present, Meredith and Nina hear the harrowing story of their mother’s life, beginning in World War II Leningrad and spanning more than sixty years to modern day Alaska. The story will shake the very foundation of their family and change who they believe they are.

Kristin Hannah, the author of more than twenty books, started out writing romances but has since changed her focus to stories of women's lives and relationships, particularly in families. Her character-driven novels wrestle with universal issues surrounding parenthood, marriage, infidelity, and loss. Many of Hannah’s books can be found on the libraries’ shelves.

4.18 stars on Goodreads, 4.6 on Amazon

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd (2020)

“I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth. I called him Beloved and he, laughing, called me Little Thunder.” 

History offers no conclusive evidence as to the martial status of Jesus.  We do know however, that is was customary for a Jewish man in his early 20s to take a wife. The Book of Longings is the beautifully written reimagined story Jesus and his chosen wife. I loved, loved, loved this book!

Ana is a force to be reckoned with; she is brilliant, ambitious, and has a daring spirit. When the reader first meets her, Ana is 14 and living with her wealthy family in first century Galilee. Ana rebels against the expectations for women of her time and encouraged by her father, she learns to read and write. When Ana’s rebellious nature gets her into trouble, she is recused by an 18-year-old Jesus.

Jesus and Ana marry and live in poverty with his family in Nazareth. Ana has her Aunt Yaltha with her but is not used to poverty and the work required to keep the family alive. The union is a happy one although Jesus is often away from home looking for work. It is after Ana travels with Jesus to meet John the Baptist that Jesus begins his ministry. Ana is left behind as we know Jesus did not have female disciples.

Ana goes back to the family, but circumstances soon force her to flee. She and Yaltha find their way to the Therapeutae in Alexandria, a community of Jewish philosophers living simple lives dedicated to studying and writing. It is here Ana finds her true calling. She leaves Therapeutae briefly when she learns Jesus’ life is in danger and is able to see him before his death.

Grounded in meticulous research and written with a reverential approach to Jesus's life that focuses on His humanity, The Book of Longings blends perfectly with the New Testament stories we know so well. Be sure to read the Author Notes before putting the book down.

4.25 stars on Goodreads, 4.5 on Amazon