Quick Book Reviews Blog

Few authors have had the success T E Kinsey did with his first novel, A Quiet Life in the Country , the first entry in the Lady Hardcastle Mystery series. Presenting us with the Lady herself, an eccentric widow accompanied by her maid and confidante in 1908 England, the story follows a murder investigation in the countryside, one the police are very close to bungling up. Thankfully, Lady Hardcastle is on the case, and few things, if any, escape her vigilant eye.

Vijay Madhuri may have only begun her literary career by publishing The Far Field in 2019, but she is quickly becoming a recognizable name for it. The story follows a young and restless woman by the name of Shalini who sets out for a Himalayan village in the region of Kashmir, certain she can find some answers about her mother's death. However, she quickly gets caught up in the volatile and explosive politics of the region, as well as the history and traditions of the people in the village.

Melanie Benjamin has shown a remarkable penchant for writing detailed and profound historical fiction novels, and with The Girls in the Picture she further reinforces this notion. Starting by following Frances Marion as she tries to find her calling in the fledgling silent movie industry, we see her become friends with Mary Pickford (who had the title of “America's Sweetheart”), and the two trudge onward to realize their grand ambitions in uncharted territory.

Taylor Jenkins Reid has certainly made a bit of a splash recently being featured in numerous reputable publications, and with Daisy Jones & The Six it seems she has raised the bar for herself even higher. Told through a novel, this is the chronicle of one of the most iconic rock groups from the 1970s, their extremely fortunate rise to their regrettable fall at the absolute height of their popularity.

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen may have written only three novels so far, but she has already demonstrated an uncanny insight into the human mind not only through her master's degree in psychology, but also her book The Liar . It tells the story of two women: a teenage girl and an eighty-eight year-old granny, both of them living mystifying lies which spin out of control. No matter how much they might gain, however, lies are seldom permanently sustainable, and they will both pay the price for their indulgences.

Alix Harrow had only published a few short stories in collaborative works and magazines until 2019, when she finally graced her readers with her debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January . In it, we follow the eponymous January Scaller as she tends to an old recluse in his mansion, and in the process finds a mysterious book which tells tales of danger, adventure, love, and perhaps most intriguingly, secret doors.

Fiona Valpy has certainly entered the realm of literature in great style last year, and with The Dressmaker's Gift she continues her conquest of our bookshelves by telling a grand story of love, loss, terror and happiness. One part of the story takes us to 1940 Paris, where three seamstresses are trying their best to live under the occupation. The other part of the story takes us two generations later, as a granddaughter to one of those seamstresses unravels her own family history.

Jami Attenberg didn't need to write many novels to gain a considerable amount of attention from the literary community for her insightful perception of family and human relations. In All This Could Be Yours , she tells the story of Alex Tuchman, a mother and a lawyer, who tries to unearth the truth about her father who is now on his deathbed. By all accounts he was a bad man, but Alex wants to know it beyond all doubt, and this will require her to pry loose her tight-lipped mother in New Orleans.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is quickly gaining a reputation in the literary world as an author who dares to explore the tragic chapters in American history, never wanting them to be left forgotten. In The Water Dancer , he takes us to the immensely bloody calamity which was the American Civil War as we follow a young man named Hiram in search of his long lost mother, as well as his own place in a world torn asunder by conflict.

T. Greenwood has earned many awards and accolades for her profound and piercing stories, and her recent novel Keeping Lucy is certainly another welcome notch in her career. The novel tells a story inspired by true events, following a mother who sets out to rescue her daughter Lucy, born with Down Syndrome, from a special school which turns out to be a real hell on Earth... sending her down the path of becoming a fully-fledged fugitive.

Alice Hoffman has quite the unique flair in telling her stories, and The World That We Knew only further affirms this, taking us to an alternate view of Europe in 1941, colored heavily by the author's own brand of magical realism. The story follows a twelve-year-old girl, Lea, sent away by her mother to hide her from the Nazi regime. With the help of a Rabbi's daughter, Ettie, and a magical golem made specially for Lea, the trio set out on their own unforgettable adventures where evil waits at every corner.

Rachel Joyce has an uncanny ability to get inside her characters' heads and paint unforgettable portraits there, something she demonstrates yet again with her novel The Music Shop . It tells the overtly-simple story of Frank the music shop owner as he attempts to connect to the one person who might carry him to salvation, the mysterious Ilsa Brauchmann. Inexplicably drawn to each other, they both come to learn about the healing powers of music and love, and perhaps gain a chance to overcome their emotional baggage.

Hannah Tinti took little time to establish herself as an author with some original tales to set on paper, and she continues her award-winning run with The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley . The novel follows the titular Samuel as he spends years on the run trying to raise his daughter Loo. With Loo being a teenager and yearning for a normal life now, Samuel decides to settle down as a fisherman, but the demons from his past are never too far behind, as his twelve bullet scars constantly remind him.

Jonathan Evison has a keen eye for observing the innermost workings of our society, and in Lawn Boy he introduces us to Mike Munoz, a young man a few years out of high-school, who is about to learn a whole lot about the world on his own. Unsatisfied with his trajectory of menial work and recently fired from his last gig as a landscaper, Mike decides to shake his life up a bit and give chase to the good old American dream... after all, shouldn't every American be entitled to it?

While many serial killers have earned infamy forever in the books of history, Maureen Callahan reminds us there are many more who slipped between the cracks of our collective attention. Namely, in her true crime book titled American Predator , she presents us with a serial killer who struck all over the United States and whose methods were considered unprecedented by the FBI: Israel Keyes.

Lara Prescott Tells a Story of Illegal Literature Lara Prescott seems to have an underappreciated knack for bringing to life the lesser-known historical curiosities, at least if her first published novel, The Secrets We Kept , is anything to go by. In it, we are presented with a retelling of how the CIA smuggled Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR to distribute it abroad. More specifically, we follow the two secretaries tasked with the job, as well as a love story for the centuries revolving around Pasternak and his muse Olga Ivinskaya .

Gill Paul has without question established herself as a leading author in the seemingly emerging Romanov historical fiction genre, with notable entries such as The Secret Wife and I Am Anastasia . In her recent novel, The Lost Daughter , Gill Paul tackles the fate of Grand Duchess Maria Romanov with the help of two parallel story lines. One follows Maria as she lives her final days in imprisonment, while the second tells of a woman retracing her surprising, and perhaps even shameful heritage.

Donato Carrisi has been a fantastic representative for Italian literature in the Western world, and his 2013 novel The Lost Girls of Rome is a fantastic example as to why. Taking place in, you guessed it, Rome, it follows a young widow, Sandra Vega, seeking answers after her husband, a journalist, supposedly plunged to his death at a construction site. Unsatisfied with the official version of events, Sandra sets on the trail of a secret society with a much darker and richer history than anyone could have imagined.

Téa Obreht has done no small work in living up to the various awards and nominations she has received so far, just publishing her second novel titled Inland . It tells two stories taking place in the dry lands of 1893 Arizona. The first one follows Nora, a frontierswoman who awaits the return of her husband, gone to look for water, and her elder sons who disappeared after an argument. The second follows Lurie, an outlaw on the run who is forced to take up military service and ends up on a journey for the ages.

Robert Pobi has taken his first dive into the police procedural genre by opening the Lucas Page series with City of Windows . It tells the story of Lucas, a retired and handicapped FBI agent who gets brought back into the fold for his unbelievable ability to analyze crime scenes. More precisely, he is asked to put his talents to use to solve the murder of his former partner, shot by a sniper while on the move in an SUV. Before long, he finds himself fully back in the fold, on the hunt for a killer nobody knows anything about.

Matt Haig has always been one for regaling readers with out-of-the-box thinking, and in How to Stop Time he presents us with a rather unusual scenario. Tom Hazard is a forty-year-old-looking man, but has actually been alive for over four hundred years, living many historical events first-hand. After centuries of travel and exploration, all he wants to do is settle down, but the secretive group which is meant to protect people such as Tom is threatening to derail his life, and what actually might be a shot at love.

Jeanne Mackin is one of the many authors engaged in immersing us in the lesser-known and often overlooked bits and pieces of human history. In The Last Collection , Mackin does this once again by transporting us to the centre of a legendary feud between two iconic fashion designers, Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. As Paris sways indecisively between the imagination of the two women, the looming Nazi threat might just take this competition into unforeseen territory.

Marlowe Benn has certainly announced her arrival on the literary scene with a lot of enthusiasm by publishing her first novel, Relative Fortunes . Taking us back to 1924 Manhattan, we follow the story of a young suffragette, Julia Kydd, with barely realistic dreams of launching a printing press of her own. When her friend's sister dies in what is apparently a suicide, Julia isn't entirely satisfied with the handling of the case, and sets out to prove it was indeed a cleverly disguised murder.

Kate Atkinson has earned her reputation over the years as one of the most respected British writers when it comes to thrillers and mysteries, further cementing her position with Big Sky , the fifth Jackson Brodie book. In it, we follow the private investigator as he takes on a case to capture evidence of a cheating husband, only to unearth a sinister network of cruel men who lure young girls from abroad with false promises.

Though Anne Hillerman specialized in non-fiction literature for a long time, I believe she made a wise decision in trying her hand at writing novels, gifting the world with the Leaphorn and Chee series. In The Tale Teller , we follow Joe Leaphorn as he embarks on a dark journey to retrieving a tribal dress, all while Jim Chee and Officer Bernie Manuelito try to crack a series of burglaries culminating in a homicide.

Greer Macallister has a strong and much-needed voice in literature, centring her works on the power of the female identity. In Woman 99 she introduces us to Charlotte Smith, a wealthy high-society young lady whose sister was committed to an infamous asylum by their parents. Dropping everything, Charlotte goes undercover as an inmate, and soon has the impression most of the patients aren't necessarily crazy, with something sinister brewing above them all.

Keele Burgin has dedicated her life to helping young girls and women all around the world, a venerable path in life towards which she was pushed to because of the immense struggle she went through in her youth, being raised by a fear-driven Catholic cult. In her memoir titled Wholly Unraveled , Burgin recounts those early years of her life, and the journey she traveled towards finding herself and her purpose in a turbulent world.

No family is stranger to secrets, but as the young Kate in Ann Mah's The Lost Vintage is about to discover, some families have mysteries running deeper than others. On the verge of studying for her last attempt at becoming a wine expert, Kate decides to travel to Burgundy and reconnect with her family's ancestral vineyard, as well as Nico and his wife Heather, now in charge of the whole thing. As she digs into her family's history, she stumbles onto a secret they've been keeping since the Second World War.

Ariel Lawhon takes us on a tour into one of the more psychologically curious cases in history in her novel titled I Was Anastasia , delving into the life of Anna Anderson. Not long after the Romanovs were famously executed , a young woman was pulled from a canal in Berlin and began claiming to be Anastasia, who was supposed to be dead and buried. Thus began the woman's journey towards becoming potentially one of the most famous imposters in human history.

The search for identity as a teenager is never easy for normal people, and S. S. Bazinet goes the extra mile to make it a million times more difficult for the sixteen-year-old Theodore in her novel My Brother's Keeper . Having been abducted and raised by a sinister organization known as the WKA, Theodore is quite surprised when his real family locates him, revealing he is in fact a werewolf... one who might be able to turn the tide in the war between his kind and the evil organization hell-bent on destroying them.

A.G. Riddle is a true literary explorer seeking to push humanity to its limits and beyond, setting them on a desperate collision course with something beyond its understanding in Winter World . With a sudden ice age dawning on humanity entire swathes of land become uninhabitable and people begin dropping like flies, with anarchy reigning supreme. Looking to the stars for a miraculous solution, the remnants of humanity find a massive mysterious object floating near Mars ...whatever it is, our civilization's hopes of survival rest entirely in its hands.

Greg Iles has never had any problems depicting both the best and the worst of what the South has to offer, and in Cemetery Road he returns there once again to dive into a filthy pool of treachery and deceit. It tells the story of Marshall McEwan, a journalist who returns to his Mississippi hometown of Bienville and ends up investigating two murders which turned the community inside out. As he is about to discover, the journey awaiting him has only begun to bare its dark and ugly teeth.

War is an unimaginably complex beast and its repercussions often reach far beyond the battlefield in unexpected ways, something Lynda Cohen Loigman makes quite apparent in her second novel, The Wartime Sisters . In it, we are introduced to two estranged sisters who become reunited at the start of the Second World War at the Springfield Armory.

James Lee Burke has sent detective Dave Robicheaux on many sordid adventures throughout his excursions in the realm of literature, and it seems he isn't done with the man yet as he gets wrapped up with a decadent case in The New Iberia Blues . The story begins to unfold as the death of a young woman shocks the country, eventually sending our beloved detective on a morally-bankrupt journey through the cesspools of Hollywood, the underworld of the mafia and the perilous backwoods of Louisiana.

The lives we live, in the end, often boil down into nothing but a series of memories we dearly hold on to. What would happen though, if one day near the end, a shadow of doubt was cast on all you believed to be true about yourself? This is precisely a predicament the ninety-year-old Emma Temple finds herself in Ella Carey's The Things We Don't Say . The most important thing she has left from her husband is the painting he made of her many years ago... and it has just been declared an inauthentic fraud.