Quick Book Reviews Blog

Lawrence Wright generally enjoys reflecting reality in his writings, or outright denouncing it as he did with Scientology . In his latest novel, titled The End of October , Lawrence takes us on a global adventure alongside Henry Parsons, an epidemiologist tasked with trying to stop the spread of a deadly disease threatening the entire world, while trying to survive with his family against ever-decreasing odds.

Jacqueline Winspear probably didn't know she would start writing the series which defines her today with her first Maisie Dobbs novel, but it's a path which has certainly given life to many interesting stories. In this debut published back in 2014, we are introduced to the eponymous private investigator as she returns to her hometown in 1929, taking on two cases. The first one revolves around a suspiciously complex infidelity, and second one around a closed WWI veterans' retreat.

While love isn't something we can ever hope to truly understand, there are wiser folk such as Nina Romano who might be a bit closer to the truth by virtue of their life experience. In The Secret Language of Women she puts all of it to good use as she kicks off the Wayfarer Trilogy , transporting us to the very end of the 19th century in China. We are introduced to a Eurasian healer and an Italian sailor whose love for each other is consistently thwarted by the chains of duty and fate amidst the violent Boxer Rebellion.

Charles Todd, the pen name by which a mother and son writing team go, have written quite a number of novels revolving around the First World War, and Casualty of War is yet another to add to that last, this time being part of the Bess Crawford Mysteries. In this one, we follow Bess, a British Army nurse, as she witnesses first-hand the profound and everlasting effects the war has on people through the path walked by a certain Captain Alan Travis who insists his cousin shot him twice.

Caroline Woods may not be a famous author yet, but nothing has stopped her for writing an ambitious and far-reaching family drama titled Fraulein M . It opens by taking us to 1930s Berlin, where two sisters are raised in a Catholic orphanage and find themselves trying to navigate the equally grandiose and terrifying waters of Nazi Germany. Fast forward almost forty years in the future, and we are presented with a woman in South Carolina who is determined to learn more about her family's history following the death of her father... a secretive history, tracing its roots all the way back to the Third Reich.

Ella Carey invites us on a road towards a past filled with questions as we follow a young woman, Anna, who was recently tasked by her grandfather to go back to Germany and retrieve a priceless family heirloom after revealing to her the family's secret aristocratic origins. What at first seems like the sentimentality of an old man quickly turns into a mystery with more questions than answers.