207 Book Talk

The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James introduces us to Carly, a college student who has recently lost her mother. She leaves college and heads to New York to look into a family mystery that she was never allowed to ask about growing up. Her mother's sister Viv Delaney disappeared from her job as the night clerk at the Sun Down Motel in 1982.  Shortly after arriving, things fall in to place for Carly to stay in Fell for longer than just a few days, perhaps long enough to solve her aunt's disappearance. She stumbles across Heather, another twenty-something looking for a roommate when she goes to see the apartment her aunt was living in when she vanished. When they go to see The Sun Down Motel for the first time, Heather notices a help wanted sign. The motel is looking fora night clerk, and Carly finds herself working the same job her aunt used to have. The motel hasn't changed much, if at all, since 1982. As Carly works to learn more about her aunt, strange things are happe...

I found  Last Day  by Luanne Rice on Kindle Unlimited. I had never heard of the author, but the premise of the book sounded interesting so I borrowed it. I would encourage anyone that decides to read this murder mystery to also borrow it from somewhere, instead of buying it. It is not a keeper, in my opinion. Last Day  follows Kate and Conor as they try to solve the murder of Kate's younger sister, Beth. Conor is a police detective who also happens to have been the first officer on the scene many years before when teenagers Kate and Beth were found tied up in the basement of their family art gallery with their dead mother, Helen.  Beth is found bludgeoned and strangled in her bed by Kate and two local officers she called for help when her sister didn't pick up numerous phone calls over the course of several days. Beth's daughter Sam was away at a summer camp in Maine, and her super sleazy husband Peter was conveniently on a guys only sailing trip at the time of Beth'...

  The 20th Victim  is the twentieth entry in James Patterson's Women's Murder Club series. Like any series with this many books to its name, the storylines are never as good 15 or 20 books in as they were at the beginning, but this one felt closer to those earlier entries than other recent titles have. This time around Lindsay and Cindy are caught up in trying to solve a cross country killing spree aimed at taking down drug dealers. Cindy has been contacted by the killer, or one of the killers, directly and in her drive for the scoop she and Lindsay get into a disagreement over sharing details of the crimes sooner rather than later. Yuki is also dealing with a drug related crime and wondering whether its right to charge a teenager wheelman for the crimes committed by his passenger. Claire is dealing with some scary health issues, and is not an active participant in solving crimes as she was in past storylines. As with many of the stories in the Women's Murder Club series, t...

  We all know the saying "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." With that in mind, this review will be brief. All This Time   is coauthored by Mikki Daughtry and Rachael Lippincott, the writes behind Five Feet Apart  (which I did enjoy). The best thing I can say about All This Time  is that, at 238 pages, I only wasted a few hours of my day reading it.  Kyle has had the same girlfriend since middle school. The night of their high school graduation, he has a gift ready that he is sure will fix whatever is going wrong, because something is definitely bothering his girlfriend Kimberly. Unfortunately, before the night is over, they will be in a horrific car crash and Kyle will emerge with a traumatic brain injury and Kimberly will not survive.  SPOILERS AHEAD..... stop here if you don't want to read them. Let me rewrite that last sentence.... Unfortunately, before the night is over, they will be in a horrific car crash and Kyle wil...

  Dear Justyce  by Nic Stone is a follow up to her 2017 debut Dear Martin . Justice is back as a secondary character to Quan, the young man at the center of this story. If you haven't read  Dear Martin , you should. If you like audiobooks, it's one of the best I've ever listened to. How can two boys from the same neighborhood end up on such divergent paths? How much does your upbringing affect your choices? How does being a young African-American boy growing up in a country whose legal system is against you from the start fare compared to a young white boy who also gets in to trouble with the law?  Nic Stone gives readers a window in to these questions, and many more, with this incredible story. Quan is locked up again, this time facing a murder charge, when he begins exchanging letters with Justyce, who is now in his freshman year at Yale University. Quan considers the differences in where their lives have led them based on the choices they both made, and on the fac...

 First, in my defense, I had already started this book BEFORE I created the challenge for myself yesterday to only read books from certain TBR piles in my house and the CloudLibrary holds on my iPad. I didn't cheat! Now on to my review... A Good Girl's Guide to Murder   by Holly Jackson was a book that I heard about because I almost concurrently saw it on a friend's Goodreads profile and on the nominee's list for 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Young Adult Fiction. The friend reading it happens to be a co-worker, and she lent me the book. It sat here on a stack of TBR's for a week or two, and then yesterday as I was finalizing my Popsugar and ATY52 challenge lists, I realized I could use it to fulfill a prompt for both, and here we are. This is the story of a high school student, Pippa Fitz-Amobi, who decides to do her senior capstone project on the infamous murder-suicide of two students that had occurred in her hometown 5 years before. She never really believed S...

 Oof... I finally forced myself to finish reading Layla  by Colleen Hoover today. Before I say what I think (although I am sure that first sentence is a giveaway), I want to mention that I really liked her books Verity and It Ends With Us and I loved  Regretting You. I wasn't sure what to expect from Layla, because  Verity  was so different than her other two novels that I had already read. This one felt like she tried to take what worked in Verity  a step further and it just fell flat.  Layla  is the story of a couple, Leeds and Layla, and the circumstances of their initial meeting, their whirlwind romance, and a terrifying encounter that leaves them both irrevocably changed. Just how changed they are is slowly revealed during the trip they take back to the Kansas bed and breakfast where they first met.  I'll be the first to freely admit that paranormal is not my typical genre, but I have read and loved books that fall under this category se...

  The Silent Wife  by Karin Slaughter is the tenth entry in the Will Trent series. I am reading this book to satisfy prompts from both the Popsugar and ATY reading challenges. ATY prompt 18: Three books related to 'Past, Present, Future' - Book 1 (past) Popsugar Challenge prompt 3: A book that has a heart, diamond, club or spade on the cover