A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd

Please note: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price. So buy and read now!

Summary: A nurse is determined to deliver the message of a man who died in her care.

Bess Crawford is my new favorite character. She's an army nurse for the British in WWI (long before we ever knew there would be a WWII) and she is a tough cookie, having been injured when a nursing boat is damaged and sunk after an encounter with a bomb. While she's recovering, she travels to the family of a man she nursed, one she had begun to care for deeply.

She is coldly received by the family and yet when she delivers the message, she becomes even more concerned. Was Arthur, her wounded soldier, covering up a crime? And is his family covering up a greater one? At every turn, Bess is reminded that she has a duty to the dead, but does Bess also have a duty to the living? This was a surprising mystery and one that perfectly captured the mood and time of the setting as well.

Save Me by Lisa Scottoline

Please note: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price. So buy and read now!

Summary: During a school fire, a mom is torn between saving her daughter or the kids in her care, with deadly consequences.

I originally thought this was a book about bullying, but it was so much more. Rose volunteers as a lunch mom at her daughter Melly's school, hoping to intervene in the some of the constant bullying that Melly is a victim to. 

On Rose's very first day, she sees Melly run away in tears and hide in the bathroom. Rose goes over to confront the girl, and the entire lunchroom is rocked by a gas explosion. In a split second, Rose must decide: Does she go back in towards the fire in hopes of saving Melly, or does she get the girls she's talking to to safety?  Rose escorts the bullying girls to the door to outside and then runs back in, hoping to save Melly. Melly has locked the door and has passed out from smoke inhalation.

Rose does save Melly, but just barely. Unfortunately, the chief bully ran back inside for her ipod and lays in a coma. Rose goes from hero mom to social pariah in a day. Confession time here: I have never finished a Jodi Picoult book. I find her writing maudlin and cliched. The first part of this book seemed to be very much written in a Picoult-ish style (instead of Scottoline's style) and I almost didn't continue. In fact, it took me a long time to push through.

I'm glad I did persevere because the book became much of what I love about Lisa Scottoline's style: ordinary women doing sneaky adventurous things and escaping danger. The ending was a little too neat and tidy but certain scenes made my heart race. Not Scottoline's best, but decent.

Pride and Prescience by Carrie Bebris

Please note: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price. So buy and read now!

Summary: Just after their marriage, Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth Darcy solve a mystery. 

You know by now how much I adore Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. And I'm constantly reading books inspired by or involving the characters. This book, which takes place just after Darcy and Elizabeth get married, is really closest in tone (style, syntax) to P&P.

While there is quite a bit more informality between Darcy and Elizabeth, it gave me a small thrill to see them happily married. Soon after their marriage, Miss Caroline Bingley - yes, the same Caroline Bingley who practically destroyed Jane's chance at happiness in P&P - marries an American. That night, she is seen wandering the street, about to be attacked by footpads. Darcy rescues her, and Elizabbeth and Darcy take the new Mrs. Parrish home. After an incident during riding and a botched suicide attempt, Bingley and Jane and Mr. and Mrs. Hurst (Charles and Caroline's married sister) decide to host Mr. and Mrs. Parrish and a Professor of Religious Artifacts and Mr. Parrish's friend at Netherfield, in an attempt to heal Caroline. Darcy and Elizabeth are loyal, so they accompany everyone to Netherfield and stay with them. The book dragged in the middle, but jumps right into the problems.

Bingley and Caroline are involved in a potentially fatal carriage accident, there's a damaging housefire at Netherfield and a stabbing. Who is the intended victim here? Is it Bingley and his fortune? Caroline Parrish? Darcy? Together, and separately, Elizabeth and Darcy solve the mystery and save the day.

While the writing was not as good as Austen's, I look forward to many more novels featuring Mr. and Mrs. Darcy.

Clarity by Kim Harrington

Please note: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price. So buy and read now!

Summary: A teen psychic tries to solve a murder in her tourist town. 

This book felt very much like my beloved television show Veronica Mars. You have a sassy, mature/precocious teen who is ostracized by her peers, yet one boy takes the time to get to know her, which eases her social life and brings her a bit of happiness before it's ripped away. Only instead of being a girl detective, Clarity (or Clare) Fern is a psychic.

This was an enjoyable teen thriller. Clarity and her brother and mother make their living giving accurate psychic readings. They are ostracized by the townies, but he tourists love them. Perry also dates the vacationing girls while Clare has no friends her age.

A young tourist is murdered in Clarity's tourist town. The hot son of the big city detective asks for her help in solving the murder, as does her hot ex-boyfriend, who is the son of the mayor running for re-election in a tense race. But what's really worrisome is that Clare's brother Perry was very likely the last person to see the murdered girl alive. In fact, he had sex with her.

Clare doubts her brother for just an instant, but the evidence is quickly mounting against him. Soon Clare becomes a target, as the murders keep happening. An easy quick read with a fun plot and characters.

Still Missing by Chevy Stevens

Please note: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price. So buy and read now!

Summary: A woman is kidnapped and kept in a cabin in the Canadian woods. Once she's freed, she's never feels safe.

I was hesitant to read this book, simply because the subject is so disturbing. Annie O'Sullivan is kidnapped from work one day, kept in a cabin in the Canadian woods, raped daily and brutalized for over a year. The Freak, as Annie calls her captor, only lets her urinate four times a day. When she tries to go the bathroom at a different time, he punishes her by making her drink the toilet water. That's a small sample of the abuse she suffers, as he lives out some crazy fantasy.

I kept reading because the book opens with Annie free and talking to a therapist, so I knew that somehow she escaped. Annie also becomes pregnant during her captivity and delivers a baby. I wish I had stopped reading soon after the baby's birth because things got even worse. I thought that when Annie delivered the baby that hospital staff helps her escape or something, but Annie delivers the baby in the cabin!

When Annie gets out - I won't tell you how - her life is almost more tense, and she never feels safe. Then, after a second kidnapping attempt, Annie's won't rest until she knows exactly why she was kidnapped and who The Freak was working with, if anybody. The villain of the piece comes as a surprise, but Annie's paranoia makes her doubt almost everyone.

This is a debut novel, and it shows, with uneven, unpolished passages. Annie also uses vulgarity frequently, which is a character choice by the author but also typical of people with underdeveloped vocabulary. I wish I hadn't read this, because it creeped me out, but I finished.  I can't recommend it to people, because it's not my style, but I can see how it would appeal to others. As a story, I did think it was better written than Room.

Simple Secrets by Nancy Mehl

Please note: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price. So buy and read now!

Summary: Grace inherits an house from her uncle and discovers a dead body on the property.

I was given a copy of this book by the publisher.

Mystery.
Murder.
And Mennonites?
Oh, yes.

This book was a well-seasoned mix of Christian fiction, romance and mystery.

Grace inherits a house from her estranged uncle and takes two weeks off work to settle affairs and get some family heirlooms before selling the house.

What Grace also inherits is the property that her uncle says hides the body of Jacob Glick, a rival for mother's hand. Her uncle believed that Grace's father, his brother, murdered Jacob Glick. Uncle Ben (yes, I know) had hidden the body all these years to protect his brother. Grace knows her father is not a murderer but resolves to solve the mystery of who murdered Jacob Glick, so she can sell the property free and clear.

The Mennonite town of Harmony, Kansas welcomes Grace and Sam is designated to show Grace around town. Sam and Grace fit well together, but Grace can't ever imagine giving up her job in Wichita to stay in backwards Harmony. Why, some houses don't even have telephones!

But as Grace and Sam try to interview other town people to find more about Jacob Glick, the list of suspects keeps growing. Is it even safe for Grace to uncover the truth? The sabotage doesn't fit with the Mennonite community but somebody has been carrying a deadly secret for 25 years.

Grace's relationship with God is a subtle part of the book, not beating anyone over the head, but supplying Grace with a steady hand and guidance. The tender romance between Sam and Grace is written with just enough tension that you could almost forget about the mystery and the dead body in the north forty.

Quite an enjoyable read. Don't let the Mennonite factor scare you off.

Dead Air by Kerri Miller

Please note: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price. So buy and read now!

Summary: A Minneapolis TV journalist uncovers an international scandal while tracking the disappearance of another journalist.

Author Kerri Miller is a local radio personality here in the Twin Cities. She has an on-air book club and hosts interesting guests. So I was excited to read this book. And it's not terrible, just disappointing.

Dead Air follows the life of Cate McCoy, a TV journalist assigned to cover local politics. Eddie Hamm is a parody of former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura. Hamm (even the name shows you that he's larger than life) insults women, is a former paratrooper, says outrageous things and then calls the press vultures, yet has an extremely high approval rating. Of course Jesse Ventura would provide material for a book, but I felt like the fictional  governor's antics and personality were an over-spiced side dish next to a bland, boiled main entree of a story.

"All of this protocol bullshit was exhausting, like being back in the military without the fun of jumping out of planes."

Cate, as so many fictional journalists do, gets caught up in solving the mystery under the guise of being a reporter. In this novel, it's the disappearance and possible murder of Millicent Pine, a radical aging journalist, in town to do a profile on the governor. But the antics of the governor are just a red herring, as Millicent was working on a much bigger story, the abuse, rape, murder and kidnapping of young Mexican Mennonite girls.

Cate and her trusty camerawoman Andy fly down to Mexico, sneak into a factory, and uncover a pornography smuggling operation. Cate is saved from a bullet in the back and a shallow dusty grave by the sudden appearance of a DEA agent.

"McCoy, it's been said before but I'll say it again. You are one tough broad-caster." 

Sheesh.  Yet, Cate's a reporter to the end, refusing to share any of her information with the cops and trying to solve the murder by herself. Weak character development and a convoluted plot disappointed me.

If you want nosy crime reporters, consider Stalking Susan by Julie Kramer or any one of the Irene Kelly books by Jan Burke.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Please note: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price. So buy and read now!

Summary: A teenage hacker mobilizes fellow teens after another terrorist attack.

I don’t like hackers. They seem obnoxious and troublesome, breaking into files just because they can. So a novel featuring teenage hackers, who are likely breaking the law, didn’t appeal to me. But I kept reading that Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother was one of the best pieces of Young Adult Fiction.

They - whoever they are - were right.

I started reading this book, not expecting to like it and ended up ignoring my kids so I could finish it. It was entertaining, suspenseful and thought-provoking.

Little Brother is set in the near future in San Francisco. Marcus and his friends sneak out of school one day to play an online treasure-hunting game – Harajuku Fun Madness.  Marcus is a snotty punk, who likes feeling smarter than and superior to the adults around him.

“The Man was always coming down on me, just because I go through school firewalls like wet Kleenex, spoof the gait-recognition software, and nuke the snitch chips they track us with.”

While Marcus and his friends are on the streets of San Francisco, a terrorist attack occurs. Terrorists have bombed the Bay Bridge, cutting off the mainland from the rest of the city. Mass panic. Their friend Darryl is stabbed in the back in the chaos after the bombing and when the friends flag down a police car for help, they are instead thrown into a van, taken off American soil and wake up in a cell, alone.

Homeland Security, yes, the Department of Homeland Security of the United States of America, suspects that these high school kids are terrorists because they were close to the bomb at the time of the attack and not where they were supposed to be. Marcus is psychologically tormented, isolated, deprived and humiliated – everything but physically tortured.

“I’d broken a lot of rules all my life and I’d gotten away with it, by and large. Maybe this was justice. Maybe this was my past coming back to me. After all, I had been where I was because I’d snuck out of school.”

Marcus is finally released after he tells the passwords and codes to every piece of technology he has on him. His cell phone, his computer at home, anything you can think of, he provides information about, terrified into spilling his guts. Marcus is released with the threat that DHS will be watching him.

My biggest complaint about many of the YA novels out there is “Where are the parents?!” It seems like kids get into trouble and hide werewolves and vampires in their rooms while the parents obliviously go along. But Marcus’s parents are real characters with real viewpoints.

When Marcus stumbles home, his parents cry with relief that he’s alive. He’s too terrified about his recent brush with Homeland Security to even tell his parents the truth. He doesn’t even know if his friends made it out as well; he’s just so happy to be home and safe.

“Believe it or not, my parents made me go to school the next day. I’d only fallen into feverish sleep at three in the morning, but at seven the next day, my dad was standing at the foot of my bed, threatening to drag me out by the ankles. I managed to get up – something had died in my mouth after painting my eyelids shut – and into the shower.”

At school the next day, Darryl is still missing. Everyone else in the group is home safely except Marcus’ best friend Darryl. Marcus starts asking questions because he owes it to Darryl to get him home. Thugs from Homeland Security confront him on his way home, ordering him to shut up if he knows what’s good for him. Trembling, Marcus vows to bring down DHS, using technology, the power of the internet and a very real distrust of the government.

The humor of this book must be my kind of humor, because I grew to like Marcus’ views on many things, even as I agree (agreed?) with his dad about privacy and security concerns.

‘ “The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He was awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. “The right of freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn’t the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you’re hanging with gangbangers and terrorists?”

“Because it’s an invasion of my privacy!” I said.

“What’s the big deal? Would you rather have privacy or terrorists?” ‘

It leads to some great discussions the unlimited powers that government holds.

 “It’s unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government classed crypto as a munitions and made it illegal for anyone to export it or use it on national security grounds. Get that. We used to have illegal math in this country.”

I won’t tell you how it ends, but never underestimate the far reaching powers of Homeland Security. Almost anything can be done under the excuse of national security and that is frightening.

So yes, this book is about a teenage hacker who fights the government, but it’s so much more. It’s about cryptology, history, mathematics, writing computer programming code, social revolution, “fighting The Man,”  freedom and of course, teen angst. I’m so glad I read this.

Deadly Little Secret (A Touch Novel) by Laurie Faria Stolarz

Please note: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price. So buy and read now!

Summary: Teenage Camelia gets involved with the town bad boy, who was accused of murdering his last girlfriend.

This book read like a Lifetime movie. Not that there's anything wrong with that, okay (I love Marlena Hall and Shannen Doherty as much as the next housewife), but it felt cliched to me.

The book opens with dark brooding Ben saving Camelia from an out-of-control car. Twilight, anyone?

Then the next chapter opens to the diary of someone who is loving Camelia from afar. The stalking part and the insane diary writer just scream Lifetime movie. One of my favorite movies has a woman unsuspectingly marry her rapist. You can't make this stuff up! Oh, wait, you can.

Then there's an encounter in biology class, where Ben touches Camelia's hand and they have a shocking moment. A moment so disturbing to Ben that he leaves school for a few days. Twilight, again. 

When Cam and her friend shop at the mall, the outfit she tried on but didn't buy is waiting for her on her bed. And the word "Bitch" is written on her mirror with lipstick. 

From the stalker's diary:

"I hate seeing her with other guys. The way she flirts with them and laughs at their stupid jokes. I saw her talking to that dirtbag. So I called her. I had to set things straight. To put her in her place. To warn her."

and

"What I don't know is why she acts like this. you think she'd be grateful for the gift I left her. That she wouldn't go behind my back ignoring my warning like we never even talked."

Like many Lifetime movies, there is limited parental involvement in the teen's life. Cam's parents are dealing with adult stuff, so Cam never mentions the gifts left on her dresser, the photos of her left in the mailbox, the late night heavy-breathing phone calls, the threatening graffiti, the menacing notes. Of course she tells her friends, but they're convinced that it's Ben, since everyone knew he killed his last girlfriend. But Camelia knows that there's something off about Ben. Did he kill his last girlfriend? Is he violent? Is he the one stalking her? Or is something else going on. Plot spoiler: something else is going on.)

By page 108, I knew who Camelia's stalker was. But I was wrong. Which totally redeemed this book.