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suspense thriller

Book Review: Dreambound by Dan Frey

By Doreen Sheridan

November 1, 2023

As a voracious reader, I’ve never felt bound to any one genre of publishing, though crime fiction certainly has primacy in my heart. Books that understand this and defy the limitations of genre have especial appeal to me. Books that do this while also being about books – and while being wildly entertaining – thus…

Book Review: Perfectly Nice Neighbors by Kia Abdullah

By Doreen Sheridan

October 31, 2023

Salma and Bilal are your typical British couple looking to move off the estate and into a quiet suburban neighborhood. She’s a geography teacher and he’s a restaurateur, though the pandemic has made it really hard to keep a business afloat in the latter industry. When they first view the house in Blenheim while looking…

Book Review: I’m Not Done with You Yet by Jesse Q. Sutanto

By Doreen Sheridan

October 18, 2023

Jesse Q. Sutanto contains multitudes! Her cozy Bay Area mystery, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice For Murderers, is one of my favorite books of this year for its large-hearted generosity. Her latest release, I’m Not Done With You Yet, is almost the exact tonal opposite: a psychological thriller involving damaged women doing terrible, murderous things. Both…

Book Review: Blind Fear by Brandon Webb and John David Mann

By Janet Webb

September 7, 2023

Finn is on the run, hunted by the FBI for horrific war crimes he didn’t commit, reeling from his best friend’s death, and trying to prove his innocence while staying completely off the grid. He is determined to bring the guilty to justice. The excitement never rachets down: Blind Fear is a book that demands…

Book Review: A Twisted Love Story by Samantha Downing

By Doreen Sheridan

August 28, 2023

I’ve known an unfortunately non-zero number of couples in toxic relationships, but reading Samantha Downing’s scintillating new novel is probably the closest I’ll ever get to figuring out why a couple who are clearly bad for each other decide to stay together. The worst (or perhaps best?) part of this book is how I was…

Book Review: How Can I Help You by Laura Sims

By Doreen Sheridan

August 24, 2023

Margo Finch has left her old life in the rearview mirror. Once a nurse who cared deeply for her patients, she’s now a library assistant – not that anyone can tell the difference between her and the town of Carlyle’s actual librarians. Working in a library is significantly different from her old job, and different…

Book Review: A Likeable Woman by May Cobb

By Doreen Sheridan

August 10, 2023

Kira Foster is a hot mess. Now in her late thirties, she’s never really gotten over the death of her mother Sadie over two decades earlier. Sadie Foster was vibrant, artistic, and very much different from the Stepford Wives who populated her East Texas community. Most of her fellow housewives thought nothing of devoting their…

Book Review: Girls and Their Horses by Eliza Jane Brazier

By Michelle Carpenter

July 12, 2023

What turns a hobby into something all-consuming? For the Parker family, joining Rancho Santa Fe Equestrian did just that. In Eliza Jane Brazier’s newest novel, Girls and Their Horses, the stables of Rancho Santa Fe, California become the catalyst for an obsession that ends in murder.  The Parker family moves to California for a new…

Book Review: Killing Me by Michelle Gagnon

By Doreen Sheridan

June 16, 2023

It’s a sure sign that I’m completely immersed and entertained by a novel that when I learn of a sequel on the horizon—as Michelle Gagnon slyly mentions in the very last sentence of her Afterword here—I gasp loudly and dramatically in ecstatic anticipation. This was the best punctuation mark to a book I simply could…

A Story Waiting Under the Ice

By Simon Mockler

June 5, 2023

In summer 2019 I read an article about Project Iceworm, an American military base built under the ice in Greenland in the 1960s. Let me rephrase that with a little more context: In summer 2019 my wife and I had just separated, and I’d moved into a house nearby that belonged to my mother-in-law to…

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