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Showing posts from May, 2024

Winter Garden

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This is a story of a mother and her two daughters, the strained relationship among all of them, and how they learn about themselves. It starts a bit slowly.  The two daughters are Meredith and Nina, Anya is the mother and their father is Evan, who holds the family together. Mother Anya is cold, withdrawn, and has never shown either girl any affection whatsoever.  The only relationship she has with the girls is to tell them "fairy tales" at night when they were young, something they loved.  As a result of their mother's inattention, the girls have grown up unable to have any sort of normal relationship with others. When Evan dies, the family is thrown into turmoil.  Meredith's marriage, which has started to fail, begins to fall apart as her husband leaves her when she feels she needs to spend most of her  time taking care of her mother.  Nina, who is a professional photographer, comes home, also to care for Anya, and leaves the man she loves because she is u...

Think Twice

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Don't start this book until you have one or two free days to do nothing but read, because once you start it, you aren't going to want to put it down. But that is what I find about all Harlan Coben books, which is why I love them so much. Best thing about this book is it reunites Myron Bolitar and Win Lockwood, who have not been seen together in a book since "Home" in 2016.   The story is told in two voices.  The first is the murderer, who manages to kill people and frame others for their murders.  We learn how the framing happens from the murderer's voice, which is quite ingenious, and we see the innocents who are jailed because all the evidence points to them. And then we see Myron, now back investigating a murder which supposedly was committed by a guy he knows...who died several years ago.  As he investigates and interviews people, he learns that the guy died of cancer...and that he didn't die, but is still alive.  Which is true? Then others start dying ...

Unnatural Death

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 I have been a huge fan of Patricia Cornwell, but in 2003, in Australia, I bought her then latest book, "Blow Fly" to read on the plane on the flight home. I hated it.  I loved the characters of Marino and Lucy and she changed them so much in "Blow Fly" that I didn't like them any more.  I read her next book and they were still unlikeable, so I stopped  reading her. Recently I decided to read on of her later books and found that Mario and Lucy were once again the characters I liked, so I've read the next couple of books. This book takes me back to "Blow Fly."  The characters  are OK, but the plot is boring.  The first third of the book discusses just about every leaf and footprint at the site of a double murder.  It goes on...and on...and on... There is just too much fantasizing... BigFoot? The book isn't as bad as "Blow Fly" but it's definitely not one of her better books