fun and mysterious...

I just finished reading "The Look of Love" by Mary Jane Clark.  I didn't know when I started reading the book that it was one about a recurring character.  I liked that even though the book followed the same character I didn't have to read all the other books to understand the story.

Piper Donovan has just been invited to a California spa to make a wedding cake for the spa owner, Jillian, and is invited to stay at the spa while she works on the cake design.

While Piper is at the spa there is a murder and it seems the target is the bride, Jillian, and that there are many people who may want to harm Jillian or her father.

Piper also meets another person at the spa and tries to help her by trying to uncover some foul play at the spa as well.

It was a fun and easy read and would definitely read another story with Piper as the main character.

a family tree...

Nancy Jensen's first novel, "The Sisters" really shows how three generations of women grow and change throughout the years.

Two sisters, Mabel and Bertie, are living with their stepfather in the town of Juniper, Kentucky.  Bertie is excited to graduate the 8th grade and looks to the future to marry her love, Wallace.  Mabel is trying to get away from her awful stepfather without letting Bertie know and something goes wrong, the stepfather is found dead and Bertie feels so lost because her sister and Wallace both disappear and both are left without their sister.

The rest of the book goes back and forth between Bertie and Mabel through the years.  Bertie sends all correspondence received from Mabel back to her and then finally just writes "deceased" on the envelope and sends it back to stop future communication.

As these two sisters fall away from each other, we are introduced to the next generation of women in this family. I do not want to give too much away, but I really liked how I was introduced to these remarkable women and the way they dealt with their struggles and how they overcame them as well.

kindy creepy...

"The Whisperer" by Donato Carrisi was quite a thriller, lots of twists and turns that were very unexpected.

A series of six arms, left ones to be specific, are found buried and arranged in a circle and seem to belong to five missing girls and the the sixth girl is yet to be identified.

Investigators start to dig into the case of the five missing girls and hope to find the identity of the sixth girl and pray she is still alive.  There is a lot going on in the personal lives of the investigators which comes into the story as background info, but it just makes the story better, more believable.

a family man detective...

"I, Michael Bennett" was a good and fast read.  Michael Bennett is a detective, has 10 children and a nanny who help keep his life in order.  But a mexican crime lord takes the life of Michael's good friends and he does everything in his power to catch this guy, which he does eventually.  But the crime lord threatens his family which cause Michael to take his kids and nanny and flee to his cabin.  However, he enters into a worse situation that he would have thought and has to protect his family and his city as well.

I really dislike the ending...kind of left me hanging.

love, loss and life lessons...

"You are the love of my life" by Susan Richards Shreve had its moments of ups and downs.  It was an easy book to read but I found it rather boring.

Lucy, a children's book author and mother of two, decides to leave New York and the father of her children who is married and move back into the house where she found her father when he committed suicide.

Lucy is having a hard time in the new neighborhood.  She is a very good mother and is having a hard time letting new people into her world or secrets and lies. Her children do not know the story behind Lucy's dad and how he died or anything about their father either.

Lucy finds out that keeping secrets isn't always the best choice...