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Runner by Patrick Lee

February 2014

Last April, I read RUNNER by Patrick Lee in manuscript and still remember being breathless when I read it. Thrillers that give you many “aha” moments are the ones you don’t forget --- and RUNNER certainly has many of those!

Sam Dryden is a retired Ranger special forces agent who once was part of a team that ran a lot of his operations off the grid. Now he has rebuilt his life in a small Southern California town. He’s a loner, having lost both his wife and young daughter in an accident. As an aside here, I knew someone who was a special agent for the FBI, and we talked one night about how one adjusts after having lived that kind of an adrenaline-filled life. How does one go from missions at Ruby Ridge, Waco and Yemen, to carpooling, grocery shopping and normal life? He told me that between the memories and the change in the pace of your life, it’s a real challenge. For years, he was the guy coaching baseball who might get a call in the middle of a game. It would not be that his wife needed milk, but rather he was wheels up on an assignment in two hours.

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The Deepest Secret by Carla Buckley

February 2014

When reading THE DEEPEST SECRET by Carla Buckley, I felt the same way that I did reading DEFENDING JACOB by William Landay; it’s that good! This book is destined to be BIG. When I was three chapters in, I said to my husband, “I am in trouble…this one is an all-nighter.” There is a really exciting feeling that comes when you find a book like this.

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Unremarried Widow: A Memoir by Artis Henderson

January 2014

Last summer, I never had heard the term “unremarried widow” until a friend on Facebook explained what is was in military terms. It means the wife of a dead soldier who has not yet remarried.

Artis Henderson was widowed when her husband’s Army helicopter crashed in Iraq in 2006; she was 26 and newly married. She, like her mom, was widowed by a husband dying in a plane crash. What she writes in UNREMARRIED WIDOW is a love story, as much as a story of survival. She writes about the stress and strain of surviving military life while, at the same time, the joy of falling and being in love. One of the references on it is to THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, and I can see why. It’s the kind of a book that will stay with me in much the same way. After finishing the book, I wanted to see Artis and hear her talk about the story, thus I was lucky enough to find this video where she does just that. 

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In the Blood by Lisa Unger

January 2014

I read Lisa Unger's first book, BEAUTIFUL LIES, back in 2006 and knew then with her debut that she was a talent to watch. Reading IN THE BLOOD, her eighth book, I am reminded I was right. This is a taut psychological thriller that reels you in from the start. It's hard to talk about it without revealing anything, a true sign that it is so well done. I do know two things. One, when I was finished reading it, I wanted to start reading again to see how the story was constructed. Two, I would not want to read it at home...alone...in the dark.

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The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Sun-mi Hwang

November 2013

I love when a slim novel packs a powerful punch. That is what happened when I read THE HEN WHO DREAMED SHE COULD FLY. On the surface, it’s a story about a hen named Sprout who is trapped in a chicken coop and dreams of hatching an egg and nurturing a chick. Instead, she is sentenced to a life where her hatched eggs slowly roll away from her and are then collected each day and taken to market. The numbing experience of loss and longing is her companion every day. From her perch, she watches animals in the yard milling about and hatches a plan to escape beyond the walls of the hen house and roam freely, in the hopes of becoming a mother.

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The Whole Golden World by Kristina Riggle

November 2013

I heard about THE WHOLE GOLDEN WORLD by Kristina Riggle at a librarian conference where it was pitched something like this: “A teacher is charged with having an affair with a high school student, and at the trial she chooses to sit behind the defendant in a show of solidarity instead of sitting with those who plan to prosecute him.” I heard that, and a lot of questions came to mind. This scenario had a number of ways it could be handled, and thus I wanted to look at how the author would take it on. What I found was a story well-told in three voices --- that of the girl, Morgan; her mother, Dinah; and Rain, the wife of T.J Hill, the defendant.

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Leaving Haven by Kathleen McCleary

October 2013

LEAVING HAVEN by Kathleen McCleary will take you on an emotional ride. Georgia, who has a daughter, longs for a second child as she suffers miscarriage after miscarriage. Then her best friend, Alice, who has a teenage daughter, offers to be her egg donor, and her dream of having a baby become real. But then she discovers something that changes her mind about how much she really wants baby Haven, and what love is. I knew the “reveal” before I read the book, but it did not take away from the story. If anything, it made me wonder how it would unfold. It still took me through all kinds of wonderful twists and turns. I was not sure what was going to happen to Haven until the last page.

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The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

October 2013

I had heard a lot about Graeme Simsion’s THE ROSIE PROJECT, and reading it I see why. It’s the kind of book that makes you smile --- and laugh --- as you read it, and it’s also wickedly clever.

In it, Don Tillman is a socially awkward professor of genetics who sees all of life through a scientific lens. He has not had success in dating, so he decides to attack this the way he does everything else in life: with a plan. He crafts a 16-page questionnaire in a quest to find the perfect mate. While I know this is ill-conceived, somehow the fact that Don is approaching the issue this way is both charming and humorous. The first women to answer it fail, but Don plunges on. And then he meets Rosie, who does not pass the questionnaire, but instead brings Don a project he can help her with. She wants to find her biological father, and who but a geneticist can help with that? So the "Wife Project" that Don calls his questionnaire becomes the "Father Project" to help Rosie. And well, you can figure out where things go from there. Complete comedy!

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Longbourn by Jo Baker

October 2013

Back in May at BookExpo America, I heard Jo Baker present LONGBOURN at a breakfast. She captivated me as she talked about the staff who worked at Longbourn, the house made famous in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Her characters are not the people who wore the elegant clothes and enjoyed the fabulous meals, but rather the ones who spent their days making the soap to use to clean the clothes and then wash them by hand.

As the cover line says, this is an “irresistibly imagined downstairs answer to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.” The protagonist, Sarah, is an orphan who slaves away for the family, but dreams of being somewhere else. She falls for a footman who begins work at the house, a man who clearly has a troubled past. And her story weaves into that of the Bennet household, making the novel irresistible.

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Once We Were Brothers by Ronald H. Balson

October 2013

Elliot Rosenzweig is a respected civic leader and wealthy philanthropist in Chicago. One evening at the opera, he is accused of being a former Nazi SS officer named Otto Piatek, the Butcher of Zamosc. Although the charges are denounced as preposterous, his accuser, Ben Solomon, stands behind them. Solomon recognizes Rosenzweig as the child who was abandoned by his family and raised by Solomon's own family, only to betray them during the Nazi occupation. But has Solomon accused the right man? He finds an eager young attorney, Catherine Lockhart, and encourages her to help him bring Rosenzweig to justice.

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