I love books about everyman/everywoman characters facing danger, puzzles, and romance with a sense of humor. I love the suspense that builds throughout a whole book and the tension that can develop in just a paragraph. It’s easier for me to imagine I’m the protagonist and lose myself in the pages if I’m not reading about a superhero or a serial killer. With so many choices out there, it’s easier to find another person who’s seen the same TV show, for instance, but books are my true love because they are limitless and offer so many choices. It’s a privilege to be able to share some favorites.
I love a good hook and sympathetic characters. Early in this book, the protagonist is inexplicably dumped by his college girlfriend, who tells him to leave her alone. Six years later, he sees an obituary for the guy she married. But when he crashes the funeral, the grieving widow is not his ex-girlfriend.
For me, the book was constantly engaging, with characters I really cared about, a huge puzzle to solve, frequent tension to move the action along, a strong love interest, and digging into an interesting character’s past to understand the present danger.
The bestselling author and creator of the hit Netflix drama Fool Me Once explores the dangers of obsession in this #1 bestselling suspense thriller.
Six years have passed since Jake Fisher watched Natalie, the love of his life, marry another man. Six years of hiding a broken heart by throwing himself into his career as a college professor. Six years of keeping his promise to leave Natalie alone, and six years of tortured dreams of her life with her new husband, Todd.
But six years haven't come close to extinguishing his feelings, and when Jake comes across Todd's obituary, he…
I love surprises and characters who are not what they seem, and I enjoy a high-tech backdrop when it fits the story. When a character thinks he sees evidence of a crime in what’s basically Google Street View, he will not let go of it and drags our unwilling protagonist into danger.
I loved the emotional core of a man dealing with his brother’s mental health issues and the blossoming romance in his life.
What would you do if you witnessed a murder - but no one believed you . . .?
Another masterful suspense novel from the bestselling author of the Richard & Judy summer read winner, NO TIME FOR GOODBYE and FIND YOU FIRST
Map-obsessed Thomas spends his days and nights on a virtual tour of the world through his computer screen, believing he must store the details of every town and city in his head. Then one day, while surfing a street view program, he sees something that shouldn't be there: a woman being murdered behind a window on a New…
Miranda falls in love with her dream house but soon discovers it's an affair with complications. A lot of them. Rosewood is a centuries old, tumble-down, gambrel roofed charmer located in an isolated, coastal corner of Virginia referred to as "strange". Known for long-standing and antiquated customs, an almost indecipherable…
A precocious thirteen-year-old girl with a sense of humor gets into big trouble and has to deal with it without adult help. What’s not to love? Ingrid is a vivid character in a great small-town setting with believable characters and plenty of tension.
And I loved the fact that she has to deal with obstacles adults don’t generally face, like not being able to drive. First of an outstanding trilogy, for my taste.
"My all-time favorite. Astonishing." (Stephen King)
Down the Rabbit Hole is the first book in the Echo Falls mystery series by bestselling crime novelist Peter Abrahams. Perfect for middle school readers looking for a good mystery.
Welcome to Echo Falls, home of a thousand secrets. In Down the Rabbit Hole, eighth grader Ingrid Levin-Hill is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or at least her shoes are. And getting them back will mean getting tangled up in a murder investigation as complicated as the mysteries solved by her idol, Sherlock Holmes.
I’m always a sucker for a well-done amnesia mystery. A character discovering he might not have been the best person before whatever incident triggered the memory loss is particularly vulnerable. As he tries to start over with a wife who is nearly a stranger, someone is trying to kill him, making for a terrific recipe of empathy and tension.
When you add the possibility of salvaging his relationship with his son, the result for me was a series of sequences with great emotional payoffs and a very satisfying ending. I’m glad I found the book before the movie because I enjoyed the book a lot more.
Here is a gripping story of a man in pursuit of himself--a man suffering a psychological blackout who decides, instead of running way, to face his forgotten life and the riddle of his own character.
Charles Bancroft--although at first he does not know his own name--is the man who, in New York, surfaces from the depths of blankness. He is well dressed, his clothes are disheveled and wet--and his face is startlingly the face of a stranger.
And in the agonizing search for his identity he comes to realize, with compassion and terror, his failures and…
A traditional mystery with a touch of cozy, The Alchemy Fire Murder is for those who like feisty women sleuths, Oxford Colleges, alchemy, strong characters, and real concerns like trafficking, wildfires, racism, and climate change. This book especially works for those fascinated by myth and witches in history. Read for…
While I love Parker’s Spenser series, I love the stronger emotional payoff I often get more of in stand-alone books, which this book is. Plus, Parker brings some of his humor to the table. (To me it’s a very rare book that can’t carry some humor along with life-and-death stakes.)
While I loved the whole idea of a married couple working together to extricate themselves from big trouble, the confrontation with the cops at the end of the book was a terrific cherry on top.
“A novel of violence, crisp dialogue, and suspense. . . . The reader is immediately caught up in the ambience of danger.”—The Boston Globe
At forty-six, Aaron Newman was enjoying the good things in life—a good marriage, a good job—and he was in good shape himself. Then he saw the murder. A petty vicious killing that was to plunge him into an insane jungle of raw violence and fear, threatening and defiling the things he cared about.
When a financial advisor takes his girlfriend to his ten-year high-school reunion, he finds he doesn’t know one person. The girlfriend, convinced he’s a fraud or brain-damaged, dumps him. And soon, things get even worse. This isn’t the result of brain damage. Someone is meddling in his life, maybe someone unhappy to see him moving on after the apparently accidental death of his fiancée a year earlier. Someone whose feelings are so strong that murder is an option.
My book is set in Colorado Springs and the nearby Rocky Mountain environment. It is a modern-day Hitchcockian thriller with a dash of romance.
What's the point of having it all when you have no one to share it with?
Brandon Miller has everything—except a commitment from the woman he loves. Angela Cooper has deep scars from a previous marriage. She's not interested in a do-over with Brandon or anyone.
What Happened to Frank? is the first book in the Meg Sheppard Mystery Series. Meg is an amateur sleuth who owns racehorses and lives on a horse farm. Her beloved border collie, Kelly, is usually at Meg's side as she investigates murders and solves other mysteries. The books are action-packed…
