I’ve been reading for 69 years, writing fiction for 43 years. I’ve read many more than 10,000 books. In my own writing, I begin with characters I create from combinations of traits and personalities I’ve met in life. I get to know them as friends. I then put them into the setting I’ve devised and given them free rein to develop the story. I know the destination, but the route is left to them. This involves much re-writing once the story is down on paper, but allows me to experience the excitement, concern, fear, love, and delights felt by the characters as I write the tale.
Character-driven romance is relatively rare, but this book, essentially a complex and deep love story, is seen entirely through the eyes of lovers. The people on these pages are both exceptional and real. We’re treated to their aspirations, frailties, courage, desires, truths, and lies. These are people I’ve met and been impressed by.
When young, gifted, and hauntingly beautiful Sarah enters the hideaway of best-selling reclusive author, Jeremy, both their lives are fundamentally changed. To supply any more details of the story would be to give spoilers, and the last thing I want to do here is spoil anyone’s read.
Author Jeremy Woods has found perfect isolation, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he can write in peace--until a strange, strikingly beautiful girl crashes into his cottage, and his life. Showing up at his door during the worst blizzard in recent history, the girl is half-frozen from exposure, with dangerously frostbitten fingers and toes. The roads to town are too inundated with snow to seek medical care for her--Jeremy's cottage rests 8000 feet high, with no other shelter for miles. How could the girl have survived the journey on foot? At first, Jeremy is intrigued; the girl displays remarkable…
I have alwaysbeen obsessed with the weather. From the third grade, I knew that I would be college-bound to get my degree in meteorology (I have two). I can still distinctly recall, as a very young boy in the early 1960s, sneaking my trusty transistor radio under the pillow, eagerly anticipating the latest update every time a snowstorm was on the horizon. And my passion for big storms—especially those of the snow variety—has only grown greater over time. Whenever a snowstorm is occurring, I’m up every hour or so all night long “just to check the radar”—my patient, long-suffering Sweetheart (wife) will attest to that!
This book is ideal for those who simply want to enjoy the plethora of great visuals which capture the splendor of New York City’s most memorable blizzards. Covering twelve such events between 1888 and 1994, this oversized book contains, by far, the greatest number of photos I have ever seen in a single compilation. Each photo’s caption also includes the source detail—something rare in most other accounts. Ample text accompanies each photo, making this a most pleasurable and informative read.
Great Blizzards of New York City - A 122 page book with a hardcover and dustjacket that contains blizzard history and stories for New York City, from 1888 to 1994. Illustrated throughout with beautiful, historic photos.
I write mysteries and I love to read them. The mysteries I write are traditional and cozy. The focus is on my sleuth as she solves murders, her relationships, and on the local setting. These past few years I've enjoyed reading mysteries quite a bit edgier than the ones I write. These books are filled with characters that are often unstable or emotionally damaged. The murders are more brutal; the plots are more complex. Psychological thrillers veer off in many directions, and the person narrating the story is not always reliable. You can't take for granted that what a character says is true. Your best bet is to observe the action and enjoy the ride!
A writer is working on a true crime book when she goes out into a snowstorm and discovers a child. Many years earlier, two young girls ventured out into the night. One returned to discover her parents have been murdered and her brother is a suspect. The other girl never returns. Who is this child and how did he get there? Going from the current mystery to the cold case years earlier, the solutions to both are resolved with a truly surprising punch.
“Fully realized, wholly absorbing and almost painfully suspenseful...The journey is mesmerizing.” —New York Times
A woman receives an unexpected visitor during a deadly snowstorm in this chilling thriller from New York Times bestselling author Heather Gudenkauf.
True crime writer Wylie Lark doesn’t mind being snowed in at the isolated farmhouse where she’s retreated to write her new book. A cozy fire, complete silence. It would be perfect, if not for the fact that decades earlier, at this very house, two people were murdered in cold blood and a girl disappeared without a trace.
I’m the author of the Countess of Harleigh Mystery series. I’ve been fascinated by the Gilded Age/Victorian Era/Belle Epoque since reading my first Edith Wharton novel, The Buccaneers, which followed the lives of four American heiresses of the late 19th century, who crossed the Atlantic to marry British lords. Love and marriage almost never went together in Wharton’s world, but with all the loveless marriages, the social climbing, and the haves and have-nots, I find it makes an excellent setting for a mystery.
Frances lives in the Victorian Era in London, but in her hometown of New York, it’s the Gilded Age. This is her background in all its glittering and horrifying glory.
Crime novels fit quite naturally in this era. I love a loathsome villain and Rosemary Simpson serves up some of the worst in her Gilded Age series. She uses actual events, like the great blizzard of 1888, as catalysts for some heinous crimes. If you needed to dispose of a body, what better place than a snowdrift?
Prudence MacKenzie, the dead man’s fiancé and our sleuth, doesn’t seem to realize the danger she’s in. I spent the entire read on the edge of my seat wondering if she’d make it to the end of the book alive. This is historical noir in elegant Gilded Age style.
Set amidst the opulent mansions and cobblestone streets of Old New York, this enthralling historical mystery by Rosemary Simpson brings the Gilded Age to life—in a tantalizing tale of old money, new love, and grave suspicion . . .
As the Great Blizzard of 1888 cripples New York City, heiress Prudence MacKenzie sits anxiously within her palatial Fifth Avenue home waiting for her fiancé’s safe return. But the fearsome storm rages through the night. With daylight, more than two hundred people are found to have perished in the icy winds and treacherous snowdrifts. Among them is Prudence’s fiancé—his body frozen,…
I’m a mystery author from sunny California who moved to New England to be close to my dark roots. Places spark my imagination. As a child, I’d look at a house and wonder, “What would it be like to live there, in that town and that landscape?” On family road trips, my parents fueled my desire for knowledge about different places by reading from the WPA guides to the states. The books I enjoy the most have a strong sense of place. I want my readers to experience my settings as fully as I do. Setting is where a book begins. Characters and story spring from this fertile ground.
I love how Dean takes a creepy cow head on a barn, and builds a compelling mystery around it. The cow head permeates the book, watching, judging, accusing, and shedding tears in the aftermath of a storm—seemingly more alive than wooden. Next to the cow head, snow is the dominant image. It’s a place for fun, as the main character and her close friend create snow angels, but it also carries a warning in the form of a message written in white, and as a blizzard, it knocks out the power in town, making getting around dangerous. Set in New England in the dead of winter, this is a book to read on a dark, frigid night with a hot drink and a blazing fire.
A barn with a wooden cow’s head peeking out of the loft… Two girls bicycling on a September day in 1990… The friend they find dead in the barn…
For the next thirty years, the case of Joseph Wheeler’s murder lies as cold as a New Hampshire winter. Deborah Strong has settled in the town she grew up in, learning to heal after her friend’s murder, and later, the deaths of her husband and child in an automobile accident. When her former best friend Rachel Cummings returns home for the funeral of Joseph’s mother, the precarious peace Deborah has found…
I love book club.If I could make it a requirement for everyone in the universe to give it a try, I would. I was an English major in college, so that feeling of ending an amazing story and needing someone to discuss it with never fully went away. All book club books should be thought-provoking, but the best add that intricate and wholehearted understanding, I think, that only literature can. Why do the characters you least understood or felt a kinship with suddenly have your heart, what do they want, need, feel, think? I hope these novels help you better understand. The who and what are beside the point.
This book has everything a book club could ask for. Characters that you love, even when maybe you shouldn’t. Relationships that seem both familiar and endlessly fascinating. An epic dilemma that resonates and flourishes until the very end.It’ll definitely have you wondering,what would I do? At the end of the day, that question is all you really need for a lively book club discussion.
Brooklyn, 1947: in the midst of a blizzard, in a two-family brownstone, two babies are born minutes apart to two women. They are sisters by marriage with an impenetrable bond forged before and during that dramatic night; but as the years progress, small cracks start to appear and their once deep friendship begins to unravel. No one knows why, and no one can stop it. One misguided choice; one moment of tragedy. Heartbreak wars with happiness and almost but not quite wins.
I have alwaysbeen obsessed with the weather. From the third grade, I knew that I would be college-bound to get my degree in meteorology (I have two). I can still distinctly recall, as a very young boy in the early 1960s, sneaking my trusty transistor radio under the pillow, eagerly anticipating the latest update every time a snowstorm was on the horizon. And my passion for big storms—especially those of the snow variety—has only grown greater over time. Whenever a snowstorm is occurring, I’m up every hour or so all night long “just to check the radar”—my patient, long-suffering Sweetheart (wife) will attest to that!
This book, with its captivating accounts of human bravery, is unmatched for sheer excitement. Turner’s vivid description of the misfortunes befalling scores of residents throughout the Northeast stems from the astonishing level of detail he garnered through dozens of interviews with survivors and meteorologists and from myriad articles he culled from over 20 newspapers dating back to 1888. Born in 1935 and a lifelong native of the Jersey shore, he is able to artfully share his childhood experiences living through three of the legendary superstorms in this superbly written and well-researched work. Even without a degree in meteorology (though once a high school geography and English teacher), Turner’s love of big storms—particularly snowstorms—is obvious throughout. Dare I say it could well rival my own?
From the Blizzard of 1888 to the Great Appalachian Storm of 1950, this book reveals the majesty and terror of true superstorms in the mid-Atlantic and New England. Not just for weather buffs (though filled with meteorological details), this book is for anyone who is fascinated by breathtaking accounts of natural forces at their most powerful. Seven Superstorms of the Northeast takes readers on a wild ride through some of the region's historically most destructive storms -- in a pre-Weather Channel, pre-satellite, pre-Doppler-radar world. The book's title stems from seven monster storms including the blizzards of 1888, 1899, and 1914,…
What I love about Christmas is that it’s the time of the year when anything feels possible. Need a miracle? Then close your eyes and make a wish. Who knows, it might just come true. Christmas is the time when we go above and beyond, when we dare to take risks. Maybe it’s because at Christmastime we take stock of what we value most in our lives…and if something is missing, then maybe it’s time to fight for it. Christmas romances are my addiction of choice. Everything matters more at Christmas, and that makes a Christmas romance all that’s best of what’s merry and bright.
This book has everything I love in a Christmas romance—a delightfully competent heroine, a deliciously grumpy hero, a cast of eccentric characters, and themes of found family and healing.
Holly, a widow, takes a housesitting job during the holidays at a remote house on the Lancashire moors. But then people keep arriving, and Holly finds herself being guilt tripped into hosting Christmas. When Jude, the owner, is forced to return home, blizzards hit, and they’re all snowed in.
I felt for Holly and Jude who both had good reasons to avoid Christmas, but beneath their prickly exteriors they’re kind, big-hearted characters. It was a joy to see them rediscover the joy of the season. In turn hilarious and emotional, this is a big warm hug of a book.
Trisha's bestselling Christmas book will have you hooked from start to finish - the perfect read as those cold winter nights draw in.
Christmas has always been a sad time for young widow Holly Brown. So when she's asked to look after a remote house on the Lancashire moors, the opportunity to hide herself away is irresistible - the perfect excuse to forget about the festivities.
The owner of the house, Jude Martland, is also avoiding Christmas since the last one saw his brother run off with his fiancee. But forced to return home unexpectedly, Jude arrives to find that…
There is something about books set in the cold, you know immediately bad things are going to happen! It may be my early childhood in Scotland, or my English upbringing, but I have always been drawn to the dark side of stories, the things under the bed, the monsters in the closet. I still love to be scared by the twists and chills but also am a sucker for a happy ending. In my novels, I always strive to entertain, to scare, and surprise, but ultimately there needs to be an emotional truth beneath everything. And this is true of the books I read as well.
Five total strangers trapped in a car together, during a blizzard trying to get home against mounting impossible odds – what’s not to like? I love believable situations which you know as a reader have so much potential to take a deadly turn!
When a storm strands Mira at the airport with no way to get home, she welcomes the kind offer of sharing a rental car with a woman from her flight. But when this also involves another three people, who all seem to have their own personal baggage and agendas, you know this is not going to be a smooth ride. As if driving in a storm isn’t enough of a problem, personal items keep going missing, and it soon becomes obvious that one of the five is trying to make sure they don’t all make it back alive! This is a fast-paced fun, twisty read, a perfect…
A New York Times Bestseller A "page-turning thriller that will keep readers guessing until the very end" (School Library Journal) about a road trip in a snowstorm that turns into bone-chilling disaster, from New York Times bestselling mystery author and "master of tension" (BCCB) Natalie D. Richards. She thought being stranded was the worst thing that could happen. She was wrong. Mira needs to get home for the holidays. Badly. But when an incoming blizzard results in a canceled connecting flight, it looks like she might get stuck at the airport indefinitely. And then Harper, Mira's glamorous seatmate from her…
There’s nothing I love more than a good thriller, especially one with a locked room setting. I’m fascinated by how people react to psychological pressure, and what it would take for any of us to behave in extreme ways. With The Elevator, I wanted to push that locked room scenario to its limits: two characters, trapped together in a tiny space. This might also be the book that’s been gestating inside me for longest – my mum was trapped in a lift when she was pregnant with me! I hope some of the books on this list appeal to you, and that you enjoy them as much as I did.
This is another chiller thriller, set in a remote hotel in the Scottish Highlands. (Note to self: only holiday in Scotland in the summer!)
The hotel is closed to guests, and Rennie Yorke is working what should be her final shift when a storm blows in and seals off her exit. But she’s not alone for long – an injured man arrives at the door, claiming to be a police officer who was transporting a dangerous prisoner when his car crashed, and the prisoner escaped. Rennie lets him in – but shortly afterward another man arrives, making the same claim.
It’s a brilliant hook, and I was completely immersed in trying to work out who was telling the truth and who was lying.
Remie Yorke has one shift left at the Mackinnon Hotel in the remote Scottish Highlands before she leaves for good. Then Storm Ezra hits.
As temperatures plummet and phone lines go down, an injured man stumbles inside. PC Don Gaines was in a terrible accident on the mountain road. The only other survivor: the prisoner his team was transporting.
When a second stranger arrives, Remie reluctantly lets him in from the blizzard. He, too, is hurt. He claims to be a police officer. His name is also Don Gaines.
