Kelly's Blog (16)

In James Patterson and Maxine Paetro’s eighth outing in the Women’s Murder Club series, The 8th Confession, San Francisco’s wealthy are being targeted. A killer has conceived the perfect murder, and when the city’s most prominent couple fall victim to the killer, SFPD Detective Lindsay Boxer catches the case. As she and her partner, Detective Rich Conklin investigate the crime, another brutal murder occurs; this time the victim is a preacher who works with the homeless. His murder seems to be… Continue

Hope Lyndhurst-Steele is turning 50 and she’s freaking out. Her life is so perfect it’s like a happy Lifetime movie; the hip magazine job, marvelous husband, tolerant son, and lots of friends, and yet, she’s freaking out. As is typical in life, just when everything is perfect, life turns to crap. Hope loses her job and her spiral into cloying self-pity strains her marriage. Her son decides that she is, in fact, a pain in the butt and her mom has announced that she’s going to be “pushing up… Continue

In the nice quiet little town of Safe Haven, Wisconsin the peace and solitude is shattered when a helicopter crashes nearby. Suddenly the sleepy little town, with only one road in or out, and no full time police force is a struggle for its survival. Contained within the helicopter and unleashed by the crash is a force bent on the total annihilation of the entire population of the town. People in the town begin to die violent and gory deaths and it’s on the shoulders of a single mom waitress, a… Continue

Leave it to Ted Dekker to come up with a novel way to totally creep us out. In Boneman’s Daughter, Dekker gives us the story of a sicko (of course) serial killer who is searching for the “perfect daughter”. (Because after all, even serial killers deserve adoring devotion and unswerving loyalty… Ick) The Bone Man kidnaps girls and when they just can’t live up to his expectations, (thinking their kidnapper is the best thing ever and being so happy to live with him) he smashes their bones until… Continue

It’s not a good thing, waking up next to a handsome stranger in a Las Vegas motel room, with absolutely NO idea how you got there, or what you did. Peggy Adams, in Las Vegas to celebrate yet another impending marriage of a friend has been busily drowning her sorrows. Her live-in boyfriend has finally promised to get engaged someday and even gave her a “promise ring.” (You remember those, from high school?) Imagine Peggy’s shock, when she discovers that she’s actually married to the handsome… Continue

In the debut novel, The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano, little Melody McCartney was only six years old when she and her parents witnessed a brutal murder. The family was placed into the federal Witness Protection Program and Melody spent her childhood moving from one city to another, from one name to another. Twenty years later, Melody is alone, using the Program to start over when boredom and ennui strike her. During the process of “starting over”, a man approaches her and calls her… Continue

The Family Bones by Kimberly Raiser is a debut novel by an imaginative young author. The story follows a family that has just inherited property in a tiny little town in Pennsylvania. The Weavers can't wait to check out their new place, and are hoping for a quiet, simple small town life for themselves and their young kids. The property comes complete with the requisite weird/friendly caretaker and his oddly creepy son, along with lots of mysterious tunnels, hidden rooms and things that go…

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Testimony by Anita Shreve portrays the events on the campus of an exclusive private prep school. A video is made of 3 young basketball players and a sexually precocious 14 year old girl. The sex scandal explodes, and this story is told through the voices of those involved. Participants, family members, townsfolk and faculty are all heard in this brilliant study of a scandal.



I've not read any of Anita Shreve's past work, and I think that I've really been missing out on a great… Continue

Every once in a while, a little book comes along that you just can't resist. Santa Responds is just such a book. For decades, this jolly old Elf has been receiving letters from children throughout the world. Nice children, naughty children, snotty children and greedy children. This year, something happened to the nice old Claus, something just snapped inside. This year, Santa is going to write back, and wow....is he pissed!



This book is filled with "letters" to Santa and Santa's… Continue

Peter Brown, former mob hitman, now an emergency room doctor thanks to the Witness Protection Program is having a bad day. Mugged on his way to work, charts and patients stacked up, and now a patient recognizes him as a former hitman and threatens to disclose his identity and location to the mob. And its not even lunch time yet.

Beat the Reaper is filled with such interesting characters that the reader has to occasionally stop and wonder exactly how the author put himself through…

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Like most people, I really enjoyed The Little Giant of Aberdeen County. Its quite easy to empathize with Truly Plaice, we all feel out of place, alone and awkward. I'm having trouble writing much about this book. The plot, the cast of characters and the setting are so richly layered and so complex, I just can't seem to describe it adequately. Which is why I cheated and posted Amazon's description!I will admit that I liked the book more in the beginning. Truly seemed a happier person, more…

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The Archangel Project by the writing team of Steven Harris and Candice Proctor, writing under the pseudonym of C.S. Graham is an interesting concept that ultimately fell flat for this reader.

The novel's protagonist is young woman, discharged from the army where she served in Iraq, on a psych discharge. October Guinness has the ability to "remote view" whereby she can focus on a geographical location and "see" what is occurring there. She participates in a university study and through…

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Dean Koontz's Your Heart Belongs to Me is yet another great story told by one of the best fiction writers out there. I don't even have to mark my calendar, Koontz releases two a year, one near my birthday in May and one near Christmas, and he never disappoints. (And the kids always know what to get me as a gift! I don't know what the heck they'll do if he decides to retire.)

Your Heart Belongs to Me is similar in tone to The Good Guy, The Husband, the Christopher Snow books and so…

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I have just had a heck of a time trying to write a review of The Gate House. First, I love DeMille; Wildfire and NightFall are a couple of my all time favorite novels. I loved The Generals Daughter, Plum Island and so many of them. I didn't remember reading The Gold Coast, but when the characters in The Gate House would refer to past events, they always seemed very familiar so I must have read it as well. I really enjoyed the sarcastic snarky main character, John Sutter. I liked the premise of… Continue

I finished Life After Genius this afternoon while waiting for the freshman football game to start. Thank goodness for mandatory time spent sitting in the car, it allows me reading time!!



As I said during the blog tour for this novel, I think we've all known some people that are just a bit..well...different. In fact, I think that there is a little bit of Mead in all of us. We all feel like we're just a little peculiar sometimes. It's been very easy to empathize with Mead, and as the… Continue

Tess Gerritsen’s The Keepsake is a fast moving, well-paced whodunit. Medical Examiner Maura Isles is called in to observe the CT scanning of a mummy for a museum. The observers are shocked to find the mummy isn’t ancient at all, but the well-preserved body of a modern murder victim. Solving the murder falls to Jane Rizzoli, a Boston police detective. Soon Rizzoli discovers other women who have been murdered and preserved using disturbing and macabre methods. Knowing the killer has chosen his… Continue