My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

There were some things you couldn’t escape. One of them was yourself.

You get up every day and decide what kind of person you want to be. Responsibilities don’t just go away because you’ve ignored them in the past.

Memories were more than just images of the past: they shaped the way we moved through life. What we saw, felt, thought, existed differently because of the things we had experienced.

‘Mabel.’ His voice tickled against my skin, and beneath it. I’d never thought my name would feel so meaningful to me. As if it truly did belong to me alone, and said so much more than I had ever realised. Those two syllables contained everything he saw in me, which in turn was everything I was. It sounded like the most beautiful compliment I’d ever heard, yet at the same time the most despairing cry.

I had always known it was dangerous, opening yourself up to other people. Once they get comfortable in there, sooner or later they get tangled up with you. They start popping into your head as you move through the world.

My Review:

This prodigious tome contained an exceptionally creative, immersive, and well-plotted tale that was laced together with equal measures of intriguing and emotive details that fully-fleshed out and conjured these uniquely alluring characters and scenarios into a smooth scroll through my gray matter. The writing style was engaging, well-honed, maddeningly paced, fraught with tension, surprisingly poignant, and kept me reading late into the night, far longer than originally planned, while poking, plucking, and prodding at my curiosity until the very last page.

While not my typical genre, I tumbled headfirst into an all-consuming, enticing, and itchy vortex, often finding myself ruminating on the story when I was regretfully busy elsewhere and had to put my Kindle down. I wanted to hiss at any interruption to my perusal and rebelliously stopped checking my notifications or answering the phone. Each of the 430 pages was swirling with atmosphere, and I would have avidly read 430 more.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Gossip was the way women like June Piedmont ran the world behind the scenes. When a man collected information, they called it intelligence. When a woman did it, they branded her a gossip. The work of the patriarchy.

The only thing rich people loved as much as their money was other rich people…

“You’re only saying that to be nice.” Juliette pressed a hand to her chest in genuine affront. “I never say anything to be nice, how dare you.”

The station was mostly dead in the wee hours, the fluorescent lighting lending a ghoulish glare to the man working the front desk. He looked like an extra in a zombie movie, mid-transformation.

I suppose you might have a point. A very specific, sharp-edged point.

My Review:

It took me more than a few beats to settle into this tale as the main character of Juliette wasn’t an endearing or likable one. Juliette was driven and had a cold and prickly personality, with, bonus, an acid tongue. So very not the type I would choose to share air with in real life, and would most likely go out of my way to avoid crossing her path. But I found this wily author’s wit to be clever and entertaining, and gradually felt some empathy toward her character’s predicament. Bit-by-bit, Juliette began to soften, and the ice queen started to melt. Her snark and inner musings were enviably top-shelf; I must give her high marks for that alone.

Neighborhood Watch
by Britney King

Amazon / B&N / Apple / BB

From bestselling author Britney King comes a razor-sharp psychological thriller about a street built on secrets, a neighbor who knows too much, and the woman who learns—too late—that the most dangerous lies are the ones everyone else is willing to believe.

“You’d be surprised how easy it is to disappear someone.”
That’s what Clint says. Always with a smile. Always like a joke.
But Nora knows better—jokes don’t leave bodies.

Nora Givens runs the salon where the cul-de-sac comes to confess. She knows who’s day-drinking, whose marriage is composting under the patio lights, and which neighbors wield kindness like a weapon. What she doesn’t know is why things on her street suddenly feel wrong.

A break-in with no motive.
A Peeping Tom no one can describe.
A woman who never makes it home.

The neighborhood responds the way they always do—with performative concern. Meetings. Patrols. A nonstop group chat. And Clint, the charming new arrival, is suddenly everywhere: taking notes, volunteering, appearing even before the sirens.

Everyone adores him.
Everyone trusts him.
Everyone but Nora.

When her police statement disappears, her dog vanishes, and her tire fails in a place she’d never survive a crash, the cul-de-sac decides she’s the problem—another “overwhelmed woman” who should calm down and stop making waves.

But Clint keeps offering help—the kind that looks generous to everyone else—
and strategic to her.

As Nora closes in on the truth, she realizes the quiet horror of suburbia:

Some neighbors want to keep you safe.
Others want to keep you quiet.
And on this street, the simplest way to disappear someone…
is to make sure no one believes her first.

Dark, addictive, and knife-edged, Neighborhood Watch delivers jaw-dropping twists, a psychological chess match in plain sight, and a villain hiding where you least expect him. Perfect for readers who want a thriller that gets under your skin and stays there.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

The air fills with shampoo, gossip, and that strange electric thrill people get when the horror’s happening to someone else.

Turns out, no one hates a whistleblower more than a neighborhood that needs one.

People don’t break all at once. They erode.

No one tags me directly. That’s how gossip works when it’s dressed up as worry.

She looks at me like she’s wondering if it’s safe to leave me alone with scissors.

If this were a movie, I’d be gliding up these stairs in slow motion, hair perfect, jaw set, justice dripping off me like perfume. Instead, I’m sweating through a Target sweater and realizing I really should have thought this through.

My chest tightens. It’s not rage I feel. It’s not even panic. It’s something worse: that low, vibrating frequency of realization. It’s a feeling that settles in your bones when the worst thing you can imagine is already happening— and has been for a while.

Tom’s idea of a splurge is letting his wife buy name- brand mustard.

My Review:

I adore, revere, and fear Britney King in equal measure. She scares me silly with her realistically flawed, devious, and creepy characters, while she also has me snorting with amusement with her keenly-honed world-class snark. Her chilling observations and insightfulness into the criminal elements and their calm brutality, ruthless calculations, pitiless rationales, and cold depravity are beyond perceptive and more than a bit disconcerting.

Reaching the last pages of her tales typically finds me with neck tension, ragged cuticles, and in desperate need of a new deadbolt and a spa day for a massage and manicure.

I avidly haunt her Goodreads page as I cannot wait to see what she does next.

It’s a state of chaos.

When publicist Mia Andrews becomes the face of a viral disaster dubbed #PantyGate, her career implodes along with her reputation.

Now jobless and single, Mia lands in the last place she expected—her grandmother’s anything-but-quiet retirement community in Florida. It’s chaos. It’s hilarious. It’s exactly what she didn’t know she needed.

Even worse? The meddling retirees are determined to fix Mia’s love life. Somehow, they find time to play matchmaker—with not one but two bachelors under thirty-five.

But amid the mayhem, Mia’s learning that the best second chances come when—and where—you least expect them.

For fans of witty banter, lovable troublemakers, and slow-burn romance, this is the laugh-out-loud novel that proves love never gets old.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

I stumble inside, as graceful as a giraffe on skates and twice as loud.

The man’s worth a fortune, and he proposed with a rock I couldn’t see without my glasses and a prenup smaller than his penis.

“That’s why I like my men like I like my drinks.” Grandma Helen hefts her nearly empty glass in the air. “Extra strong and gone by morning.”

Big talk from the lady who hasn’t invited a man into her room for so long, she’ll have to Google how…

The chime sets off a chain reaction, squealing and shuffling and hollers from members of our crew who don’t feel quite ready yet. It reminds me of my first apartment in Miami, where a flip of the light would send roaches running.

…feeling your feelings is not for the faint of heart.

My Review:

Another fun and delightfully amusing adventure with senior shenanigans tucked into a slow-burn romance between a pair of their grandchildren. This eclectic group was quite the handful. I reveled in their sass and pluck and looked forward to their next well-orchestrated rebellion, that’s just how I roll. Each character was authentically conjured, with originally quirky and well-fleshed-out personalities.

Cindi Madsen has superior observation skills and is undoubtedly highly perceptive to have created such well-nuanced women far beyond her own years. The writing style was smooth, engaging, well-polished, easy to follow, and sparked frequent smirks and giggle-snorts during perusal.

Vee is nervous about returning to the village of Willowbrook. Not only is Dragonfly Cottage – the house her late mum left her – in need of a total refurb, but the neighbours still remember Vee as a troublesome teen, even though she’s now in her fifties.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

…spiderwebs hung from every corner. It felt like the place where depressed flies came to die.

‘Winnie, I’ve never seen anyone be so keen to go on a banana boat.’ ‘And I only fell off once,’ said Winnie, preening herself. ‘I showed those youngsters a thing or two, didn’t I, Beryl? You were hanging on for dear life.’ ‘Yes, it was two things you showed them, if I remember rightly. Your bikini top came right off. That lifeguard will probably never be the same again.’

This was the life. Mother wouldn’t have approved at all, which made the idea even more appealing.

It wasn’t much fun being a teenager, when I look back on that year. We were full of our own importance some of the time but totally lacking in confidence the rest of it.

My Review:

This was a fun and amusing read with well-balanced hits of family drama and inner turmoil amongst the wry wit and acerbic observations. I’m new to Celia Anderson, shame on me for not noticing this crafty scribbler before. I enjoy her well-textured and agile word skills, snarky humor, and how she totally had me on the hook to unravel what happened in 1985.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

“Tell me everything. Every detail. How hot was it?” “On a scale of chili peppers?” I settled back into the neck rest. “We’re talking habanero hot.”

Detective, if I killed every male who’s ever sexually harassed me in any way, I’d have a whole trail of bodies behind me, starting with Troy Nestor in sixth grade.

My Review:

This was an enjoyable, entertaining, and quick read that kept me engaged and amused throughout perusal. The writing style was easy to follow, well-polished, with just the right light touch of emotiveness as well as head-scratching intrigue for a humorous cozy mystery. Ms. Fox cleverly conjured and populated her tale with a delightful array of authentically quirky characters, my favorite kind! I look forward to more installments from this crafty scribbler.