Wrong Alibi
(Murder in Alaska #1)
by Christina Dodd 

Breathe Your Last
(Detective Josie Quinn #10) 
by Lisa Regan

Vanishing Girls
(Detective Josie Quinn #1)
by Lisa Regan

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Denton was roughly twenty -five square miles, many of those miles spanning the untamed mountains of central Pennsylvania with their one-lane winding roads, dense woods and rural residences spread out like carelessly thrown confetti.

We can keep arguing about this… but you’re never going to be right.

Whatever. Or is it whatevs? I heard Mrs. Sole’s great-granddaughter in here the other day and she said, ‘whatevs’. Is that the new thing? Young people are too lazy to even finish saying words?

My Review:

This was my first experience with the devastatingly talented Lisa Regan and I found her work to be breathtakingly well-crafted and brilliantly executed with crimes and behaviors that were deeply disturbing and found me cringing and flinching in distress. Her characters were complex, driven, and deeply flawed, yet compelling and vastly intriguing. I can’t wait to dive back in, I am greedy that way, I want all her clever arrangements of words.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Flattery, flattery, flattery— in her experience, the three best ways to earn someone’s trust quickly.

Mr Tate, may I remind you that I am from Australia where we say the F-word on TV and include words like ‘bloody’ and ‘bugger’ in award-winning ad campaigns. Yes, I know that those are the height of profanity here in the UK, but in ’Straya”— she bunged on a broad Aussie accent—“ they are regularly heard on the playground.

My Review:

This was a fun, amusing, and low conflict women’s fiction holiday read, perfect for the days leading up to Christmas, which is exactly when I read it. While three separate romances were blossoming across the globe, the underpinning of the storylines was a long-standing twenty-year friendship between three women from three different continents. Their deep and supportive friendships were established as young girls when they met during family vacations in Hawaii and well maintained into adulthood. The type of friendship everyone yearns to have yet few can successfully sustain.

The author was new to me yet her smooth and relaxed writing style felt immediately comfortable, pleasantly familiar, and easy to follow. Her agile storytelling was engaging and insightful and I enjoyed her characters as much as their storylines. This was a fresh take on a familiar premise and while I was well entertained and enamored with all three couples, I will confess to loving Chloe a bit more for her fierceness.

Author Website

Twitter: @Court_Writes

Instagram: @CourtneyColeWrites

Facebook: @CourtneyColeWrites

Goodreads

Courtney Evan Tate is the nom de plume (and darker side) of the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Courtney Cole. As Courtney Evan Tate, she is the author of Such Dark Things and I’ll Be Watching You. Courtney grew up in rural Kansas and now lives with her husband and kids in Florida, where spends her days dreaming of new characters and storylines and surprising plot twists and writing them beneath rustling palm trees. 

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Your mum hasn’t ever really done “OK”… She generally ranges from “pallbearer” to “Elton John in his heyday” and nothing in between.

The church came in today. They all looked at me like they were sizing me up for my coffin.

… he had other more important things to do. Right now he needed to… drink coffee and… smell other people’s cigarettes and dream about smoking them himself and… eat more sweets. He was a very busy man.

You are still under the tourist illusion that everything in Paris is fragranced like it was manufactured in a perfumery… We learn to live with the scent of pee. No one knows where it comes from. We clean. We sanitise. After that, no one wants to know where it still comes from.

My Review:

This was a fun and cleverly amusing story with an original premise and enticingly quirky and complex characters.   The lively storylines were well-paced, engaging, highly textured, and hit all the feels while alternating between squeezing and warming my heart. Ms. Baggot’s deft storytelling flows smoothly with colorful details that fleshed out each scene and kept me closely implanted within the characters’ periphery. I got to enjoy Paris without the jetlag, long lines, olfactory assault, or calories.

Jess is falling for Sam.
Sam is falling for Jess.
But it seems life will do whatever it takes to make them fall apart.
When Jess and Sam lock eyes at a party, a spark ignites. The spark. But love at first sight isn’t like the movies, especially when Sam’s ex, Victoria, is determined to make their honeymoon period a living hell.
Is love at first sight enough?

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

You’re like a cat on a hot tin roof on roller skates. You’re going to break that chair with all your fidgeting.

I’m about as popular as a fart in a spacesuit right now.

It takes a lot to make me mad but I’m like the Incredible Hulk – except without the green and the muscle: when I go, I go. Unfortunately, that usually does end in tears because when I blow, I end up saying a ton of stuff I regret later and then my ire evaporates, leaving me as limp and pathetic as a deflated balloon.

I teach the reception class. It’s like trying to manage meerkats.

… her nose is so stuck up in the air she’s probably sniffing St Peter’s armpits

My Review:

Lucky me, it was my third-time at-bat and hitting another home run with a delightfully amusing Jules Wake book and I finished up even more enamored with her clever wordplay. I am gradually working my way through the dozen books noted on her Goodreads listing, with the remaining nine proudly residing on my TBR. I adore her witty tales and spunky characters – they beguile and engage me while craftily squeezing my heart.

In addition to a satisfying and entertaining read, Ms. Wake has also provided two fun additions to my Brit Words and Phrases list with shufty – a quick look; and grockle – a derogatory term for tourist, I plan to get a lot of mileage out of both.

The Killer’s Girl
(Detective Morgan Brookes #2) 
by Helen Phifer 

‘Mama, wake up.’

The little girl reached for her mother’s face with one pudgy hand. But the eyes stayed closed, and the blood continued to trickle across the floor.

When the body of a young woman is found, tied to her bed and the victim of a brutal attack in her own home, Detective Morgan Brookes is sickened by what she finds as she searches the house. And unprepared for the nightmares it inspires about her childhood.

When the DNA collected gives a positive ID, Morgan can’t wait to put the attacker behind bars. But the person it matches to is already in prison. How could the DNA of someone who has been locked up for over twenty years have shown up in Morgan’s crime scene? And then they make another close match. To Morgan herself.

Faced with the impossible proof that she is somehow connected to this case, Morgan delves deep into the crimes of a killer who stalked the Lake District two decades ago. But distracted by the old case, she misses the signs that he has found a new victim. And when he strikes close to home, Morgan finally realizes that she has been living on borrowed time. To find this killer, it’s clear she must confront the nightmares in her past…

A heart-racing, nerve-wracking crime thriller. Fans of Angela Marsons, Rachel Abbott, and Patricia Gibney will be completely gripped.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Despite him being in love with himself, there was no denying his black hair, tanned skin and brown eyes were easy on the eye. It was no wonder women swooned over him, not that she’d ever tell him that; his head was big enough.

If she did agree to come stay at his house, he was going to have to go shopping and clean up. Living alone meant a different takeaway every night and getting the polish out when the dust was too thick to see the image clearly on the TV screen.

I’d rather shit in my hands and clap…

My Review:

Poor Morgan, she seems to attract trouble as fast as my thighs amass cellulite, which apparently is exponential. I am rather new to police procedurals but I am lapping up this series and developing quite a taste for them while enjoying the devious and conniving wordcraft of Helen Phifer, she is a master of misdirection. She kept me guessing while the killer was front and center the whole time. The storylines were intriguing, interestingly detailed, and thrummed with tension. Her characters are more than a bit fractured and weary, yet endearing and oddly compelling. I am besotted and enamored with Declan and hope he will be featured in greater detail in a subsequent installment.

In addition to an absorbing and gripping read, Ms. Phifer has also provided me with the latest addition to my Brit Words and Phrases list with “I’ll be mother,” which Mr. Google tells me means being in charge of the teapot.   Oddly, Mr. Google had no idea what “being father” would mean – I would suspect sneaking off to the pub.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

He knew what his problem was: it came to him each night before he fell asleep and it whispered loudly in his ear. He was lonely, and the loneliness slithered over his life like a cold snake and stole his confidence and made him shiver inside his own skin.

Sylv chuckled. ‘Well he’s a budgie… but he mocks people and he’s a bird, so…’ ‘So?’ Dawnie screwed up her face, thinking. ‘So he’s called Tequila Mockingbird?’

‘I want to be like Bruce and say “Yippee ki-yay” to his arse.’ Vinnie frowned and followed his mother out into the street. For someone of her advanced years, she was walking quite quickly, her elbows jutting out from her body as if she was looking for a fight… Dilly screwed up her eyes so that her face became tough and imperious. ‘Are you feeling lucky, punk? … go ahead and make my day… Any more of this gossip about Billy and you’ll have me to deal with, Malcolm Frost. And you know what will happen if I hear about you bad-mouthing my friend?’ She waggled the finger under his nose, made a firing sound and blew down the nail. ‘I’ll be back.’

It has taken me years to get it to this state of imperfection.

My Review:

I reveled in every well-chosen word of this lively tale. The storylines were astoundingly witty, thoughtfully insightful, tenderly poignant, and laced together with exceedingly clever and vibrant arrangements of words that whisked me into a colorful vortex where I was practically bouncing in my chair with glee while giggle-snorting and smirking throughout perusal.

Each inimitable character was well-honed, multi-layered, oddly peculiar, vastly intriguing, and uniquely dynamic. The primary characters of Dawnie and Billy were seventy-years young and more high-spirited and energetic than most people in their thirties. I adored them. I was also quite taken with the eighty-six-year-old Dilly who enjoyed watching and quoting Bruce Willis films and claimed she was “on the pull” during their 60s disco adventure. Dilly’s story threads often found me cackling.

While brimming with clever levity and remarkably comical, there were also topical and heart-squeezing elements relevant to our world today including PTSD, grief, anxieties, ageism, bigotry, depression, and social bias. Judy Leigh’s delightful storytelling was smooth, flawlessly engaging, and rapturously transportive. Ms. Leigh cunningly plumbed all the feels while keeping me mirthfully entertained and tethered to my kindle and now finds herself with the burden of a rabid new fangirl for life – unless she starts writing about zombies, I despise zombies.