The Longest Silence

by Debra Webb

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Hardcover: 336 pages

Publisher: MIRA (March 6, 2018)

“The twists and turns in this dark, taut drama make it both creepy and compelling.” —New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry

A killer stole her voice. Now she’s ready to take it back. Don’t miss the chilling Shades of Death series from USA TODAY bestselling author Debra Webb.

Joanna Guthrie was free. She had been for eighteen years–or so she needed everyone to believe. What really happened during the longest fourteen days of her life, when she and two other women were held captive by the worst kind of serial killer, wasn’t something she could talk about. Not after what they had to do to survive.

But when more women go missing in an eerily similar manner, Jo knows her prolonged silence will only seal their fates. She’s finally ready to talk; she just needs someone to listen. FBI special agent Tony LeDoux can’t deny he finds Jo compelling–he’s just not sure he believes her story. But with the clock ticking, Jo will do anything to convince him, even if it means unearthing long-buried secrets that will land them squarely in the crosshairs of the killer…

“This psychological thriller is rife with tension that begins on page one and doesn’t let up. It’s a race against the clock that had me whispering to the pair of flawed, desperate protagonists, ‘Hurry, hurry.’ A gripping read.”  —New York Times bestselling author Sandra Brown

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Sharing the news of his divorce with his sister had been relatively easy, the career crash and burn, however, was a whole different ball game. He didn’t want to see the disappointment in her eyes. She’d always looked at him as if he was a hero, starting the day he’d kicked nine-year-old Lacon Turner’s butt for putting gum in her hair.

Shoulder-length hair badly in need of a wash. A few curly hairs that looked more like they belonged somewhere in the vicinity of his balls sprouted from his chin. Tony felt reasonably confident the tight, ripped jeans were cutting off the blood supply to his upper body and, more important, his brain.

The world we were snatched from no longer exists. There is only this place, this moment and our fears.

The darkness they had shared was an unspoken knowing between them. It was a bond that could never be broken.

My Review:

This was a gripping and well-crafted read that was devastatingly real. This was my first time reading Ms. Webb’s works and I am an instant fan. This book was the fourth in a series but had strong legs to stand-alone and kick-butt while doing so. The main premise of the storyline was itchy creepy with the type of nightmarish situations that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, yet it wasn’t as gruesome or graphic as you would expect while still getting across the seriousness and ghastliness of their terrifying circumstances. Written from multiple POVs, the story threads were engrossingly intriguing and maintained a taut level of suspense while slowly relating the flinch-worthy and riveting details of the past and present crimes and the brutal and nefarious actions of those involved. I grew to admire and respect the deeply flawed and critically damaged characters and would be more than interested in delving into the rest of the series.

About Debra Webb

DEBRA WEBB is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of more than 130 novels, including reader favorites the Faces of Evil, the Colby Agency, and the Shades of Death series. With more than four million books sold in numerous languages and countries, Debra’s love of storytelling goes back to her childhood on a farm in Alabama.

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The Sometimes Sisters

by Carolyn Brown

Release Date February 27, 2018

A bittersweet inheritance reunites three estranged sisters in a novel of family, trust, and forgiveness from New York Times bestselling author Carolyn Brown.

When they were growing up, Dana, Harper, and Tawny thought of themselves as “sometimes sisters.” They connected only during the summer month they’d all spend at their grandmother’s rustic lakeside resort in north Texas. But secrets started building, and ten years have passed since they’ve all been together—in fact, they’ve rarely spoken, and it broke their grandmother’s heart.

Now she’s gone, leaving Annie’s Place to her granddaughters—twelve cabins, a small house, a café, a convenience store, and a lot of family memories. It’s where Dana, Harper, and Tawny once shared so many good times. They’ve returned, sharing only hidden regrets, a guarded mistrust, and haunting guilt. But now, in this healing summer place, the secrets that once drove them apart could bring them back together—especially when they discover that their grandmother may have been hiding something, too…

To overcome the past and find future happiness, these “sometimes sisters” have one more chance to realize they are always family.

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My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Granny used to say that the person who stirs the shit pile has to lick the spoon.

He made it in eight minutes and would have arrived there sooner if he hadn’t gotten behind a pokey old woman who didn’t have any place to go and a year to get there.

Did you think it was all rainbows and unicorn farts after you left? The only thing that changed was that I got all the bitchin’ instead of sharin’ it with you.

You can do better… He’s not for you, Aunt Tawny. He’s got a cat and he lives with his mama.

She’d worn a white robe and the preacher said that she was leaving all her sins in the water and would be a new creature when she arose from it. At ten years old, she’d often wondered how the water felt holding the sins of so many people and where it went when the preacher pulled the plug and let it all go. Did it wash into the rivers, where the sin jumped on people as they swam?

She loved the sound of his soft drawl. Maybe she could take him home. He could sit beside her bed and read the phone book to her until she fell asleep.

My Review:

I enjoyed this cleverly paced small-town family drama that was packed with quirky characters, heart-squeezing histories, irreverent homespun wisdom, and amusing observations.   Three grieving and desperate women arrived at a small-town Texas lake resort with each hoping for a chance at a fresh start in life. They had previously called themselves sometimes sisters, although they were actually three half-sisters who were only together one month each summer while staying at the rustic lake resort of with their much-loved grandmother, “Granny Annie.” Each was envious of the others but had never looked too deeply as nothing was as it had seemed.

But Granny Annie has just passed away, and the three women must return to run the resort together or get nothing at all, which posed quite the challenge, as they had not been successful in spending more than a few minutes together without an argument breaking out. Each arrived at the resort out of options, out of money, and weighted down with shameful secrets, regrets, and old resentments. Little did they know that Granny Annie had been keeping the biggest secret of them all. My favorite character was not one of the sisters but the elderly cook who had been known to them all their lives as Uncle Zed, I adored him, even if he was the cause of the first ugly cry I’ve sobbed out in years.

About the Author:

New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Carolyn Brown was born in Texas and raised in southern Oklahoma. These days she and her husband make their home in Davis, Oklahoma, a small town of less than three thousand people where everyone knows everyone, knows what they are doing and with whom, and read the weekly newspaper to see who got caught.

A plaque hangs on her office wall that says I know the voices are not real but they have such great ideas. That is her motto and muse as she goes through the days with quirky characters in her head, telling their stories, one by one, and loving her job.

She has been married almost half a century to a retired English teacher that she calls Mr. B and he does not read her books before they are published because she cannot afford a divorce. They have three grown children and enough grandchildren to keep them busy and young.

When Carolyn is not writing she likes to sit in the back yard and watch the two tom cats protect the yard from all kinds of wicked varmints like crickets, other cats, spiders and blue jays.

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A Piece of the World 

by Christina Baker Kline

HarperCollins | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (January 30, 2018)

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Exquisite. A must-read.” –Kristin Hannah

“This paperback edition includes a color reproduction of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World, along with a Q&A with bestselling author Kristin Hannah and a bonus short story, “Stranded in Ice.”

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the smash bestseller Orphan Train, a stunning and atmospheric novel of friendship, passion, and art, inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s mysterious and iconic painting Christina’s World.

“Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgrass and timothy. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won’t stay hidden.”

To Christina Olson, the entire world is her family farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. The only daughter in a family of sons, Christina is tied to her home by health and circumstance, and seems destined for a small life. Instead, she becomes Andrew Wyeth’s first great inspiration, and the subject of one of the best-known paintings of the twentieth century, Christina’s World.

As she did in her beloved bestseller Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline interweaves fact and fiction to vividly reimagine a real moment in history. A Piece of the World is a powerful story of the flesh-and-blood woman behind the portrait, her complicated relationship to her family and inheritance, and how artist and muse can come together to forge a new and timeless legacy.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Sometimes a sanctuary, sometimes a prison, that house on the hill has always been my home. I’ve spent my life yearning toward it, wanting to escape it, paralyzed by its hold on me. (There are many ways to be crippled, I’ve learned over the years, many forms of paralysis.) … You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel. And the skeleton of a house can carry in its bones the marrow of all that came before.

It is a terrible thing to find the love of your life, Christina… You know too well what you’re missing when it’s gone.

The day we bury her is dreary: a colorless sky, gray-boned trees, old sooty snow. Winter, I think, must be tired of itself.

… I put my hand over his, and he lays his other hand over mine. I feel the way I do when I lose something – a spool of thread, say – and search for it everywhere, only to discover it in an obvious place, like on the sideboard under the cloth.

My Review:

This was my first exposure to Christina Baker Kline’s talents and I became an instant devotee. The writing was emotive and often tinged with melancholy, lushly descriptive, thoughtfully observant, cunningly crafted, and intricately detailed. A fascinating mix of fact and fiction, I have since spent far too much time Googling Christina Olson and Andrew Wyeth’s iconic artwork.   I was immediately immersed in this beautifully and insightfully written book from the first person POV of Christina, a girl/woman with few options and limited mobility. Christina lived her entire life in the same house with her slightly odd family in small-town rural Maine and had continued to live under extremely harsh conditions without indoor plumbing, running water, or electricity, long after others in her area were enjoying these luxuries.

Christina was possibly the most obstinate woman of her time. Unsteady on her weak limbs following an life-threatening and undiagnosed illness at the age of three, she despised pity, denied most offers of assistance despite frequent mishaps and injuries from falls, refused to seek medical assistance when offered, and in her later years when her legs were no longer of use to her she steadfastly refused to use a wheelchair and drug herself by her elbows, up and down stairs and even across fields to visit her neighbor. I ached for her and wanted to pop her in the back of the head at the same time for her stubborn pride.  I was provided with a review copy of this captivating book by  TLC Book Tours and HarperCollins.

About Christina Baker Kline

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Orphan Train as well as A Piece of the World. She lives outside New York City and spends as much time as possible on the coast of Maine. Learn more about Christina at www.christinabakerkline.com.

Connect with Christina on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.