400 pages
William Morrow Paperbacks (February 18, 2020)

“This might well be my favorite Rader-Day so far: a brilliant premise intriguingly developed, totally believable characters and a climax that took my breath away.”  — Ann Cleeves, New York Times bestselling author of The Shetland and Vera Series  

From the author of the Edgar Award®-nominated Under A Dark Sky comes an unforgettable, chilling novel about a young woman who recognizes the man who kidnapped her as a child, setting off a search for justice, and into danger.

Most people who go missing are never found. But Alice was the lucky one…

As a child, Alice was stolen from her backyard in a tiny Indiana community, but against the odds, her policeman father tracked her down within twenty-four hours and rescued her from harm. In the aftermath of the crime, her family decided to move to Chicago and close the door on that horrible day.

Yet Alice hasn’t forgotten. She devotes her spare time volunteering for a website called The Doe Pages scrolling through pages upon pages of unidentified people, searching for clues that could help reunite families with their missing loved ones. When a face appears on Alice’s screen that she recognizes, she’s stunned to realize it’s the same man who kidnapped her decades ago. The post is deleted as quickly as it appeared, leaving Alice with more questions than answers.

Embarking on a search for the truth, she enlists the help of friends from The Doe Pages to connect the dots and find her kidnapper before he hurts someone else. Then Alice crosses paths with Merrily Cruz, another woman who’s been hunting for answers of her own. Together, they begin to unravel a dark, painful web of lies that will change what they thought they knew—and could cost them everything.

Twisting and compulsively readable, The Lucky One explores the lies we tell ourselves to feel safe.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

A cake of angels and beauty itself, chocolate on top of chocolate, like a last request before execution. Merrily had passed out in a food coma in her old room and had to borrow the twinset and skirt from her mom’s closet for work… Merrily looked like a giraffe dressed for church, but she still looked better than the women in the front office any day of the week. Fact.

“I turned thirty. Thirty.” … Thirty was a monster. She’d been pursued by it and now here it sat in her lap, breathing its stink on her. Her age would ruin everything, if not this year, then soon.

“There’s my Alice in Wonderland.” Alice got up and met him for a hug. He couldn’t swing her off her feet anymore, but the old nickname never failed to shrink her to fit the tiny door of childhood.

Every sweet thing about Uncle Jim, Jimmy could ruin like a funhouse mirror. She liked to think that Jimmy was adopted, some changeling JimBig and his ex-wife had found and taken home.

Merrily had always wished for a baby brother or sister, but she needn’t have bothered. Her own mother provided all the mischief she could handle… Why were the grown-ups in her life so damaged and needy?

My Review:

This gripping, tautly written, and twisty book had me in knots and frequently chewing on my lips and picking at my ragged cuticles, which were merely the early clues that this was going to be a 5-Star read. Each character was oddly compelling although deeply flawed and not all that admirable. Neither of the two main characters, Merrily and Alice, were among the sharpest tools in the shed and I frequently wanted to schedule each of them a colonoscopy to search for their misplaced craniums.

The storylines were shrewdly crafted, cunningly paced, and riveting with intrigue while fraught with tension, family secrets, and impending peril. This was my first experience with the diabolically clever storytelling of Lori Rader-Day and in my expert analysis – she may well be a high priestess of the word voodoo as I was totally sucked into her vortex, tumbled around, and spit back out hours later feeling rather stunned, dazed, and pleasantly amazed.

I was provided with a review copy of this cleverly crafted missive by TLC Book Tours and HarperCollins.

About the Author

Resistance Women
by Jennifer Chiaverini

About the Author

Years ago, Beth Lathrop and her sister Kate suffered what they thought would be the worst tragedy of their lives the night both the famous painting Moonlight and their mother were taken. The detective assigned to the case, Conor Reid, swore to protect the sisters from then on.

Beth moved on, throwing herself fully into the art world, running the family gallery, and raising a beautiful daughter with her husband Pete. Kate, instead, retreated into herself and took to the skies as a pilot, always on the run. When Beth is found strangled in her home, and Moonlight goes missing again, Detective Reid can’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu.

Reid immediately suspects Beth’s husband, whose affair is a poorly kept secret. He has an airtight alibi—but he also has a motive, and the evidence seems to point to him. Kate and Reid, along with the sisters’ closest childhood friends, struggle to make sense of Beth’s death, but they only find more questions: Who else would have wanted Beth dead? What’s the significance of Moonlight?

Twenty years ago, Reid vowed to protect Beth and Kate—and he’s failed. Now solving the case is turning into an obsession . . .

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

He always thought of his first encounter with a homicide victim as two people meeting. An encounter every bit as important in death as it would have been in life, as revelatory as a conversation— in some ways more so.

She had the feeling she might fall off the world. Everything felt dangerous; she wasn’t sure her skin could hold her bones and blood and heart inside.

She was the crème brûlée of mothers: hard shell on the outside, total mush on the inside.

Every few weeks the morgue was called here to remove a body—mostly overdoses, some accidental and some suicides. The walls were soaked with the sadness of lonely people drinking themselves to death in their small rooms.

Surreptitiously, on the side Lulu couldn’t see, Scotty grabbed the roll of fat around her waist. The old commercial used to say if you could pinch more than an inch you needed to eat their cereal and get into shape. Scotty could pinch half a foot.

My Review:

Brilliantly conceived, cunningly plotted, diabolically crafted, shrewdly paced, and skillfully written. This book was da bomb! I was taut with tension with my shoulders in my ears and so sure I knew who had killed Beth, but, silly me, I was – so – very – wrong! This was my introduction to the skilled and breathtaking art form found in the wordcraft of Luanne Rice. I was enthralled, riveted, confounded, and ensorcelled. Ms. Rice was obviously gifted by the fairies of lexicon with mad skills. Her word voodoo is strong. I am her newest and most ardent fangirl.

About the Author

Connect with Luanne

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Kelly Collins welcomes you back to Aspen Cove where acceptance is found in the eyes of a stranger, and love is found in his heart…

Horse trainer Trinity Mosier never looks for trouble, but it finds her at every turn. After losing her job, she packs up and moves to Aspen Cove, hoping her brother will take her in. However, when she arrives, he makes it clear that one wrong move will have her out on her ear. Things are starting to look up when a bully from her past comes back to taunt her. Just as she readies for battle, Wyatt Morrison steps in and redirects her fury, but can he keep her storm on its new trajectory, or will she leave destruction in her wake once more?

Wyatt Morrison came to Aspen Cove looking for an opportunity. But instead of becoming the foreman of The Big D Ranch, he finds out he’s been hired to be a glorified assistant to a man who doesn’t know his chaps from his Chapstick. To make things worse, he’s been banned from living on the property because the owner’s young daughter has taken a shine to him. He needs to find a new job, and fast. Unfortunately for him, when his dream job arrives, it comes at the cost of losing the woman he loves.

What will Wyatt choose—his love or his dream?

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

He’d never been sure why there was a mirror in their office. Most of his colleagues usually looked like they’d gotten dressed in the dark and had never seen a hairbrush before, but it was coming in handy to check he didn’t have anything between his teeth…

There was something a little ‘jumble sale’ about the whole office. Was that a sword crafted out of foam sticking out a milk crate? What on earth went on in this office?

It had been rather remarkable, but not long after Granny Fitzgerald passed away, Sharon had turned up at their house with a cat under her arm, swearing it was Granny Fitzgerald reincarnated. Or ‘reincatinated’ as their brother Luke had suggested. Despite Luke’s joking, oddly enough, the cat did look like his late grandmother. As much as a feline could look like a human, that was.

My Review:

This was a sweet and predictable novella that was chaste enough for my elderly mother’s Sunday School Book Club. The characters were likable and varied with a large family and open-ended storylines to set the stage for a new series.

About the Author