It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? #SundayPost #SundaySalon

Linking to: It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? at BookDate; Sunday Post @ Caffeinated Reviewer; and the Sunday Salon @ ReaderBuzz

Life…

Well here we are a week into the new year and it’s certainly been an eventful one.

I’m delighted that the Senate is now Blue, and Biden’s presidency has been confirmed. Obviously however news of the disturbing assault on the Capitol Building is on everyone’s mind. I wish for peace and safety in the United States, and the removal of Trump from office when the The House meets on Monday.

Australia is working hard to squash an outbreak of Coronavirus on the East Coast that began just before Christmas. We currently have 199 active cases in NSW, and restrictions have been increased in the Greater Sydney area, with face masks required in all indoor locations. Thankfully our region remains Covid free -there has not been a case for 253 days – so restrictions continue to be minimal.

In other, admittedly less globally noteworthy, news my youngest daughter turned 18! We had dinner with family earlier in the week, and her godmother, older sister, and I, in what is a traditional rite of passage, took her to the pub for her first drink (18 is the legal drinking age here).

I’ve done far too much doomscrolling this week so I didn’t do as much blog hopping as I had planned, I follow over 1000 book bloggers via Feedly and while I aim to comment on at least ten blogs a day, and visit at least double that, I never feel like I’m making much progress. I have posted the first of what will be four posts providing titles that suit the twelve categories for the 2021 Nonfiction Reader Challenge. You can read the post HERE and leave further suggestions in the comments.

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What I’ve Read Since I last Posted…

Lana’s War by Anita Abriel

Shelter by Catherine Jinks

Elizabeth & Elizabeth by Sue Williams

The Schoolgirl Strangler by Katherine Kovacic

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New Posts…

Review: This Has Been Absolutely Lovely by Jessica Dettmann

Review: When the Apricots Bloom by Gina Wilkinson

Review: Lana’s War by Anita Abriel

2021 Nonfiction Reader Challenge Inspiration PART #1 -Biography, Travel, Self Help

Review: Shelter by Catherine Jinks

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What I’m Reading This Week…

There are so many ways to kill a friendship . . .

You’re lying, sprawled at the bottom of the stairs, legs bent, arms wide.

And while this could be a tragic accident, if anyone’s got a motive to hurt you, it’s me.

Bec and Izzy have been best friends their whole lives. They have been through a lot together – from the death of Bec’s mother to the birth of Izzy’s daughter. But there’s a darker side to their friendship, and once it has been exposed, there is no turning back.

So when Izzy’s body is found, Bec knows that if the police decide to look for a killer, she will be the prime suspect. Because those closest to you are the ones who can hurt you the most . . .

The Rumour meets The Holiday in this compulsive thriller with a toxic friendship at its heart that keeps you in the dark until the final breathless pages

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When Bertram Telemann, a developmentally disabled man, goes missing from a local diner near Greenbury, the entire community of the small upstate New York town volunteers to search the surrounding woods in hopes of finding him. High functioning and independent, Bertram had been on a field trip with the staff and fellow residents of the Loving Care Home when he vanished.

When no trace of the man is found, the disappearance quickly becomes an official missing persons case and is assigned to detectives Peter Decker and his partner Tyler McAdams. As their investigation deepens, the seasoned Decker becomes convinced that Bertram hadn’t lost his way, but had left with someone he knew. Soon Decker discovers that Elsie Schulung, a recently fired nurse who had worked at the home, seemed to be especially interested in Bertram. But answers proves elusive when Elsie disappears and human blood is found in her kitchen.

But the complications are only beginning. While combing the woods, searchers discover the remains of one of three young men who had vanished during a camping trip. And for Decker, personal problems are adding pressure as well. After a ten-year absence, the biological mother of Decker’s and Rina’s foster son, Gabriel, has suddenly appeared in New York, children in tow, wreaking emotional havoc on the young man.

Juggling the personal and professional, a hot case and a cold case, Decker and McAdams race to find answers, sifting through cabinets of old files, a plethora of clues and evidence, and discouraging dead ends. As on-going searches for Bertram and the campers’ missing remains continue, the frustrated detectives begin to wonder if the woods will ever give up its dark secrets . . . and if these intertwining cases will be solved.

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A masterly and agenda-setting inquest into how the deaths of two teenage girls shone a light into the darkest corners of a nation

Katra Sadatgani. An eye-blink of a village in western Uttar Pradesh, crammed into less than one square mile of land. A community bounded by the certainty of the changing of the seasons, by tradition and custom; a community in which young women are watched closely, and know what is expected of them.

It was an ordinary night, in the middle of mango season, when the two girls first went missing. When the next day dawned, and their bodies were found – hanging in the orchard, their clothes muddied – only one thing seemed clear: that life in Uttar Pradesh would never be the same again.

Sixteen-year-old Padma had sparked and burned. Fourteen-year-old Lalli had been an incorrigible romantic. But who they were and what had happened to them were already less important than what their disappearance meant to the people left behind. In the ensuing months, the investigation into their deaths would implode everything that their small community held to be true, and instigated a national conversation about sex, honour and violence.

A masterly and agenda-setting inquest into how the deaths of two teenage girls shone a light into the darkest corners of a nation, The Good Girls returns to the scene of Padma and Lalli’s short lives and shocking deaths, and dares to ask: what is the human cost of shame?

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There are dark forces at work in our world (and in Manchester in particular), so thank God The Stranger Times is on hand to report them . . .

A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but mostly the weird), it is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable.

At least that’s their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little of the publication he edits. His staff are a ragtag group of misfits. And as for the assistant editor . . . well, that job is a revolving door – and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who’s got problems of her own.

When tragedy strikes in her first week on the job The Stranger Times is forced to do some serious investigating. What they discover leads to a shocking realisation: some of the stories they’d previously dismissed as nonsense are in fact terrifyingly real. Soon they come face-to-face with darker forces than they could ever have imagined.

The Stranger Times is the first novel from C.K. McDonnell, the pen name of Caimh McDonnell. It combines his distinctive dark wit with his love of the weird and wonderful to deliver a joyous celebration of how truth really can be stranger than fiction

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