Book Reviews – Page 106 – Carol's Notebook

It Burns by Marc Fennel

August 20, 2019August 20, 2019 by Carol3 Comments

I am not a fan of hot things. I don't like my salsa above medium, I avoid jalapenos. I am a wuss when it comes to spicy things. But It Burns was one of the free Audible Originals this month and for some reason the app was having trouble downloading the book I actually used a credit on. (I finally got Bleak House downloaded. It's going to take forever to listen to - 45 hours. Anybody out there love it?) Apparently, the pepper business and the whole hot pepper community is crazier and more cutthroat than I would ever have guessed. It's a whole world that I never knew existed. This audiobook is short, under three hours, but full of people hurting themselves and finding themselves through peppers. It's really rather fascinating in a dark, bizarre way. Marc Fennel narrates It Burns, but it's not a traditional book. We get to hear his interviews with growers fanatics, even his mom. His style...

A Gentleman’s Murder by Christopher Huang

August 15, 2019August 15, 2019 by Carol4 Comments

There are a few things you might not know about me. 1.) I love clickbait. 2.) I can be a sucker for ads, not the ones on tv necessarily, more often the ones that show up on websites or facebook, you know those targetted ads. A Gentleman's Murder showed up in one of the ads on Goodreads. I forget what exactly the mini-blurb in the ad said, probably something along the lines of "reminiscent of the Golden Age of Mysteries, but it, along with the title and cover, was enough to send me off to the full blurb and I ended up adding it to my to-read list. A Gentleman's Murder takes place just after WWI in London. While a lot of the mysteries I've read that were actually written in that era gloss over the war, this one faces it aftereffects head-on. "Shell Shock," since this takes places before we referred to it as PTSD, plays an important role in...

A Whisker in the Dark by Leighann Dobbs

August 14, 2019August 29, 2019 by Carol2 Comments

A Whisker in the Dark was a fun, easy, silly read. Josie owns a guesthouse where people keep ending up dead. Well, this time around the first dead body is a skeleton from 300 years ago, but we end up with a murder soon enough—and it's probably no surprise with so many folks thinking there's a treasure buried on the guesthouse's property. So, the cats, Nero and Marlowe and their friends, are the real detectives here, although Josie does some investigating too. In Josie's defense, she's got a lot on her mind, with running the guesthouse, trying to learn how to cook, and flirting with the building inspector. The cats are pretty darn smart, and cats can get into places people can't and eavesdrop without being noticed. I'm still getting used to the cats talking to each other, but it does make the series stand out. The book is really about the characters, both human and feline. The mystery itself is...

The Sentence Is Death by Anthony Horowitz

August 13, 2019October 27, 2021 by Carol4 Comments

Hawthorne has been called in by the police again to help solve a murder, and of course, he convinces Horowitz to join him. After all, Horowitz needs to write two more stories featuring Hawthorne. The Sentence Is Death is the second in the series and honestly, I liked the whole author as a character thing more enjoyable this time around. The first time around I found it almost clever for clever's sake, but in this one it was amusing, seeing how people reacted to him, or not, knowing he was an author. I don't really have much to say about this one. It's a good traditional mystery, kind of a take on Sherlock and Watson, with Hawthorne as Sherlock, putting together the clues. He's not entirely likable, definitely not politically correct, and a bit abrasive. He keeps his theories to himself right up until the end. And Horowitz is our bumbling Watson, never getting the clues quite right, asking the wrong...

Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O’Keefe

August 8, 2019August 8, 2019 by Carol2 Comments

Velocity Weapon is really entertaining - a bit long perhaps, but a lot of fun. So why have I been sitting here looking at this blank review on and off for days now? I don't want to give away any of the plot points and those are what make the book interesting. The blurb above gives you the basic setup. Sanda is awesome, tough, resourceful, vulnerable. She was clearly the strongest of the characters and the parts from her point of view were the most compelling. Her brother Biran is a politician, but he still has some hope in the system, even if his faith is stretching thinner and thinner. I like that he doesn't give up hope, ever. There's a third character whose point of view we see the story from, but she's not mentioned in the blurb. Jules is in a different system. She's a thief whose last job went wrong and she is in major trouble. We don't know...

Everything Below the Waist by Jennifer Block

August 1, 2019August 1, 2019 by Carol4 Comments

Everything Below the Waist by Jennifer Block was eye-opening. In the last few years, I've gone out of my way to see women doctors, they make me more comfortable and I feel like they listen better, but to be honest, I hadn't really thought beyond that. Block's focus is on women's reproductive health specifically, but she does talk about how doctors and the medical establishment treat women both now and historically. Female reproductive health covers a range of sub-topics, and Block laid out the facts thoroughly and specifically, citing studies from numerous medical journals. Covered here is routine gynecologic care, hormonal birth control, infertility treatment, abortion, pregnancy, and childbirth. Most women will find something in these pages they can relate to. Maybe in a good way, a birth that went well or having a skilled surgeon. Maybe it's being bullied by a doctor or given unnecessary tests. Maybe it's not being given all the information about whatever the pharmaceutical companies are...