book reviews

Tornadoes, Hidden Wills, and Treachery Author: Connie Feddersen Book two in the Amanda Hazard cozy mystery series starts as any good cozy should: with a darkening storm, an isolated farm, and a dead body. It begins when Amanda comes to visit her cantankerous client, the isolated and generally disliked, Elmer Jolly. Already her not-so-great for the rural wilds of Oklahoma car is having issues with the pitted country backwoods roads. And there is no help out here. With lowering storm clouds, all she has seen is one speeding pickup truck, and little to no shelter.  When she gets to Jolly’s [...]

How to Make a SensationalisticCase Boring Author: Cara Robertson Having just finished Sarah Schmidt’s See What I Have Done, a fictitious imaging of that humid summer’s day in 1892 when Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally axed to death, I decided I wanted to know a bit more about the real, non-fictitious murder. This was my first dip into the world of true crime non-fiction and there were a LOT of books on Lizzie’s life and the events that led up to the eventual, seemingly surprising “not guilty” verdict. With its high ratings, relative newness, and easy availability, the audio book [...]

A Cop, a Thief, a Murderer Author: Belinda Bauer Snap begins with a young boy, left in a baking car abandoned in the pitted and debris filled breakdown lane with his two younger sisters, waiting for his mother to return. She never does. Where this ultimately leads Jack is into a life of crime and the search for a murderer. Snap starts with a gut punch. A broiling scene of crying babies and mad siblings that paints an austere picture, one we can’t help but enter. From here though as the years slam by, the fear turns into teenage anger and the [...]