reviews

Misanthropes unite! Author:  Edward Abbey It’s the novel that generated a new verb that still resonates across the American West, even decades after it was first published in 1975.  The Monkey Wrench Gang is the late Edward Abbey’s most influential work of fiction and fully captures the man at his most crotchety.  Loaded with plenty of his patented cynicism (in regards to humans) and endless passion (in regards to the desert southwest – sans humans), it’s a uniquely caustic chronicle that has served as a rallying cry for the environmental movement ever since. Distressed by the accelerating destruction of the [...]

The Beginning of a Sassy, Cozy Mystery Series Author: Connie Feddersen Amanda Hazard and her small time Oklahoma town, Vamoose, have captivated me since picking up Dead in the Pumpkin Patch (book four). Charmed, I bought the whole series and am now starting properly – from the beginning. Amanda, a jaded CPA new to the town of Vamoose is down on men (her ex has seen to that) and is ready for a fresh new start. When that new start involves her with a shady client and worse – a dead body – it looks like she is going to get her [...]

Faded memories... Author:  Miranda Richmond Mouillot The house was a ramshackle wreck, slowly fading into the dust in the tiny town of Alba in southern France.  But it captured her imagination like nothing else.  Perpetually intrigued by the old structure, purchased – but never inhabited – by her Jewish maternal grandparents more than fifty years prior, North Carolina native Miranda Richmond Mouillot couldn’t resist the urge to find out more, opening up some deeply buried old family secrets in A Fifty-Year Silence. But the secret of the neglected house was a trifle compared to the much more troublesome mystery that [...]