Review Copies

Who’d Have Thought It by Christine Webber. Kindly received from Christine.

A year after discovering that her husband no longer loves her, Dr Annie Templeton wakes up with a sudden relish for singledom. However, she soon realises that being single in your fifties is very different from being single in your twenties.
How, she wonders, do people of my age – with careers, adult children doing unwise things with unwise people, parents going gaga, and friends falling ill, or in or out of love – ever have the time and energy to find a new partner?
Who’d Have Thought It? is a romantic comedy, which will make you laugh and cry – often at the same time.

 

Jungle Rock by Caroline James. New novella from local Cheshire author Caroline.

Handsome young chef Zach Docherty is feeling the heat. Following an exposé in a national newspaper, his fiancée Poppy Dunlop has broken their engagement. Heartbroken at the thought of life without Poppy, Zach drowns his sorrows and, when his agent suggests that Zach becomes a contestant in a reality TV show, Jungle Survival, he reluctantly agrees. Plunged deep in the jungle, into a bizarre mix of talent and trials, Zach meets glamour model Cleo Petra, and the cameras go crazy.
Will Zach survive and be crowned Jungle King? Or will his latest exploits push Poppy further away…

Kindle Purchases

Loving Eleanor by Susan Wittig Albert (99p)

When AP political reporter Lorena Hickok—Hick—is assigned to cover Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1932 campaign, the two women become deeply involved. Their relationship begins with mutual romantic passion, matures through stormy periods of enforced separation and competing interests, and warms into an enduring, encompassing friendship documented by 3300 letters.

Set during the chaotic years of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War, Loving Eleanor reveals Eleanor Roosevelt as a complex, contradictory, and entirely human woman who is pulled in many directions by her obligations to her husband and family and her role as the nation’s First Lady. Hick is revealed as an accomplished journalist, who, at the pinnacle of her career, gives it all up for the woman she loves. Then, as Eleanor is transformed into Eleanor Everywhere, First Lady of the World, Hick must create her own independent, productive life. Loving Eleanor is a profoundly moving novel that illuminates a relationship we are seldom privileged to see, celebrating the depth and durability of women’s love.

A Man With One of Those Faces by Caimh McDonnell (99p)

The first time somebody tried to kill him was an accident. 

The second time was deliberate. 

Now Paul Mulchrone finds himself on the run with nobody to turn to except a nurse who has read one-too-many crime novels and a renegade cop with a penchant for violence. Together they must solve one of the most notorious crimes in Irish history . . . 

. . . or else they’ll be history.

Twenty years ago you were forced to give your daughter up. Now she’s back. Or is she?

Women who’ve had to give up children for adoption are being killed. A knock at their front door begins a nightmare from which they will never wake up.

East London Detective Ruby Preston and her team must hunt down a disturbed individual before someone else is taken. But when bodies start turning up, staged in perfect, domestic scenes, it carries the echo of a memory in Ruby’s mind. The tinkling of a music box. A mother and child reunion…

Then just as Ruby thinks they’ve made a breakthrough, she receives a sinister email, and the case takes a terrifying personal twist. 

Can Ruby catch the killer before they strike again? Or will her troubled past catch up with her first?

Kindle Freebies (or they were when I downloaded them)

 

They’d met on their first day at school four little girls who were all very different from each other but who somehow became close friends. Their friendship has now lasted thirty-five years. As their birthdays all fall in the same week they long ago made a pact to spend each big decade birthday together. So far they’d managed it.

Now as their thirty-ninth birthday looms, Angel, a famous Hollywood actress, announces that this will be her last birthday. Terrified of aging, she absolutely refuses to turn forty. So Lexi, the mother hen of the group and an artist, invites them to Florida for a week-long celebration of this, their last birthday together.

Brenda, mother to five grown-up children, flies in from Dublin, eagerly looking forward to her first foreign holiday ever. Mel, however, has to be prised away from New York where she is a successful partner in a law firm – Mel is a workaholic with no other friends or love in her life.

The four come together for the celebration but soon things start to unravel and the week ends disastrously. Lexi is distraught. Can their friendship endure? Only time will tell.

The House That Jack Built by Catherine Barry

When life gives you a second chance…?

At sixteen years old, Jack Joyce loses her virginity to her brother’s charming and charismatic friend, Matt.

She finds the experience an unexpected disappointment and whilst her friends spend their twenties settling in to their careers, Jack spends it partying, desperately trying to recreate the youth she felt she should have had.

More than a decade on — living in a tiny flat in Dublin, as a single mother and in a dead-end job — she still dreams of Matt, Thin Lizzy and those days of old.

So bumping into her first love at the point when her future seems its bleakest feels like destiny.

Is this Jack’s second chance?

Matt may be married, and have kids, but surely divine intervention must count for something?

If only Jack can shift some weight and stop drinking, who knows what might happen?

When Matt invites her to join an evening class he’s teaching, Jack’s fantasies soar to new heights.

She soon finds that he has set her on the first step of a journey that will change her life forever.

Only it isn’t quite the journey she had in mind…

Murder in Stained Glass by Margaret Armstrong

Meet Miss Trumbull, a stout talkative New Yorker with perfect manners and a passion for sleuthing.

When the remains of temperamental artist, Frederick Ullathorne, are found in his own fiery kiln it looks like a ghastly murder has been committed. But with only a few bones as evidence the local police are getting nowhere fast. Can Miss Trumbull pick up the clues that the police are missing? Or will her interfering get her into trouble in more ways that one?

A Goose Creek Christmas by Virginia Smith

Al’s Goose Is Cooked!

Forced into early retirement, Al Richardson knows what his wife will say when she hears the terrible news. Millie will insist that they open their B&B early. Where will that leave him? Carrying luggage and waiting tables? No way! He needs time to come up with another plan. With the help of an unlikely accomplice, Al spends his days scanning want ads and frequenting out-of-town coffee shops in an effort to hide his secret from all of Goose Creek—including his wife.

Millie is too busy to notice Al’s odd behavior. Between planning a huge Christmas party and holding tight to the reins of newcomer Lulu Thacker—whose tacky decorating schemes are sure to infuriate Main Street business owners—she has no time for anything else.

One thing is certain: In Goose Creek, no secret stays hidden for long. The most holy of holidays is swiftly approaching. Is Al in for a Merry Christmas or a Marriage Crisis?

Laid Back Around the World in 180 Days by Richard Evans

From the vast deserts of Kazakhstan to the Pyrenees via the monsoons of Southeast Asia, the Australian Nullarbor, the Canadian Rockies and Great Lakes, this is Richard Evans’s travelogue of his six-month journey around the world by recumbent bicycle in 2014.

Averaging around 1,000km per week, Richard shared treacherously potholed highways with speeding juggernauts, faced freezing nights and scorching days, and battled headwinds strong enough to blow him off the road. Having lost 7kg in the first seven weeks and with 19 weeks still to go, it was important to stabilise the weight loss. A cure was found in beer and dumplings.

Roads varied erratically from freshly tarmacked highways of international standard one minute to heavily rutted dirt tracks the next, where all evidence of any rideable surface had long since disappeared.

In the thermal pools of Taupo, New Zealand, he met ultra-runner Kevin Carr, who’d been running round the world at over 50km/day for two years. Kevin’s blog Hardwayround prompted Richard to consider renaming his own blog Easywayround. Because there were some easy bits too. And running is always harder.

In an American supermarket he stumbled across the gun counter, where a shop assistant apologised for not knowing much about firearms because she usually worked on fruit and veg.

Countless acts of spontaneous generosity from strangers propelled him along the way. Several times he was warned that he’d reached the edge of civilisation and to continue would be sheer folly because folk in the next town/province/country were aggressive savages. Upon arrival however he was invariably met by benevolent locals interested in where he was from, where he was going and how old he was (52½). And one proposal of marriage.

Richard eventually finished back where he started, at BikeFix in London, having ridden 23,000km across 18 countries and four continents. The only aggression he’d faced had been on the roads: first from motorists, a sizeable minority of whom morph into murderous maniacs as soon as they get behind the wheel; and to a lesser extent from dogs – but Richard had his own special way of dealing with them…

Escape to Perdition by James Silvester

Love, deception and murder dominate as Prague becomes the center of international intrigue and shadowy organizations battle for power over a nation’s future.

Prague 2015. Herbert Biely, aged hero of the Prague Spring, stands on the brink of an historic victory, poised to reunite the Czech and Slovak Republics twenty-six years after the Velvet Revolution. But other parties have their own agendas and plans for the fate of the region. A shadowy collective, masked as an innocuous European Union Institute, will do anything to preserve the status quo.

Institute operative Peter Lowe’s mission is to prevent reunification by the most drastic of measures. Yet Peter is not all that he seems – a deeply troubled man, desperate to escape the past, his resentment towards himself, his assignment and his superiors deepens as he questions not just the cause, but his growing feelings for the mission target.

As alliances shift and the election countdown begins, Prague becomes the focal point for intrigue on an international scale. The body count rises, options fade, and Peter’s path to redemption is clouded in a maelstrom of love, deception and murder – can he confront his past to save the future?

Celebrations & Confetti at Cedarwood Lodge by Rebecca Raisin

Clio Winters is finally fulfilling her childhood dream of renovating the gorgeous old Cedarwood Lodge in Evergreen. Turning it into the perfect destination for big celebrations, weddings and parties has brought her back home, but Cedarwood Lodge is in need of a lot of tender loving care.

Perhaps all the work will be the perfect distraction from the real reason she had to leave her glamorous New York life behind.

Will coming home be the best decision of her life… or her biggest regret?

Cedarwood Lodge is a delectable romance told in three parts – following Clio Winters journey back to her hometown of Evergreen. This is Part One.

Charity Shop Purchase

The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton by Elizabeth Speller

When former infantry officer Laurence Bartram is called to the small village of Easton Deadall, he is struck by the beauty of the place: a crumbling stately home; a centuries-old church; and a recently planted maze, a memorial to the men of the village, almost all of whom died in one heroic battle in 1916.

But it soon becomes clear to Laurence that while rest of the country is alight with hope for the first time since the end of the War, as the first Labour government takes power, the Wiltshire village is haunted by its tragic past. In 1911, five-year-old Kitty Easton disappeared from her bed and has not been seen since: only her fragile mother believes still she is alive. When a family trip to the Empire Exhibition in London ends in disaster and things take an increasingly sinister turn, Laurence struggles to find out what has happened as it seems that the fate of the house, the men and of Kitty herself may be part of a much longer, darker story of love, betrayal – and violence.