Monday, July 10, 2023

Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week.

Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles, and humongous wish lists!!
Mailbox Monday, created by Marcia @ A Girl and Her Books, has a permanent home now at Mailbox Monday.
 ************
Here’s a shout out to the administrators:
Emma @ Words And peace
************
                THANKS to everyone for keeping Mailbox Monday alive.

No NetGalley's this week but a few from BOTM and one I bought just because I had to have it. 

I love BOTM. Great books and all Hardbacks. Much cheaper than Amazon.

These are my three this month. 
I'm really looking forward to reading these. I've heard good things about each one. 
1: Dark Corners by Megan Goldin 

"A gripping story that is equal parts shocking, unnerving, and thrilling. Goldin takes the ‘true crime’ trope to new and unexpected territory.” —Karin Slaughter, New York Times and #1 international bestselling author of Girl, Forgotten

Rachel Krall, the true crime podcaster star of Megan Goldin’s acclaimed The Night Swim, returns to search for a popular influencer who disappears after visiting a suspected serial killer.

Terence Bailey is about to be released from prison for breaking and entering, though investigators have long suspected him in the murders of six women. As his release date approaches, Bailey gets a surprise visit from Maddison Logan, a hot, young influencer with a huge social media following. Hours later, Maddison disappears, and police suspect she’s been kidnapped—or worse. Is Maddison’s disappearance connected to her visit to Bailey? And why was she visiting him in the first place?

When they hit a wall in the investigation, the FBI reluctantly asks for Rachel Krall’s help in finding the missing influencer. Maddison seems to only exist on social media; she has no family, no friends, and other than in her posts, most people have never seen her. Who is she, really? Using a fake Instagram account, Rachel goes undercover to BuzzCon, a popular influencer conference, where she discovers a world of fierce rivalry that may have turned lethal.

When police find the body of a woman with a tattoo of a snake eating its tail—identical to a tattoo Rachel had seen on Bailey’s hand—the FBI must consider a chilling possibility: Bailey has an accomplice on the outside and a dangerous obsession with influencers, including Rachel Krall herself. Suddenly the target of a monster hiding in plain sight, Rachel is forced to confront the very real dangers that lurk in the dark corners of the internet.

2: The Connelly's Of County Down by Tracey Lange

From Tracey Lange, the New York Times bestselling author of We Are the Brennans, comes The Connellys of County Down: a story about fierce family loyalty, good intentions gone awry, and the consequences of improbable love.

When Tara Connelly is released from prison after serving eighteen months on a drug charge, she knows rebuilding her life at thirty years old won’t be easy. With no money and no prospects, she returns home to live with her siblings, who are both busy with their own problems. Her brother, a single dad, struggles with the ongoing effects of a brain injury he sustained years ago, and her sister’s fragile facade of calm and order is cracking under the burden of big secrets. Life becomes even more complicated when the cop who put her in prison keeps showing up unannounced, leaving Tara to wonder what he wants from her now.

While she works to build a new career and hold her family together, Tara finds a chance at love in a most unlikely place. But when the Connellys’ secrets start to unravel and threaten her future, they all must face their worst fears and come clean, or risk losing each other forever.

The Connellys of County Down is a moving novel about testing the bounds of love and loyalty. It explores the possibility of beginning our lives anew, and reveals the pitfalls of shielding each other from the bitter truth.

3: The Whispers by Ashley Audrain

INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Expertly, subtly and powerfully rendered. . . . [The Whispers] delivers a sucker-punch ending you’ll have to read twice to believe.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[An] electrifying . . . razor-sharp page-turner.” —Carley Fortune, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Every Summer After


On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighbor­hood couples and their children gather for a barbecue as the summer winds down. Everything is fabulous until Whitney, the picture-perfect hostess, explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack—loud and clear. Before long, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. And then his mother can only sit by her son’s hospital bed, where his life hangs in the balance.

Over the course of a tense three days, the women of the neighborhood grapple with what led to that terrible night. People-pleasing Blair, Whitney’s best friend, suspects something isn’t as it seems. Rebecca, the ER doctor who helps treat Whit­ney’s son, has struggled to have a child of her own. And the all-knowing Mara, the older woman next door, watches everyone’s world unravel from her front porch.

Exploring envy, women’s friendships, desire, and the intuitions that we silence, The Whispers is a chilling novel that marks Ashley Audrain as a major fiction talent.

This is one that I had been looking at for a while. I wanted it and just decided to buy it. 

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

The New York Times bestselling author of Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, and The Poisonwood Bible and recipient of numerous literary awards—including the National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Orange Prize—returns with a timely novel that interweaves past and present to explore the human capacity for resiliency and compassion in times of great upheaval.

Willa Knox has always prided herself on being the embodiment of responsibility for her family. Which is why it’s so unnerving that she’s arrived at middle age with nothing to show for her hard work and dedication but a stack of unpaid bills and an inherited brick home in Vineland, New Jersey, that is literally falling apart. The magazine where she worked has folded, and the college where her husband had tenure has closed. The dilapidated house is also home to her ailing and cantankerous Greek father-in-law and her two grown children: her stubborn, free-spirited daughter, Tig, and her dutiful debt-ridden, ivy educated son, Zeke, who has arrived with his unplanned baby in the wake of a life-shattering development.

In an act of desperation, Willa begins to investigate the history of her home, hoping that the local historical preservation society might take an interest and provide funding for its direly needed repairs. Through her research into Vineland’s past and its creation as a Utopian community, she discovers a kindred spirit from the 1880s, Thatcher Greenwood.

A science teacher with a lifelong passion for honest investigation, Thatcher finds himself under siege in his community for telling the truth: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting new theory recently published by Charles Darwin. Thatcher’s friendships with a brilliant woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor draw him into a vendetta with the town’s most powerful men. At home, his new wife and status-conscious mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his financial worries and the news that their elegant house is structurally unsound.

Brilliantly executed and compulsively readable, Unsheltered is the story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum, as they navigate the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts. In this mesmerizing story told in alternating chapters, Willa and Thatcher come to realize that though the future is uncertain, even unnerving, shelter can be found in the bonds of kindred—whether family or friends—and in the strength of the human spirit.


6 comments:

  1. Some great books there! I plan on reading The Whispers this summer, I am looking forward to it. And I would like to read Dark Corners too sometime soon as I loved The Night Swim. Happy reading!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Night Swim was excellent. I enjoyed it so much.

      Delete
  2. But with BOTM, you can only get some of the books they feature, right?
    I usually love Kingsolver's books. But I thought this one was not well written

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You can purchase as many books as you’d like. After so many the price drops to a bit over $11 for each book. Though you do pay a monthly fee but you also get a book free. You do have to choose at least one BOTM book to get others from what I’ve seen. I love it though. There’s no shipping fee either.

      Delete
  3. I hadn't considered BOTM but I am glad you are enjoying it and taking good advantage of it. Enjoy all of your reading!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm enjoying the books. They are nice priced too.

      Delete

James by Percival Everett

  My thoughts First, the narrator was wonderful. I was sucked into this story. It was a bit slow at first but it was worth it. What this wor...