Mailbox Monday

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

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Warning:  Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles, and humongous wish lists.
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Mailbox Monday, created by Marcia @A Girl and Her Books, has a permanent home now at  MAILBOX MONDAY.
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Here is a shout out to the administrators

Serena @ Savvy Verse and Wit

Martha @ Reviews By Martha’s Bookshelf

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THANKS to everyone for keeping Mailbox Monday alive.

This weeks NetGalley approvals:

In The Hour Of Crows by Dana Elmendorf

In a small town in Appalachia, people paint their doorways blue to keep spirits away. Black ferns grow where death will follow. And Weatherly Opal Wilder is a Death Talker.

When called upon, she can talk the death out of the dying and save their lives—only once, never twice. But this truly unique gift comes at a price, rooting Weatherly to people who only want her around when they need her and resent her backwater ways when they don’t.

Weatherly’s cousin Adaire also has a gift: she’s a Scryer and can see the future reflected back in dark surfaces. Right before she is killed in an accident, Adaire saw something unnerving, and that’s why Weatherly believes she was murdered—never thinking for a moment that it was an accident. But when Weatherly, for the first time, is unable to talk the death out of the mayor’s son, the whole town suspects she is out for revenge, that she wouldn’t save him.

With the help of clues Adaire left behind and her family’s Granny Witch recipe box, Weatherly sets out to find the truth behind her cousin’s death, whatever it takes.

Imbued with magic, witchery, and suspense, Dana Elmendorf’s In the Hour of Crows is a thrilling tale of friendship, identity, and love.

Red River Road by Anna Downes

Anna Downes's extraordinary next thriller follows a woman desperate to discover what happened to her sister on a solo road trip through the Australian outback.

Katy Sweeney is determined to find her sister. A year earlier, just three weeks into a solo vanlife trip, free-spirited Phoebe vanished without a trace on Western Australia’s remote and achingly beautiful Coral Coast. With no witnesses, no leads, and no DNA evidence, the case has gone cold. But Katy refuses to give up.

Using Phoebe’s social media accounts as a map, Katy starts to retrace her steps, searching for the clues that the police have missed. Was Phoebe being followed? Who had she met along the way, and what danger did they pose? Was she as happy as her sun-bleached, lens-flared photos seem to suggest?

Then Katy’s path collides with that of Beth, a young woman on the run from her own dark past—and very recent present. And as Katy realizes that Beth might be her best and only chance of finding the truth, the two women form an uneasy alliance to venture forth into increasingly wild territory to find out what really happened to Phoebe in this breathtaking but maybe deadly place, and how her fate connects them all.

Anna Downes takes us on a twist-filled journey into the dark side of solo female travel, in this gripping novel that explores what drives us to keep searching for those we have lost, the family bonds that can make or break us, and the deception of memory.

Polite Calamities by Jennifer Gold

In a hazy 1960s Rhode Island summer, three disparate lives converge and combust in this riveting story of the empowerment women find in friendship, solidarity, and rage, from the author of Halfway to You.

Winifred is blunt, opinionated, and outrageously colorful. In a community that demands domesticity, she simply doesn’t fit. When her wealthy husband suddenly dies, Winifred’s fellow society housewives no longer have a reason to play nice. Cast out entirely, Winifred throws roaring parties for the clerks and waiters that serve the town, finding the connections she’s been craving—and upsetting the gentle balance of her elite neighborhood in the process.

Flailing artist Marie wants to paint over her past before the painful memories consume her. On the brink of making a longtime dream come true, her newfound friendship with Winifred might be the key to finally moving forward—or her undoing.

High-society housewife June weathers a chronic pain that would make other women faint. With her veneer crumbling, she has no patience for the free spirit shaking up her community. Filled with a mixture of obsessive hatred and fascination for the outcast, June’s determined to destroy Winifred and return her life to the way it used to be.

When slow-simmering summer secrets and resentments finally reach the boiling point, everyone is at risk of being burned. Polite Calamities explores what “community” really means when societal survival is at stake, and what happens when women decide it’s time to stop behaving and start living.

The Berlin Sisters by Soraya M. Lane

From the bestselling author of The Secret Midwife comes a story of bravery, sacrifice and resilience in war-torn Berlin—and two sisters who will risk it all to make a difference.

Berlin, 1943: Ava Müller is a proud supporter of the German war effort, working for Joseph Goebbels alongside her father, a high-ranking official in the Reich. With her sister Hanna, a nurse, braving bombing raids to save lives, they are a model Nazi family. Until Ava discovers her parents and Hanna are secretly working for the resistance…

Returning to their country home, Ava is shocked to find her childhood friend Eliana Goldman and her family hidden in the attic. Suddenly she faces a stark choice: denounce her family, as she’s been taught, or betray her country. She knows only too well what happens to traitors—but as Eliana’s story of terror at the hands of the Nazis unravels, Ava realises her loyalty to the regime has blinded her to the horrifying truth.

Drawn into the resistance network alongside Hanna, Ava begins the dangerous work of undermining the Reich from within its own headquarters. Relying on each other for courage and resilience, the sisters must risk their own lives to save others, knowing that every day brings them one step closer to making the ultimate sacrifice…

Heartbreaking, hopeful and thought-provoking, this is a powerful work of fiction inspired by those who chose to fight the Nazis from within Germany and the events that followed.