Thursday, February 29, 2024

The Mystery Guest

When a world-famous author dies at a five-star hotel, a neurodivergent maid sets out to find the culprit for his suspicious, sudden death.

The Mystery Guest by Nita Prose is a bright, dynamic continuation of her cozy mystery series that features Molly Gray, a lovable, learning-as-she-goes maid who works at the Regency, an elegantly sophisticated, five-star boutique hotel.

In the first book, The Maid, neurodivergent Molly struggled to navigate life after the death of her touchstone, her grandmother, “Gran,” who spent her life working as a maid. Molly, then a meticulous maid-in-training, became swept up in a murder investigation of a hotel patron that called her and her co-workers into question. In The Mystery Guest, Molly’s story picks up three and a half years later. Molly, now 29-years-old, has since been promoted to Head Maid at the Regency. 

The hotel is eager to redeem its image, hosting “world-famous,” reclusive author, J. D. Grimthorpe. He is intent on making a major public announcement. Standing before a gaggle of press people and adoring fans in the Regency Tea Room, he suddenly drops dead before the big reveal, sending Molly and those in her orbit into mayhem. Could it be that Grimthorpe was murdered? If so, why? 

Prose deftly employs a familiar cast of quirky characters plus adds a few new ones, each with dubious motives. As in the first book, “Gran” and her wisdom continue to influence Molly’s smart perceptions. Molly’s strong narrative voice mines experiences from the past that just might hold clues to her solving this suspensefully well-drawn, second-in-the-series mystery.

The Mystery Guest: A Maid Novel (Molly the Maid Book Two) by Nita Prose

Ballantine Books, $29.00 hardcover, 9780593356180, 304 pages

Publishing Date: November 28, 2023

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (December 29, 2023), link HERE 

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Jill Fordye: The Undoing of Aloneness

 The Writer's Life

Jill Fordyce: The Undoing of Aloneness

(photo: Nathan Westerfield)

Jill Fordyce was born and raised in Bakersfield, Calif. She received a degree in English from the University of Southern California, and a law degree from Santa Clara University. While practicing law, she continued to study writing through the Stanford Continuing Education creative writing program. Her first novel, Belonging (Post Hill Press, January 30, 2024), traces the relationships and generational influences that impact the life of one woman over the course of 40 years. (See the review below)

Why write a coming-of-age story?

I have always been moved by stories that chronicle of young love, lifelong friendships, hometowns, music, and the hold the past often has over the present. And when I think of important times of youth, for me they are set against the backdrop of the Central Valley of California.

That accounts for the Bakersfield setting.

Initially, I thought of setting the novel in a fictional town, but every time I traveled back to Bakersfield, I felt such a unique type of inspiration, and I knew I had to write about it. I think we write what we know, what we can see--particularly with a first novel. The setting is so important, and Bakersfield is a place I know personally, so it made sense to put Jenny (the main character) there.

Themes of "hometown" are central to the story.

While some inspiration may come from what the notion of "hometown" evokes for everyone, some of it feels very specific to Bakersfield and Central California--the music, the food, the tree-lined streets and flat horizon, the warmth and the fog, the families who have known each other for generations.

Yes, the importance and influence of family--both birth and created families--is threaded throughout, as are themes of life and death, and a reliance on spiritual faith.

Family to me is a place of home and belonging. And belonging is fundamentally about the undoing of aloneness, which is a primary need for everyone. As I came to understand Jenny more deeply, I could see that her faith--Catholic faith instilled by her extended family--was central to her life. The comfort she derived from those spiritual influences was critical to her survival as a child, as she undergoes illness, isolation, and experiences death for the first time. Jenny comes to believe that to "love forever is to live forever." If she didn't have a spiritual grounding and hold such belief, I don't know if she would have had the fortitude and resilience that she does. She knows she's not doing it all alone. 

The book offers an ensemble cast. Yet, you tell the story solely through the perspective of a sensitive woman whose life is traced over decades.

All of the characters exist relative to Jenny, and I wanted to convey her experience of growing up in an intimate and realistic way--especially in a home with an alcoholic mother. I wanted to show those things that a young girl would rely on when her home life is so tumultuous: friends, extended family, faith, music. Finally, I wanted to understand how she would emerge from it and create the life that she longed for--and those things are possible primarily due to the large circle of loved ones around her.

The enduring battle of alcoholism figures prominently.

I don't know the percentage of families affected by alcoholism, but I suspect it is very high. Jenny learns that you can love and forgive an alcoholic on your own yet, also, step away and live your own life. Even if the alcoholic is never better, is never able to see her way out of the disease, the people around her can find grace and peace, both for themselves and the alcoholic. I think adult children of alcoholics have a unique burden when trying to find trusting love relationships and, in exploring Jenny's relationships, I try to show how some of those difficulties can be overcome.

How difficult was it to tell this story?

The most fulfilling part was experiencing the story as it unfolded, when it wasn't struggle or effort, when storylines emerged without conscious thought. That felt like magic. However, Belonging took me over 10 years to conceive of, write, and market. I embarked on many rewrites. When I first sat down to write, the only concrete idea I really had was the notion of the bonds of childhood friendship that light the way throughout life, across time and distance--and even death. 

The book spans from 1977 to 2017. Why that timeline?

I love a complete and full story--of seeing characters as children and then as young adults on their own in the world... and then in middle age, in a place where they can look back. The seeds of early relationships are so important. I always want to know, if characters are in love, why are they in love? If characters are best friends, why are they best friends? I tried to show readers the strength--and lasting impact--of childhood bonds, what they bring out in people.

Detailed flourishes and nostalgia are embedded throughout the novel. How much research was necessary? 

I researched the climate and geography of Bakersfield and the surrounding area: why there is fog, why the river was dry, the origin of the Grapevine, the ramifications of valley fever, a fungal disease. I delved into the history of Bakersfield and the Bakersfield Sound. I spent time in antique stores and looked at religious prayer cards. I rewatched films that inspired me. I listened to many old songs and made sure they were chronologically correct. I re-read both Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and The Greatest Thing in the World (Henry Drummond) several times. I spoke with a hospice nurse about end-of-life care. I spent hours researching the Vietnam War. But there were moments, too, when no research was necessary--gifts were just presented to me.

Belonging is certainly a gift to readers! Any plans for a second novel?

Yes, I am so excited to be working on another coming-of-age love story and family story, this time set in rural Tennessee.

Belonging

A captivating, sensitively drawn first novel that traces the relationships and generational influences that impact the life of one woman over the course of 40 years.

Belonging--the first novel by Jill Fordyce--is a tenderly drawn coming-of-age story that sympathetically traverses decades in the life of one soul-searching woman from Bakersfield, Calif., and how generational influences shape her fate.


The story begins in December 1977--a time filled with wood-paneled station wagons, the music of Merle Haggard and Carole King, and movies like The Goodbye GirlClose Encounters of the Third Kind, and Saturday Night Fever. Jenny Hayes is 13 years old, a "shy and slow to make friends" eighth-grader fascinated by photography and smitten with Billy Ambler--"his broad shoulders, the dark curls that touched the top of his perfect ears, the way he held his camera like he knew what he was doing." Jenny's best friend is Henry, the "boldest and funniest person" she had ever known. The two bonded in kindergarten and became "unlikely but inseparable" friends. Henry's parents broke up when he and Jenny were in the fifth grade, and he is privy to Jenny's home life--the erratic, neglectful, and emotionally abusive nature of her alcoholic mother, Janice. Henry knows "the crushing level of cruelty" of which Jenny's mother is capable, and how her father--amiable, but often absent--works long hours as a produce broker to escape Janice's wrath.


Jenny's saving grace--in addition to her friendship with Henry--is her extended family on her mother's side. The Morettis, who also reside in Bakersfield, are vivacious, loving, and spiritually bolstered by their Catholic faith. The supportive presence of her widowed Nonna and Uncle Gino--Nonna's youngest brother, also widowed, who runs a local antiques shop--brings happiness and much-needed stability to Jenny's life. She often works at the store and is always intrigued when Gino and Nonna regale her with stories of the Moretti family's migration from Italy in 1902, and how they came to put down roots in California.


Shortly before Christmas, a terrible dust storm sweeps the San Joaquin Valley. Eleven days later, Jenny wakes to find itchy red welts covering her body. She has contracted valley fever, an illness caused by fungus spores stirred up in the wind that enter the lungs and develop into a pneumonia-like infection. Jenny's damaged right lung keeps her out of school for months. Throughout her long, harrowing medical ordeal, Jenny's mother and Nonna care for her daily. Janice and Nonna share a "tenuous and bitter" relationship, as Janice became pregnant with Jenny when she was only 19; she eloped, and Jenny was born six months later.


During her prolonged isolation, Jenny draws from the spiritual faith of Nonna and Uncle Gino. Catholic statues and religious icons that Jenny discovers at Uncle Gino's shop become sacred touchstones; they bring comfort on her long road to healing. And a collection of prayer cards with religious art depicting the lives of the saints takes on greater meaning when an unexpected death profoundly impacts Jenny's young, still malleable life.


When Jenny returns to school months later, she reconnects with Billy Ambler, who is now an aspiring pitcher. The two join forces, taking pictures for their photography course, and romance blooms. For the next several years of high school, Jenny and Billy's passionate young love grows--a love that, in some ways, liberates Jenny from the prickly relationship with her mother, who is clearly jealous of her daughter's happiness. At every turn, Janice passes judgment, calling Jenny "trashy" and "floozy," among other slurs. Janice also degrades Henry, describing him as a "freak." These slanders deepen the mother-daughter divide, and Jenny applies to college to escape her mother. Through it all, Jenny conceals her mother's alcoholism from Billy, who doesn't fully accept Jenny's enduring, however changing, friendship with Henry.


At the end of senior year, Jenny and Henry set off to study at USC, while Billy gets a baseball scholarship to Arizona State. Jenny and Billy make a heartfelt, romantic vow: in seven years, after they launch their adult lives, they will get married. But surprising twists and turns, choices made, challenge them and change both Henry's and their lives.


Readers dip in and out of dramatic episodes from Jenny's life. Fordyce crafts perceptive scenes that depict Jenny's maturation, illustrating how the past influences her ability to love and trust. The path she travels rarely goes according to plan. Jenny, and those who come to define her life, are tested, forced to face hard truths--even truths about themselves. Can wounds from the past ever truly heal? Is forgiveness possible? And what will it take for Jenny to carve out her own unique place in the world so she can finally experience a true sense of belonging?


Multi-layered characterizations, spiritual undertones, and emotionally evocative scenes propel this searching, inspiring story that explores themes of trust and loyalty; secrets and truth-telling; the meaning of love; and the many challenges posed in living a truly authentic life. With prodigious insight and great delicacy, Fordyce intimately explores ideas of family in its many forms--how family can both empower and damage--while also probing the battles between the head and the heart in matters of love and acceptance.

 

Belonging: A Novel by Jill Fordyce

Post Hill Press, $28.99 hardcover, 9798888451748, 279 pages

Publishing Date: January 30, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness: Maximum Shelf (December 18, 2023), link HERE 

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

The Uncharted Life of Olivia West

An exciting, adventurous novel about two courageous women, living in different eras, whose entwined lives ultimately solve a long-ago mystery.

Prolific author Sara Ackerman presents an inspiring, well-researched novel that delves into the stories of two women--living in different eras, 60 years apart--who lives are unexpectedly entwined in The Uncharted Flight of Olivia West. 

Through a beautifully braided narrative, two clearly delineated points of view, Ackerman anchors her story on the “The Big Island” of Hawai’i in both 1927 and 1987.

 

The 1927-part of the story centers on Olivia “Livy” West, a young, ambitious female pilot trying to measure up and compete in a male-dominated world. Determined to participate in the Dole Air Race--a real-life, 2400-mile flight competition that launched in Oakland, Calif., crossed the Pacific Ocean, and ended in Honolulu, Hawai’i--she wheedles her way to become a navigator in a race that will test her strength and fortitude.

 

The 1987-part of the story centers on down-and-out Wren Summers who suddenly learns that she’s inherited (from a great-uncle) a piece of land on the Big Island of Hawai’i. The place, however, is a depilated shambles; a mess. Badly in need of money, Wren goes to sell the land, but soon discovers an object in the barn that piques her interest—so much so, that she sets her off on a quest to learn more. Along the way, she dredges up the past and follows a winding road that leads to chilling, unexpected revelations.

 

As in her other exciting novels (The Codebreakers Secret, Radar Girls), Ackerman displays great finesse in her understanding of Hawai’i, women, and fast-paced historical fiction. Filled with spirited romance and suspense, this uplifting, inspiring story adds to Ackerman’s accomplished body work. The Uncharted Life of Olivia West will hold great appeal to readers who admire stories of courageous women determined to live authentic, empowered lives.


The Uncharted Flight of Olivia West by Sara Ackerman

Mira Books (HarperCollins), $18.99 paperback, 9780369747785, 384 pages

Publishing Date: February 6, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

A Wish for Winter

An enchanting, fun romance about a single, 40-year-old bookstore owner in search of finding her Mr. Right—a nameless man in a Santa suit.

Viola Shipman (pen name of Wade Rouse) delights readers with A Wish for Winter, an unforgettable, heartwarming story about a never-married bookstore owner from Petoskey, Mich. who goes in search of rekindling Christmas joy and finding true love.

 

Christmas was always special for Susan Norcross. Both her mother and her grandmother met their future husbands when they were dressed up as Santa Claus. But when Susan was in fifth grade, her parents were killed in a Christmastime car crash that snuffed out hope from the holidays.

 

Susan is “girlishly youthful looking” and now the successful owner of “Sleigh By the Bay,” a thriving community bookstore. As she nears her 40th birthday, those who love her--especially the grandparents who raised her, a dear friend of her late mother’s and Holly, Susan’s best friend--want her to settle down. When Susan dresses up like Mrs. Claus and attends the famed “10k Santa Run” in Chicago, she meets an appealing Kris Kringle who sparks her fancy. The two make plans to meet up after the race. However, Susan is later stood up—and she never got Santa’s name. This disappointment encourages determined friend Holly to take to social media to find him. Three men--three Kris Kringles from the run--step up claiming to be the ‘mystery’ Santa. Might one of them be Susan’s romantic destiny?

 

Shipman’s (The Charm BraceletThe Recipe Box; The Secret of Snow) sensitive storytelling is enlivened by offbeat, well-meaning characters and an enchantingly fun, romantic plot.


A Wish for Winter by Viola Shipman

Graydon House (Harper Collins), $17.99 paperback, 9781525804847, 416 pages

Publishing Date: November 15, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Gator Country

An exciting, propulsive true story about an alligator poaching sting operation in Florida and what it reveals about nature—including human nature.


In Gator Country, science and nature journalist, Rebecca Renner delivers an astounding story about an alligator-poaching operation in the Florida Everglades. She grew up in Florida, the “swampy deep south,” one of the most bio diverse places in the country. At the age of seven, she encountered her first alligator up close behind her family’s home. By 2017, Renner was working to support herself as a high school English teacher when a student had turned in a well-informed, intimate wildlife essay on poaching--“the active illegally taking or flora or fauna from the wild”--and profiting from it. The student feared Renner might snitch on him, and this planted a seed in Renner. 

 

Years later, when she was working her way up the ranks as a nature writer for National Geographic and The New York Times, Renner’s interest in poaching resurfaced. In 2020, she became determined to learn more about alligator poaching from the points of view of the law and the poachers--those whom she identified as the economically poor, struggling to live in Florida’s diminishing wetlands. Her adventurous, in-depth study probes the nature of crime and human character, while also mining the far-reaching consequences of what it truly takes to survive—in the wild and in society.

 

Renner (Drift: Collected Short Fiction), a gifted and deeply empathetic writer, paints such sympathetic, well-rounded portraits of the justice-seeking rangers and wildlife officers versus the struggling-to-survive poachers that readers will have trouble taking sides. Her propulsive narrative reads as suspensefully as a well-wrought mystery novel as she uncovers an exciting true story that will educate, enlighten, and enthrall her audience. 


 

Gator Country: Deception, Danger and Alligators in the Everglades by Rebecca Renner

Flatiron Books (Macmillan), $29.99 hardcover, 9781250842572, 288 pages

Publishing Date: November 14, 2023

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (November 17, 2023), link HERE 

To read the longer form of this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (October 2, 2023), link HERE


Wednesday, December 20, 2023

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever

A deeply entertaining, thoroughly researched biography of rival movie critics, Siskel and Ebert, and how they came to define modern film criticism.

Cinephiles will find much to savor in Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever, a comprehensive, immensely entertaining biography by film critic Matt Singer. In meticulous detail, he probes the lives of the legendary film critics and newspaper rivals, whose opinions became as popular as the movies they reviewed in print--and, later, fervently debated on TV--from the 1970s to the late 1990s. 

Throughout their partnership, Siskel and Ebert remained “mortal enemies. Each considered it an essential aspect of their job to beat the other: to write the best review, to land the biggest interview, to score the best scoops. And they took their jobs very seriously.” Despite their seriousness, David Letterman, who often hosted the duo on his late-night talk show, once remarked that their popular appeal was due to their honest, passionate debates, and how they broke “the stuffy traditions of old-fashioned print film criticism.” The trademark of Siskel and Ebert film reviewing was a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down rating system. 

Singer paints a fascinating portrait of the critics, sharing quotes and stories of how their upbringings developed their personalities; their respective roads to journalism and film criticism; and what they each brought to the reviewing table--how their contentious relationship actually increased their viewership. This thoroughly researched narrative makes a strong case that Siskel and Ebert were, as Ebert once put it, true "film lovers" and "fans." That innate passion is what led to their overwhelming, two-thumbs-up success and their enduring appeal.

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever by Matt Singer

Putnam (Penguin/Random House), $29 hardcover, 352p., 9780593540152

Publishing Date: October 24, 2023

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (October 27, 2023), link HERE 

To read the longer form of this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (September 1, 2023), link HERE

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Peg and Rose Stir Up Trouble

The second in a delightfully fun cozy series where retired sisters-in-law investigate the sudden death of a man met on a dating website.

Laurien Berenson unleashes another warm and fuzzy cozy mystery in Peg and Rose Stir Up Trouble, the second book in her comical Senior Sleuths series set in the Connecticut suburbs.

 

Readers don’t need to be familiar with the first book, Peg and Rose Solve a Murder, where tough and feisty Peg Turnbull and sweet-natured, eternally optimistic Rose Donovan were first introduced. The once estranged sisters-in-law, now in their 60s, are unlikely friends after years of not speaking to each other. Peg is a widowed, Poodle breeder and a “popular and highly esteemed dog show judge,” while Rose, a former nun, now runs a woman’s shelter with her husband, an ex-priest.

 

When Rose gives Peg’s stagnant romantic life a push by signing her up for “Mature Mingle,” a dating service, her actions are met with disdainful skepticism. But when Peg meets and falls for “witty and urbane” Nolan Abercrombie, things take a surprisingly glad turn—until Nolan dies in a hit-and-run accident. When grieving Peg attends his funeral with Rose, the two notice that all the mourners are women around their same age. Why is that? Peg and Rose put their amateur sleuthing skills to work, piecing together clues into who Nolan really was. Might his death not have been accident? And if so, who might’ve wanted him dead—and why?

 

Cleverly sharp twists and turns--tracked by two, spunky retiree protagonists--will once again charm and delight cozy mystery lovers.

 

 

Peg and Rose Stir Up Trouble: A Senior Sleuths Mystery Book Two by Laurien Berenson

Kensington Cozies, $27.00 hardcover, 9781496735751, 288 pages, Publishing Date: July 25, 2023

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (July 28, 2023), link HERE