Runner

A Chicago cop-turned-private investigator sets off to find a missing girl, in foster care, who might be running away from danger.

 

Tracy Clark delivers the fourth book in her highly-charged Chicago Mystery Series featuring Cassidy “Cass” Raines, a 36-year-old, African American former cop-turned-private eye. Cassidy, immensely perceptive, is no-nonsense, but has a sense of humor that lightens even the grimmest of scenarios. She takes on all kinds of cases. However, missing persons are her specialty.

 

In this installment, a recovered addict hires Cass to search for Ramona, her fifteen-year-old daughter who has run away from her foster home. Alongside the police search, Cass employs her street-smart connections to find the missing girl. Might Ramona be hiding out because she’s privy to secrets that have the power to destroy her?

 

Clark (Broken Places, Borrowed Time, What You Don’t See) has created an engaging heroine and supporting cast that keeps readers coming back for more. Runner is a super-charged, atmospheric, story anchored in big city drama that lives up to the fast-paced implications of its title.

Runner: A Cass Raines Mystery (Chicago Mystery, Book Four) by Tracy Clark

Kensington, $26.00 Hardcover, 9781496732019, 304 pages

Publication Date: June 29, 2021

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

An isolated young woman is liberated from a sad, damaged past via the unexpected kindness and caring of new friends.

Thirty-year-old Eleanor Oliphant is a creature of habit who keeps to herself. Plagued with a facial scar and often donning white gloves to conceal flares of psoriasis, the bright, articulate yet lowly office worker lives alone in a small Glasgow flat. She has managed to survive and circumvent the horrors of her early life--including stints in foster care--by taking comfort in books, doing crossword puzzles, watching the BBC, having a weekly chat with her cruel and demeaning "Mummy" and indulging in vodka on a regular basis.

When Eleanor develops a crush--from afar--on a singer in a local rock band, she embarks on a self-improvement crusade that includes hilarious firsts in bikini waxing, manicures and becoming techno-literate in computers and smartphones. Along the way of her transformation, she crosses paths with warmhearted Raymond, who works in the IT department of her company. As the two are leaving the office one day, they stop to help an elderly man who has collapsed in the street. This simple act upends Eleanor's life in enlightening and challenging ways.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman's intriguing, hopeful first novel, explores the power of kindness and how unexpected friendships can liberate lives. Eleanor's lovable, eccentric and original narrative voice is entrancing. It draws readers fully into her damaged, unconventional psyche as she is forced to deal with a deeply repressed past and come to grips with who she is, and who she'd like to be.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, $26.00 Hardcover, 9780735220683, 336 pages

Publication Date: May 9, 2017

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, 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 (June 9, 2017), link HERE

Invisible Ellen

Well-drawn characterizations and a compelling opening launch Invisible Ellen, a unique story of friendship by actress/writer Shari Shattuck. The book begins with an intriguing description of Ellen Homes, a 24 year-old, 273 pound, socially-awkward woman who shares a low-income, one-room apartment—and a "love of caloric excess," namely in the form of bacon—with her cat named Mouse. Ellen was once a product of the foster care system, where she was either taunted or ignored due to a prominent scar on her face and her left eye, halfway closed, which limits her vision. Ellen's background, along with her physical deformity, encourages her to espouse evasive techniques of anonymity to accommodate her limitations and cultivate her reclusiveness. But one afternoon, a young, blind woman boards the same bus that Ellen takes to her job cleaning at a Costco store, and Ellen instinctively intervenes to save the stranger from being mugged. Ellen's once-manageable, invisible life—spent quietly observing, from a distance, her struggling, also afflicted neighbors and co-workers, namely a troubled, pregnant woman and a drug dealer—is suddenly upended by the incident. In an ironic twist, the blind woman named Temerity takes an interest in Ellen and after more than six years of isolation, offers Ellen friendship—along with the motivation to more fully participate in life and courageously help others, regardless of complications.

Shattuck (Legacy) has written an upbeat, entertaining survival story about the souls of lost human beings often ignored by society and shows how lives can be profoundly transformed through unlikely human connections.

Invisible Ellen by Shari Shattuck

Putnam Adult, $26.95 Hardcover, 9780399167614, 304 pp

Publication Date: May 29, 2014

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (6/5/14), click HERE