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This is the first person account of “the four vagabonds,” told by 12-year-old harmonica-playing, storytelling Odie. It is 1932, in the midst of the Depression, and Odie, his older brother, Albert, their Indian friend, Mose, and six-year-old Emmy are traveling by canoe to what Odie hopes is home in St. Louis. All four are orphans who had been living in unacceptable circumstances at an Indian boarding school in Minnesota with its vicious superintendent. The life they are leaving is based on what really did go on at many Indian boarding schools. Yes, the four are trying to escape their present environment, but the three boys are also running from the law. It is mistakenly believed that they have kidnapped Emmy. They are paddling their canoe down rivers to their destination, often with no food. Along the way they meet people both good and bad.The four vagabonds find friends to help them get where they're headed and foes trying to find them. Although the depicted treatment of Indians and Indian boarding schools is accurate, I found other parts of this story too hard to believe. And those parts, for me, made this book seem young adultish, not meant to be questioned by an adult. As a YA book, though, this is excellent.

THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE is historical fiction about a fire that occurred in a Richmond, Virginia theater in 1811, the worst urban disaster in US history at the time. That makes the book interesting, certainly more so than an account of the fire in a history book. But it’s more than that. This historical fiction is thrilling. Rachel Beanland tells the stories of four actual people who survived the fire. Gilbert is a slave, who is also a hero the night of the fire. Cecily is Gilbert’s niece. Sally is a white woman who escaped the fire but only after helping others when men wouldn’t. And Jack is a young theater hand, just a boy. In telling their stories, Beanland creates a thriller when she explores possibilities. Who was responsible for the fire? Also, couldn’t a slave who was at the theater that night have escaped but just be counted as one of the dead? I often find historical fiction to be dull. But in the case of THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE, I found a page turner. This book will be available in April 2023. I read an ARC.

LOCUST LANE is a can’t-put-it-down book. It is a well written, character-driven story with a plot (which so many character-driven stories seem to lack). And if you think this is a young-adult book because you’ve heard it is about teenagers—WRONG. First, it’s not YA. Second, while at the center of the story is a crime that was probably committed by one or more of the teenagers, LOCUST LANE isn’t about them as much as it is about the reactions of the adults around them. A teenage girl, Eden, has been murdered after spending the evening with three other teenagers, Hannah and Jack and Christopher. Hannah and Jack are girlfriend and boyfriend. Christopher has a crush on Eden. Christopher is a suspect from the start. But it is their parents and their reactions and the drama of their lives that are the story. Of course, they want to protect their children. But that issue is complicated. How far will they go? Eden’s mother also has a place in this story. And so does the man who hits Eden’s dog with his car in the Prologue. This is so suspenseful! I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. You won’t either. Warning: you may hate the end and you may find the Epilogue hopeful.

Several of my favorite authors are Irish and now, with SNOW by John Banville, I have just added another to my list. This is a whodunit that kept me guessing from beginning to end. SNOW is a mystery that takes place in Ireland at Christmas time when snow and ice and inclement weather prevail. (Coincidentally, that’s when I read it, with much the same weather.) These are the conditions when Detective Inspector St. John (pronounced "sinjun”) Strattford investigates the gory murder of a priest. As the story continues, you will see that many characters might have done it; some even had good reason to. But the Catholic Church and, therefore, the majority of the police department want to hush this up and call it an accident. What a great mystery this is! The only part I did not enjoy reading was a short section in the middle that describes the priest’s habits (for lack of a better word).

THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY is the story of a detour from a plan to travel the Lincoln Highway west from Nebraska to California. Of the three books by Amor Towels that I’ve read, RULES OF CIVILITY, A GENTLEMEN IN MOSCOW, and now THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY, this one is by far his best. After Emmett’s stint in jail and his father‘s death, he and his little brother Billy decide to move to California. But after two of Emmett's old bunkmates, Duchess and Wooley, show up, Emmett and Billy have to first take them to New York, in the opposite direction. And this is their story, an adventure told by each one of them, plus some chapters told by Emmett's and Billy’s friend, Sally. I loved their different perspectives of the same situations, I loved their dialogue, and I loved Towles’ humor. Every bit of this is unpredictable, especially the end. What a pleasure this book is! Its only negative is Towles’ lack of quotation marks, which I think is rude to the reader.

In EDUCATED, Tara Westover first describes the circumstances she grew up in. Her father was a survivalist who did not trust the government. So he didn't do things like register his cars or send his kids to public schools. Westover's mother made a stab at home schooling her seven children, but, to say the least, it was inadequate. Luckily, Westover's older brother taught her to read. Her father was also careless with his family's safety and didn't trust doctors or hospitals. So, when they were hurt, often as a result of his carelessness, the family depended on their mother's homeopathic remedies, even for severe burns and head injuries. With this background, Westover sought education, beginning with Brigham Young University. She had never even gone to high school much less graduated. But she got in when she was 16 after (pretty much) teaching herself enough to pass the ACT. She soon discovered how ignorant she was of even the most well-known history such as the Holocaust and Martin Luther King's civil rights movements. But she learned as much as she could on her own and ended up impressing her professors enough to continue her education in spite of not being able to afford it. Throughout the years she devoted to her education, Westover made annual trips to her home in Idaho. She wanted her parents' approval, but her father and, therefore, her mother insisted she was siding with the devil and needed to stop sinning and accept their reality, not hers.

THE MOTHER-IN-LAW is about a misunderstood mother-in-law. It’s also about whether she really killed herself and who might be responsible. The story is told in both past and present from the points of view of, of course, the mother-in-law and of, of course, the daughter-in-law. Diane and her husband Tom were rich and in love. Tom died first, and now Diane is dead too. Their daughter Nettie will do anything to have a baby, and their son-in-law Patrick is cheating on her. Their son Ollie owns a failing business, and their daughter-in-law Lucy has been dealing with her hateful mother-in-law for 10 years. They all have reason to kill Diane. Heck, even Ollie’s business partner, who was counting on Ollie's inheritance, might have done it. But it appears that she killed herself. This is quite a convoluted mystery, and more and more mysteries continue to show up throughout the book. The main mystery I told you. But to tell you more might spoil any of the other mysteries. I can tell you this, though: I didn’t see any of them coming. Sometimes a book that is a mystery is a thriller as well but not so in this case. That may be the reason that it wasn’t a page turner for me. But I would say the same of an Agatha Christie novel. So, although I would give it three stars for its pace, I give it four stars for its convoluted mysteries. I won this book through bookclubcookbook.com.

The most appropriate word I can think of to describe the main character, who narrates LUCKIEST GIRL ALIVE, is "bi___." At least I thought so at first and beyond the 50-page mark, when I usually give up on a book that hasn't grabbed me by then. I even checked others' reviews of the book at this point to see if they agreed with me that reading about a bi___ gets tiresome. And most did. But I kept reading anyway because it is a movie now on Netflix. And I'm so glad I did. It seems that Ani (as in TifAni) has an attitude problem. She doesn't seem to like anyone, including her fiancé. But he is her achievement, with a good name and lots of money. You may be tempted, as I was, to quit reading a book that seems to be about Ani's incessant bi___iness. But don't. I didn't get it. Ani DOES have an attitude problem, but why? How did she come to be that way? She has achieved everything she wanted, so what's the problem? I came to understand, so get through the description of what it seems she turned into. LUCKIEST GIRL ALIVE is an excellent book. It's too bad, then, that I can rate it only three stars. The beginning, the look at the bi___ that Ani has turned into, goes on and on for too long. A lot of it should have been edited out because it turns off too many readers. All they will ever know of this book is that Ani is a bi___.

FAITHLESS is a book in Karin Slaughter's Grant County series. I’ve read most of her books, which is a testament to what a great writer she is, particularly of mysteries/thrillers. But I read them as I find them in used bookstores, so out of order, and I still enjoy the heck out of them. But good for you if you can read them in order. The three main characters in this series are Jeffrey Tolliver, Grant County’s police chief; Sara Linton, Tolliver's ex-wife, a pediatrician, and Grant County's coroner; and Lena Adams, a Grant County detective who works for Tolliver. All three become involved in the workings of a church (or is it a cult?) after Tolliver and Linton stumble across the body of one of its members in a coffin buried in the woods. She had been buried alive. Did she suffocate? Or was she poisoned? Have other church members suffered the same fate? Both Tolliver and Adams investigate, while Linton mostly acts as Tolliver's sounding board, although she too becomes involved to a lesser extent. They find a church run by a particular large family. Now can they find out why the dead woman, a member of this family, was buried alive and who did it? As a result of their investigation, they find so much more about the church and about the family that runs it. Because I’ve been reading Slaughter's two series out of order, I’ve already read the next book, BEYOND REACH. Luckily, I have it in my bookcase so I can skim through it to remind myself of what happens next.

3 1/2 stars. The first half of THE WHISPER MAN rated 3 stars, the second half 4. The mystery in this book is good. Tom Kennedy and his young son Jake are learning how best to live since Rebecca, Tom’s wife and Jake’s mother, died. So they decide to move to a house that will not remind them of Rebecca, especially Jake’s memory of his mother's body at the bottom of the stairs. It is their move to that particular house that involves them in the mystery of the whisper man. In the city where Tom and Jake have moved, the whisper man has taken the lives of several young boys. The body of one of the boys killed 20 years ago has never been found. The whisper man of the 20-year-old crimes has been found and is now in prison. But he seems to have had an accomplice, although he will not say so or indicate who it is. Is this other whisper man now coming for Jake? Even though this mystery is good, I did not find it spooky, as other reviewers have, and the first half of THE WHISPER MAN is not thrilling and too easy to put down. Mysteries and thrillers should be unputdownable books.

I’m sorry to say that I’ve come to the end of the All Creatures Great and Small series by James Herriot. I read the books as I found them in used bookstores so out of order. But this book, THE LORD GOD MADE THEM ALL, really is the final book in the series. Each of the books in this series consists of lovely stories written in first person by a Scottish veterinarian in Yorkshire, England. The time spans from the beginning of his career in the 1930s to this last book in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the stories are fiction, Herriot based them on his own experiences. So, they are largely books about animals, but they are really a series about a country vet. These books have been around since the 1970s, but they are just as touching now.

Alex Finlay's EVERY LAST FEAR is a mystery/thriller with lots of twists. I loved reading it, didn’t want to put it down, and certainly didn’t want it to end. We begin with Matt, who's away at college when an FBI agent informs him that his parents and sister and brother have died in Mexico. Why were they in Mexico? Were their deaths an accident? Matt travels to Mexico to have his family's bodies released and sent back to the US. In Mexico he encounters trouble over and over with the incompetence of the police but, also, with a beautiful girl he meets. The FBI agent who gives Matt the news about his family is investigating this case. She had been intending to interview Matt's father, Evan, about his former employer. Could the deaths of Matt's family be somehow related to this company under investigation? Matt also has another brother, Danny, in prison for the murder of his girlfriend, a crime his family and many other people do not think he committed. Matt secretly feels otherwise because of something he thinks he saw the night of this murder. But Danny confessed to the crime under extreme duress. Was it, therefore, a false confession? Could the murder of Danny's girlfriend and his imprisonment be somehow related to his family's deaths?

Other reviews will tell you that NORTHERN SPY is about two sisters in Ireland who become involved with the IRA. While that is true, this book centers even more on one of those sisters, Tessa, and her baby, Finn; their relationship is emphasized. It is through Tessa's eyes that the reader sees the stress of life in Northern Ireland and her resulting concern for Finn's future. As a producer for the BBC, Tessa one day sees security footage of an IRA robbery. Her sister Marian is one of the robbers. Tessa goes from disbelief to anger to becoming involved herself, although reluctantly. She never approves of the IRA's tactics; they frighten her. But she does what she does for eventual peace. NORTHERN SPY is my first Flynn Berry book. Now I'm eager to read her previous two books.

ALL THE DIRTY SECRETS is a convoluted mystery, meaning it's more than just a mystery; it's mystery upon mystery upon mystery, and that's the best kind of mystery. So I appreciated it. But it wasn't for me. That is not to say anything negative about this book. It would have been for me back when I was in high school. It would have been a four-star book then. Although this is one novel, it is made up of more than one story/mystery. Mainly, there are three, two taking place during beach week in 1994, one during present-day beach week. All three are about teenagers who drowned or are assumed to have drowned. And there's also another mystery of a man who was a track coach in 1994 at the teenagers' private school and is somehow now the head of that school. The problem for me is that much of ALL THE DIRTY SECRETS is about teenagers, a subject that often bores me nowadays. Although the mysteries are told from the perspectives of different characters, including Liza as an adult, she is trying to solve mysteries that happened when she was a teenager. This book would have been more appropriate for me when I, too, was a teenager.

THE KEEP is more than one story. I had to reread some paragraphs to understand it at first. But once I got it, I enjoyed it so much! It is such a different book from any other I’ve read. There’s the story of Danny, who has come to a castle in an unnamed country in Europe at the request of its owner, his cousin Howard. Danny is paranoid and afraid of Howard's plans for him. There’s an old woman living on the castle grounds, in the keep. Danny meets her at one point but has trouble deciding whether she was just a dream. Suddenly another story begins in first person. This is the story of Ray, a prisoner, and his writing teacher, Holly. Danny’s story is Ray’s creation. I never did understand the usefulness of the style that Jennifer Egan uses: no quotation marks. Why? When authors do that, I resent it. The author is being rude and hindering readability. Heck, why not go all the way and get rid of periods? But could she have left out quotation marks to differentiate her style from the fictional Ray's? Maybe Ray writes that way. Then there is the story of Holly. Now Egan uses quotation marks. Because now it her style, not Ray's? Maybe someone smarter than I am understands why she didn’t and now she does. In the end I felt like I was left hanging with unresolved issues. Yet, I still rate this book highly for its originality and for making me anxious to read it.

BLOOD WILL OUT, though a true murder mystery, is not the murder mystery you would expect. Although there is a murder and many mysteries, particularly about the man who committed it, the author, Walter Kirn, plays a big part in this story, too. Not only that, but Kirn theorizes about the mysteries, and his theories are good, almost certainly correct. Kirn does not begin with the murder or even what led to it. Instead, he begins with how he met the murderer, Christian Gerhartsreiter. Except Kirn thought he was meeting Clark Rockefeller, yes, of THE Rockefeller family. Turns out, "Clark Rockefeller" was only one of Gerhartsreiter's many aliases. (Kirn makes, in my opinion, the mistake of calling him Clark throughout the book because, Kirn says, that's how he knew him for a long time.) The book begins with Kirn's drive from his home in Montana to "Clark's" home in New York to bring him a crippled dog he wanted to adopt. Upon their meeting, "Clark" started dropping several clues that his stories were not true. And Kirn berates himself for not catching the lies at the time, with just being impressed with his new friend. For friends they did become. And Kirn continues to berate himself for that.

Lisa Unger has it in her to write a really great book, and I have read several. But UNDER MY SKIN isn’t one of them. It’s not bad, though. So, although I didn’t enjoy it, you may. UNDER MY SKIN irritated me right away because its main character’s name is Poppy, which I think is a silly name but which is not a good reason to dislike a book. And it didn’t make me dislike it. It’s just a warning that my irritation may have contributed to my estimation of it. Poppy’s husband, Jack, was murdered. Other reviews will tell you that UNDER MY SKIN is about her search for the murderer. Wrong. Part 1 of the book, that is, approximately the first half of it, is constant repetition of her love for and memories about Jack and her drug–induced dreams/memories. Unger also manages to tell you several times that Poppy dislikes her mother and loves her lifelong friend Layla. Because of all the repetition in Part 1, I could easily skip paragraphs here and there. I got it already. Part 1 could have and should have been half as long. Part 2 is where Poppy searches for her husband‘s murderer, but this part was mostly silly. I often felt like I was reading a romance novel. And it was so, so predictable. UNDER MY SKIN could be called romantic suspense. That’s a genre many readers like. But not me.

I love Bohjalian's books but might not have read them if I had started with this one. That is not to say this book is poorly written. It was the subject matter that didn't appeal to me. After Chip Linton, an airline pilot whose plane crash landed in a lake, and his wife, Emily, and twin daughters move to an old home in New Hampshire, he begins experiencing what appeared to me to be hallucinations. One of their new neighbors, Anise, regularly brings them her homemade food, and I believed she was spiking it with a hallucinogen. She is among a group of especially friendly and helpful neighbors who are all herbalists with greenhouses in their backyards where they grow both normal and exotic herbs. THE NIGHT STRANGERS is about Chip seeing and speaking with the ghosts of dead passengers on his ill-fated plane but, also, about this group of herbalists. The book is told from the points of view of various characters, including the 9-year-old twins. It is these girls who are in danger throughout THE NIGHT STRANGERS from both their father and his ghosts and from the herbalists. If I had ever known for sure that Chip's ghosts were all in his head and not real, I might have taken this story more seriously. More than that, I didn't see how the end could be as it was written. To me, it is unacceptable.

I read ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR because I heard that Netflix based a movie on it ("Things Heard and Seen"). Now I think I will be disappointed in whatever Netflix did with it because it couldn’t possibly be as wonderful as this book. Right away the novel lets you know that Catherine Clare has been murdered in her home, her four-year-old daughter, Frannie, was there at the time of the murder and for hours after, and her husband, George, may have done it. Flashbacks make up most of the rest of the book. Was George, in fact, guilty? Is he a sociopath, maybe a serial killer, or did he just cheat on his wife? I heard that the movie concentrates on supernatural happenings in the old farmhouse where Catherine, George, and Frannie lived much more than the novel does. Maybe that's why their titles differ. But throughout the flashbacks in ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR, Catherine did suspect that the ghost of the woman who had previously lived there was in the same room with her. My impression of the novel is that characterization, especially of George but also of Catherine, his colleagues, and their neighbors in the small town of Chosen, far exceeds the supernatural in importance. You’ll learn more and more about each but especially about George as the book continues. And the more you learn, the worse you’ll feel about him. Although I loved this book, I still say that the author was inconsiderate not to include quotation marks.

What an appropriate title! "Small world" really is what SMALL WORLD is about. But know this right up front: SMALL WORLD has lots of characters, so many that you may have a hard time remembering who's who. This book should include a list of characters with who each is. Because it doesn't, I suggest, if you own your copy, keep a highlight marker handy and highlight each name when it first appears so it's easy to flip back and find that name if you forget it by the time it next shows up. My friend keeps notes on borrowed books. You will probably need one of these tricks to help your memory because this book has several stories going on. All the main characters from the present-day stories are on the same train. How did they all come to be there at the same time? What are their stories?

“A magnificent page turner“ THE PAPER PALACE is not, although the author of THE PLOT wrote that blurb that appears on the cover of THE PAPER PALACE. Consider the source, I guess. I admit, though, many others have also reviewed this book favorably. So you may choose to believe them and not me. I found THE PAPER PALACE slow and drawn out. It is almost 400 pages of alternating parts of chapters examining, on the one hand, one day in which Elle cheats on her husband with her old friend Jonas and, on the other hand, the rest of her life, her background. The book could have been and should have been half as long. I understood that the parts about the rest of Elle’s life are to explain her history with Jonas and what led to this day when they have sex. Yet all those parts are not only about her history with Jonas. So why are they there? It felt like padding. Besides, too many awful things happened in Elle’s life story when she and her sister should have spoken up to their parents to let them know what was going on. But, even as children, they dealt with too much alone. I found myself wanting to scream at them to say something. It was so much frustration.

If you can suspend disbelief here and there, you'll really enjoy FALLING. I did, and so did everyone else in my book group. FALLING is a fast read because you won't want to put it down. Terrorists have given an airline pilot a choice: crash his plane with 140 "souls" onboard and save the lives of his kidnapped family, or land the plane, saving passengers and crew but resulting in his family's deaths. His answer is that neither the people on the plane nor his family are going to die. At that I admit that the book is ultimately predictable, but it was so much fun to read about how everyone (the passengers and crew on the plane, the pilot's wife and two children, the two (yes, just two) terrorists, the FBI, the air traffic controllers, the President of the United States, and even the baseball players and fans at Yankee Stadium) learned about and dealt with this terrorist threat. My criticism is T.J. Newman's waste of time describing the pilot's dreams. They add nothing of consequence to the story. Others poke holes in this story and criticize its authenticity. I don't at all. I'd be willing to bet that, once you start FALLING, you'll be willing to suspend disbelief and you won't want to stop.

Don't you just love it when you read a really good book by a new-to-you author, and now you get to read his previously unknown-to-you books? That's how I feel now. I just read the really good CAROLINA MOONSET by Matt Goldman, a new-to-me author who previously wrote four books I now get to read. And, if author blurbs mean something to you, I'm joined in my praise by William Kent Krueger. Joey, a 45-year-old divorced father from Chicago, is visiting his parents in South Carolina. His father is suffering from dementia, and his mother needs a break. While there, Joey meets Leela, the daughter of his parents' next-door neighbors. She is also in her 40s and divorced, and she also has children. Together they discover secrets about long-ago unsolved murders in this area. Then another murder occurs, and the police want to accuse Joey's father, who is not only physically and memory impaired but will die in a few years. So Joey and Leela investigate further and find even more secrets in this town, most from long ago, all involving his father and friends and rich brothers and their women. Oh, so what if parts of the story sound a bit soap opera-ish. From CAROLINA MOONSET's first page, I knew I was going to like the book. Goldman's writing is superb, and it grabbed me right away. Pay attention, even in Chapter 1, to every little thing. These are clues to what comes later. I won an advance reading copy of CAROLINA MOONSET through bookishfirst.com.

Although I differ with some blurbs I've read calling NOTES ON AN EXECUTION a thriller, I do agree that this book is excellent. And, although I think the couple lines of Danya Kukafka's antiracist comments (inserted as a character's thoughts) contained in this book are unnecessary, NOTES ON AN EXECUTION is undeniably great in its thoughtfulness. It's a five-star read. The lives of not only a condemned man but, also, of the women crucial to his life are explored right from his beginning. While I disagree with Kukafka that people romanticize a serial killer and forget his victims, NOTES ON AN EXECUTION is the most thoughtful and maybe even the most interesting exploration of their lives and feelings that I've read. But there is more to this book: Kukafka grabs a reader's attention with her presentation of the stories. Her organization is, I think, why some people call NOTES ON AN EXECUTION a thriller. It really isn't, but the order in which the stories are presented does add tension.

LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, by my estimation, rates three or four out of five. I’ll give it four. It starts out dull, a book about suburban teenagers. But this book eventually turns out to be about adults, too. So it gets better. It’s hard to say who the main characters are. LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE is a mystery told from the points of view of different characters, both teenagers and adults. Blurbs I read call this book a thriller, but it’s not. I think some people use the words “thriller” and “mystery" interchangeably. LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE is a mystery: Who lit the little fires everywhere? And the phrase ”little fires everywhere" is treated both literally and nonliterally in this book. The story starts out with the fire, then it’s flashback. Different mysteries go on then, all leading up to the fire. The flashback begins with Mia and her teenage daughter who come to Shaker Heights, Ohio with all their belongings fit into their VW Rabbit. (There’s another mystery for you: that VW Rabbit is 20 years old, and they’re still driving it cross country. Really?) The landlady of their apartment they settle in also lives in Shaker Heights in a beautiful home and has four teenagers of her own. If I had to pick the main characters, they would be these six people. Everyone has secrets from one another, and sometimes the secrets are mysteries to the reader, too. Some of the secrets are resolved. My criticism of this book, though, is that I had too many questions in the end.

HOUR OF THE WITCH is another masterpiece novel by Chris Bohjalian. This one is historical fiction about the Puritans in 1662 Boston. With this subject matter, Bohjalian has also written a thrilling page turner. After you read this book (and maybe while you are reading it), you'll want to research what you thought you knew about the Puritans, including even the words they used, and you won’t want to put it down. Twenty-four-year-old Mary has an abusive husband, Thomas. When he tries to impale her hand to a table with a fork ("the devil's tines”) she attempts to divorce him, but the magistrates of the community will not allow it. So the abuse continues, always out of the site of witnesses. Much of this novel is taken up with Mary’s plots to leave Thomas. Her first try is the one I liked best. I never thought I’d see myself rooting for murder. But it is the courtroom drama that had me riveted. I saw not only how Puritan law worked but also how useless were a woman’s accusations and defense. So HOUR OF THE WITCH is sometimes difficult to read. Both Thomas’s abuse and Puritan hypocrisy are often frustrating. But Mary is smart, and she defends herself to the magistrates so well that you may find yourself rereading what she says to them. The end is satisfying, but I found the epilogue to be a bit too expected.