Book Reviews by vicki rock

Acting Sheriff Emmy Clifton’s mother, Myrna Joy Clifton, dies just six weeks after Emmy’s father, Sheriff Gerald Clifton, was killed in the line of duty. At the cemetery, Emmy’s sister, ex-federal agent Dr. Jude Archer, is comforting Emmy’s son, Cole, who is a deputy.

As Emmy, Jude and Cole leave the cemetery heading for the funeral lunch, they hear gunfire coming from the Vickery family’s house. Allison Vickery was a detective with the Clayville police, but recently retired. She was murdered in her kitchen. Her daughter, Mandy, 16, was shot in the head and is alive. When they break into the house, the killer shoots at Jude, who is wounded. The shooter gets away.

Allison was married to Bill Garrison, who isn’t Mandy’s father. The Garrison family owns a high-end appliance store. Bill is abusive, but Allison would never follow up with the charges against him. And Mandy is seeing Wesley Woodrow, who helps his uncle sell drugs.

This has an excellent plot with multiple twists and small-town intrigue, although I figured out the main plot early on. The characters are outstanding, especially Emmy and Jude. This is the second in the series. It can be read as a stand alone, but one of the big story lines is revealed in the first novel “We Are All Guilty Here.”

I rate it five out of five stars.

It is the first Thursday in August, 1978. In Tallmadge, New York, Mira Winston, 18, drives a golf ball from her tee towards the practice net. The golf ball tears through the net and strikes Kenny Foster, 17, a high school junior who is a caddy, on the temple. He is dead before an ambulance arrives.

At first, everyone agrees this was a tragic accident. Mira, who was accepted to Yale, is so devastated that she refuses to leave for college. But years before the death, Mira used a golf club to break Frank Pendleton’s car window, so she is known to police.

Mira’s father is a lawyer, but not a litigator. Theo Catton, 47, is Mira’s married lover. Then Nick Foster, Kenny’s father, realizes that he saw Mira at a hotel with Theo.

Later, after Mira doesn’t go to college, her parents insist that she get a job. She is hired as an intern at a travel magazine and decides to try to write. She eventually becomes an author. Mira is writing this memoir as an adult.

But when detectives learn how the practice net was torn before Kenny’s death, and a detective remembers Mira’s past act, she is arrested for manslaughter.

I was first unsure of where this story was going until the arrest. The basic theme is what happens when something small causes a death which then impacts multiple lives. The plotting is outstanding and the ending is a surprise. Chris Bohjalian is very good at writing female characters, including teenagers. And he skillfully portrays 1970s attitudes towards women, drugs and alcohol.

I rate it five out of five stars.

Miles Krzelewski and his wife Kate Petrosian live in California with their children Olive and Wesley and dog Giuseppe.

Miles is 12 years late on his Ph.D. on Russian folktales and is a stay-at-home dad. When Kate is offered a one-year visiting professorship at a college in Vermont, they decide to move. Miles thinks he will be able to finish his dissertation there. They agree to housesit for another professor. Kate has multiple sclerosis, which is currently in remission.

Since Miles has a lot of spare time, he gets involved with the school, the parents and other people in town. He then gets involved in researching a local legend.

The pacing is slow and it doesn’t have much of a plot. While other people may enjoy this, it wasn’t a good fit for me.

I rate it three out of five stars.

Nora Breen, a former nun, left her convent in 1954 to find her missing friend in the first book in the series “Murder at Gulls Nest.” She decided to stay at the seaside town of Gore-on-Sea, Kent, England.

In “Murder at the Spirit Lounge,” she is walking one morning when Detective Inspector Hilary Rideout stops his car and asks her to go with him to the home of Dolores Chimes, a famous medium, who recently moved there. Dolores reported a theft, but turned away a junior officer. Dolores conducts her readings in her house in a room that she calls the Spirit Lounge.

Dolores then invites Rideout to her séance planned for that evening. After dinner, Nora is called to Dolores’ home because Nora was formerly a nurse. Dolores was conducting a reading with six guests, including Rideout, when she suddenly died. The next day, a guest at the séance, Harriet Braybrooke, jumps out of a hotel window. When Rideout and Nora go to tell her mother, Lady Constance Braybrooke, of the death, they find that she has also died.

Are these suspicious deaths all murders? Rideout and Nora try to figure out what is happening is before the others who attended the séance also die.

The first half of the novel moves slowly, but then it picks up. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first in the series, but it is a good cozy mystery. While I figured out the killer before Nora does, the plot is good. The characters are engaging, including the minor ones, and it’s nice that Nora is making a life for herself after leaving the convent.

I rate it four out of five stars.

Eve Yalen is alone with her two children, Lev and Sonya, in Massachusetts while her husband, nicknamed Henry James, pursues his music career in New York City. Eve and her family moved to her childhood home from Boston six months earlier.

She takes the children to a playground beside a piazza. Then is surprised when someone calls her by name. It is Demeter D’Errico, a childhood friend she hasn’t seen in many years. Demeter has her young daughter with her. They call her Persephone for privacy.

Persephone cannot go outside during the day. The sunlight makes her ill. People call those with this illness Emilys after Emily Dickinson. Eve decides to try to help find a cure. She becomes friends with a librarian, a botanist, an actor and someone who writes many letters to the editor.

It is said to be a story of community coming together, but I didn’t get that from this meandering novel. The author tries to incorporate too many themes. I struggled to get through it.

I rate it three out of five stars.

Three Chinese women arrive in Los Angeles in 1870. It is soon after the end of the Civil War. Los Angeles is a city of only about 5,000 people.

Dove, 17, is the daughter of an imperial scholar. Her father arranged her marriage to a much older merchant who lives most of the time in Los Angeles. His first wife lives in China. Dove’s brother accompanies her as far as San Francisco, where he will work.

Petal, 18, is the daughter of peasants. She has grown up hungry and, to her shame, her feet weren’t bound. Her father sells her for money to buy rice seed without telling her. She is sold a second time for prostitution in America.

Fast forward to 1926. Moon, 82, is married to Gene Tong, a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. She is educated and speaks fluent English. But her foot-binding failed and she walks with a limp. As she writes her memoir, she remembers when she met Dove and Petal.

Anti-Chinese sentiment is strong in Los Angeles, and this eventually leads to the Night of Horrors on Oct. 24, 1871, when a dispute between Chinese gangs escalated into a full-blown riot.

Lisa See wrote that this story is inspired by real women in history. It is intense and there is a sense of despair, but more so of determination, friendship and survival. Lisa See has long been a major voice in historical fiction. She brings overlooked histories of women and Asian people to life.

I rate it five out of five stars.

Daphne and Jonathan Fuller are visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art when Jonathan notices an older man following them. They go up to the next floor and the man is still following them.

It turns out he is Eddie Triplett, Daphne’s former stepfather, who was married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. They haven’t seen each other in almost 45 years, but he recognizes her.

It is a chance meeting. Daphne teaches literature at a private school and Jonathan is a retired hospital administrator. Eddie is an editor at Random House, but he wasn’t at the office this day because of a water main break.

Daphne visits her sister, Leda, to tell her about the encounter. Flashback to 1980, when Leda was having an appendectomy, Eddie was driving Daphne to the hospital in a snowstorm and they were in an accident. Daphne had to climb out of a car window and walk for help. After that, her mother divorced Eddie. Of course, there’s more to what happened.

This is a wonderful story about adults looking back at the choices they’ve made and the choices that others made for them. It is about the small things that impact our lives and memories of childhood. It is about families, love and bravery. This is one of Ann Patchett’s best novels.

I rate it five out of five stars.

No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there. The chance to relive the moments that meant most. To see what kind of person you really were.

For Wilbur Budd, his best days were with Maggie Shaw, the love of his life, on their honeymoon in Venice on Aug. 9, 1974. Their marriage lasted 20 years. Fifty-two years after the wedding, Wilbur dies at the age of 81.

After he dies, a train arrives. The first person he sees is Agnes Bagdale, who used to own a bookshop in Sheffield, England. As a child Wilbur went to the bookshop that was then owned by Agnes’s son, Arthur. Agnes tells him that when you die, you become the age at which you were closest to your true self. His first job was at Bagdale’s Bookshop.

This is the second in the Midnight World series, after the first one, “The Midnight Library.” Matt Haig explains in the afterword that “The Midnight Library” was a library between life and death. “The Midnight Train” is a train after death.

While the characters are good, some of their mannerisms are really annoying, like Agnes constantly calling Wilbur “old bean.” I didn’t like this one as well as Matt Haig’s “The Life Impossible,” but it does continue with the theme of self-examination of the individual’s life.

I rate it four out of five stars.

It is June 10, 2022. When April and Leo Torres’ house burns in the middle of the night, they escape with their two young children, Otto and Sadie. The fire started in the kitchen and April wonders if she turned off the burner after Leo told her that he wants a divorce.

They retreat to April’s childhood home in Dallas, about an hour away. April’s sister, Josie, and brother, Cameron, are there with their parents, Bill and Deb Russo. Bill was recently diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. He isn’t even 60.

The story then goes back to 2011, when April, a reading specialist, is interning at a high school where Leo teaches history. It moves through time, with different chapters told by the characters. Leo’s parents abandoned him when he was a child and he then lived with an aunt and uncle.

The characters are wonderful and it is well-written, but overall the story is very sad. The themes are family, sacrifices, losses and love for parents, siblings and spouses.

I rate it four out of five stars.

Detective Sergeant Stephen Stilwell and two deputies watch a plane land at night in a remote mountain airstrip on Catalina Island because of information that came from Deputy Alton Quigley’s confidential informant. A duffel bag of drugs is dropped and a man on an ATV moves in to pick it up.

Stilwell chases the ATV as Quigley and Deputy Issa Ramirez block the airplane from taking off. The ATV operator abandons it and runs. Stilwell then gets a radio report that his deputies were shot. Stilwell returns to the scene. Quigley is dead and Ramirez is severely injured.

While under orders to remain in the sheriff’s substation during the internal investigation, Stilwell sorts through the station’s lost and found department. He comes across a valuable backpack and traces it to Angela Metier who disappeared while hiking four years ago. But the backpack was only turned in two months back. Now intrigued, he follows the mystery to the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit and Detective Renée Ballard.

As Stilwell and Ballard work the case from both sides of the channel, they soon realize the criminal is taunting the police. Meanwhile, Stilwell is conducting his own investigation into the deputies’ shooting.

The plotting is excellent. The characters are not as strong as those in Connelly’s other series featuring Renée Ballard, Harry Bosch or Mickey Haller, but that may just because this is only the second novel in this series. Readers who like detective novels will enjoy any of Michael Connelly’s novels.

I rate it four out of five stars.

Alice Li, a first-generation Chinese-American, is a food blogger who has lived in the shadow of her mother, Vivien Li, a Chinese dissident who escaped China after Tiananmen Square. Vivien is now a human rights activist.

Alice agrees to meet her mother at a restaurant in D.C. They have a strained relationship as Vivien always makes Alice feel like she is a child again. Alice is dating Liam Palmer, who is an account manager for a food distribution company. They met as students at Columbia University.

While Vivien and Alice are in the restaurant, security and fire alarms go off simultaneously all around the world. Countries are under attack, possibly by China. They go to Vivien’s Georgetown home where they meet up with Kevin, Alice’s younger brother, and his partner.

Vivien goes into her study, then comes out and tells Alice to come with her. They’ve been called to the White House in the hopes that Madame Li can decode the Chinese intentions. While it makes sense that the President would turn to Vivien since she regularly advises world leaders on the actions of the Chinese government, what isn’t clear is why they want to talk to Alice.

President Fraser Pardington assures the nation that the administration will get to the bottom of what happened. The British say the attack originated in Fujian, China, so he calls Chinese President Chen. Then there is another attack. Vivien and Alice go to China to find out what group is attacking other countries.

This is well plotted and intense, with a big twist about halfway through. There are some amusing parts, like the way the U.S. and Chinese presidents set up back channels to each other. Overall, it is a story of family, memory, myths and greed. It is a very compelling thriller.

I rate it five out of five stars.

It is 1968 and socialite Vera Huntington lives in Soho, London. She loves Ronnie Scott’s jazz club. Her new friend, Frances Adams, is there. But now Vera is in trouble and asks Frances if she has a friend who can help her. Frances is majoring in psychology and works at a diner.

Fast forward to present day. When Annie Adams heads to London to visit her mother, Laura, a famous artist, the last thing she expects to find is a dead body. Least of all for it to be Laura’s new protégée, Felicity Rowe.

Felicity was the ex-girlfriend of Castle Knoll Detective Rowan Crane, who Annie has worked with to solve murders. Felicity also was suspected of having stolen money from the Crane family. And the odder thing is Annie’s late great-aunt Frances wrote in her journal about a similar murder that happened to her friend, Vera Huntington. Dr. Alastair Huntington, Vera’s husband who was a heart surgeon, was convicted of her murder.

Annie’s father, Sam Arlington, left her mother when Annie was a baby, after losing money in a Ponzi scheme. When Laura refuses to talk to Annie about Felicity, Annie calls Sam to find out what information she and Rowan can get from him.

This is the third book in the cozy mystery series. You don’t have to read the others in the series to follow the plot. The two timelines are woven together well and the art angle adds to the story.

I rate it four out of five stars.