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58. Malice at the Palace

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Rhys Bowen

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Mystery

304 pages, published August 4, 2015

Reading Format:  E-Book on Overdrive

Summary 

Malice at the Palace follows the travails of Lady Georgiana Rannoch, a temporarily broke girl about London in the 1930’s who is thirty-fifth in line for the British throne. While her beloved Darcy is off on a mysterious mission, Georgiana receives a new assignment from the Queen.  The King’s youngest son George is to wed Princess Marina of Greece and Georgiana is to be her companion at the supposedly haunted Kensington Palace.  Things get complicated when Georgiana searches the Palace for a supposed ghost only to encounter an actual dead person, a society beauty said to have been one of Prince George’s mistresses.  After Darcy turns up, the investigation brings Georgiana and Darcy precariously close to the prince himself.

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57. Joyland

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Thiller

283 pages, published June 4, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

Joyland takes place in 1973 at a North Carolina amusement park which was the site of a vicious murder of a young woman in the “Haunted House.”  Devin Jones, a student at the University of New Hampshire, takes a summer job at Joyland in North Carolina and is told by the resident fortune teller that he will meet two children that summer, a girl with a red hat and a boy with a dog, and that one of them has The Sight.  Jones becomes close to Annie, a single mother, and her disabled son Mike.  Devin finds that he has a talent for “wearing the fur,” Joyland-talk for portraying Howie the Happy Hound, Joyland’s mascot.  One day, he saves a young girl in a red hat from choking on a park hot dog.  Devin later discovers that Mike is the child with “The Sight.”  Devin and his friends start investigating a string of unsolved murders that they believe are related to the Joyland murder.  It all comes together on a dark and stormy night at Joyland.

Quotes

“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”

 

“This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy.  Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wake up nights.”

 

“All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I’m blue — when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day — I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn’t always a butcher’s game. Sometimes the prizes are real.  Sometimes they are precious.”

 

“I’m not sure anybody ever gets completely over their first love, and that still rankles.  Part of me still wants to know what was wrong with me.  What I was lacking.”

 

“When you’re twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It’s only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you’ve been looking at the map upside down, and not until you’re forty are you entirely sure. By the time you’re sixty, take it from me, you’re fucking lost.”

 

“My father had taught me – mostly by example – that if a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems.”

 

“The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life.”

 

“Young women and young men grow up, but old women and old men just grow older and surer they’ve got right on their side.”

 

“Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down – a thing not always easy to do. “Son, do you know what history is?”  “Uh…stuff that happened in the past?”  “Nope,” he said, trying on his canvas change-belt. “History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever growing pile of crap.  Right now, we’re standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we’ll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come.  That’s why your folks’ clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example.  And, as someone who’s destined to buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving.”

 

“We could see other fires–great leaping bonfires as well as cooking fires–all the way down the beach to the twinkling metropolis of Joyland. They made a lovely chain of burning jewelry.  Such fires are probably illegal in the twenty-first century; the powers that be have a way of outlawing many beautiful things made by ordinary people.  I don’t know why that should be, I only know it is.”

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31. Little Indiscretions

Rating:  ☆1/2

Recommended by:  

Author: Carmen Posadas

Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Food

Info: 320 pages, published July 12, 2005

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

Little Indiscretions, a whodunit and social satire, was a huge international bestseller and winner of Spain’s top literary prize. Nestor Chaffino, pastry chef to the rich and famous, is invited to cater a party in a villa on the Costa del Sol.  When Nestor is found frozen to death in a walk-in freezer with a notebook in his hand, the party guests gathered that evening are the natural suspects.  It turns out that just about everyone staying in the house had a motive to kill Nestor who had decided to publish incriminating information  about his hosts and their house guests.

 

Quotes

“He vowed that this little indiscretion would never be divulged, because coincidences, he thought, are like soufflés:  they come to nothing unless someone takes the trouble to beat, stir, or otherwise agitate the egg whites.”

“All things fade away in time. Any pain can be anesthetized by carefully covering it up with layer after layer of insignificant memories.”

“I will always love you until 8:30.  That was the prudent strategy she had used with her other lovers.  She had learned early on that the verb to love should be conjugated only in the present tense.”

“People think that men like me give money to buy forgiveness or out of vanity, when really it’s the winners pathetic tribute to the loser.  Look at me, we seem to be begging, I need you too.  I need you to accept me, to admire me, to love me.”

“Eight: the age of exploration, of ghosts and secret forays; the age at which a mystery lurks behind every curtain and every armoire opens into a magical world, which you may enter at any time, but who knows when you will return.”

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15. The Girl on the Train

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Heather Bohart

Author:  Paula Hawkins

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Suspense

Info:  395 pages, published January 13, 2015

Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

The Girl on the Train is psychological thriller told from the point of view of three women: Rachel, Anna, and Megan.  Rachel Watson is a 32-year-old alcoholic who frequently binges and has blackouts.  Rachel’s life has been in a downward tailspin since her divorce from Tom, who left her for another woman, Anna Watson. Tom and Anna are now married and have a baby daughter which exacerbates Rachel’s self-destructive tendencies, as it was her inability to conceive a child that began her spiral into alcoholism.  

Rachel’s drinking has caused her to lose her job, a fact which she hides from her roommate by taking the train into the city every day.  While the train slowly passes her old house, which is now occupied by Tom, Anna, and their daughter, Rachel begins watching an unknown, attractive couple who live a few houses away from Tom, and fantasizes about the couple’s perfect life together until Rachel sees the wife kissing another man.  

When the wife goes missing after Rachel experiences a drunken blackout, Rachel begins to question whether she bears any responsibility.  As Rachel inserts herself into Scott Hipwell’s life and the investigation into Megan’s disappearance, the story unfolds in unpredictable ways.

 

Quotes

“But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them.”

“I’d never realized, not until the last year or two of my life, how shaming it is to be pitied.”

”let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers.”

“She must be very secure in herself, I suppose, in them, for it not to bother her, to walk where another woman has walked before.  She obviously doesn’t think of me as a threat. I think about Ted Hughes, moving Assia Wevill into the home he’d shared with Plath, of her wearing Sylvia’s clothes, brushing her hair with the same brush. I want to ring Anna up and remind her that Assia ended up with her head in the oven, just like Sylvia did.”

“I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.  Who was it said that following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all.”

“How much better life must have been for jealous drunks before emails and texts and mobile phones, before all this electronica and the traces it leaves.”

“it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.”

“Hollowness:  that I understand. I’m starting to believe that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it. That’s what I’ve taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps.”

“The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it. Not when you’re in your thirties. My friends were having children, friends of friends were having children, pregnancy and birth and first birthday parties were everywhere. I was asked about it all the time. My mother, our friends, colleagues at work. When was it going to be my turn? At some point our childlessness became an acceptable topic of Sunday-lunch conversation, not just between Tom and me, but more generally. What we were trying, what we should be doing, do you really think you should be having a second glass of wine? I was still young, there was still plenty of time, but failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under, and I gave up hope.”

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10. The Life We Bury

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Heather Ringoen 

Author:  Allen Eskens

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Crime

Info:  303 pages, published October 14, 2014

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

As part of a college English class assignment, Joe Talbert must interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. At a nearby nursing home, Joe meets Carl Iverson, a dying Vietnam veteran who has been medically paroled after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.  As Joe writes about Carl’s life, especially Carl’s service in Vietnam, he cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the contemptible acts of the convict.  Joe, along with his female neighbor and love interest Lila, throws himself into uncovering the truth, but he is constrained in his efforts by having to deal with his extremely dysfunctional mother, the guilt of leaving his autistic brother vulnerable, and a haunting childhood memory.

 

Quotes

“What if I was wrong? What if there was no other side. What if, in all the eons of eternity, this was the one and only time that I would be alive. How would I live my life if that were the case?”

“Add to that cauldron an ever increasing measure of cheap vodka–a form of self-medication that quelled the inner scream but amplified the outer crazy–and you get a picture of the mother I left behind.”

“But deep down, I knew the truth: I needed her—not as a son needs a mother, but as a sinner needs the devil. I needed a scapegoat, someone I could point at and say, “You’re responsible for this, not me.” I needed to feed my delusion that I was not my brother’s keeper, that such a duty fell to our mother. I needed a place where I could store Jeremy’s life, his care, a box that I could shut tight and tell myself it was where Jeremy belonged—even if I knew, deep down, that it was all a lie. I needed that thin plausibility to ease my conscience.”

“We are surrounded every day by the wonders of life, wonders beyond comprehension that we simply take for granted. I decided that day that I would live my life—not simply exist. If I died and discovered heaven on the other side, well, that’d be just fine and dandy. But if I didn’t live my life as if I was already in heaven, and I died and found only nothingness, well…I would have wasted my life. I would have wasted my one chance in all of history to be alive.”

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