What a ride! The Professionals is the kind of book that you get about 75% through, then you set it down because you don’t want it to end…then you spend the next hour looking at it, sitting on the table, until you can’t take the suspense and you grab the book and finish another chapter or two. I cannot wait for the movie.

Four friends, sit around and talk about their lousy employment options. Student loans, a degree in history and looking forward to a lifetime of jobs in grocery stores and coffee shops will make anyone desperate. Desperate enough to consider a life of crime — or at least a few years of it. Kidnapping — easy targets, reasonable ransoms, no violence — seems like a good option if you don’t get greedy. Or as long as you don’t kidnap the wrong guy.

Now, the kids are on the run from the good guys as well as the bad guys. One mistake and things go from bad to worse. It makes for a fabulous read that’s part caper flick, part high-speed chase and perfect for a action thriller. I raced through this on the train from Sheffield to Manchester, finished it on the flight to Atlanta. I really enjoyed it — it’s the kind of book that leaves you torn between wanting to know what happens and not wanting it to be over quite yet. It’s not really fun — these aren’t fun situations — but it’s a good thriller and one you should put on your TBR list. It’s also a story that I think would make a great movie. Someone ought to option this for a screenplay. I’d buy a ticket (and I know how it ends!). There is also a second novel in the works, featuring the cops from this one, state police officer Kirk Stevens, and FBI agent Carla Windermere.

For more on The Professionals, visit the author’s website, www.owenlaukkanen.com. My copy of The Professionals was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Carry the One has a dramatic beginning: it’s the evening of Carmen and Matt’s wedding and they are surrounded by their family and friends. It’s a non-traditional, very Bohemian wedding at a farmhouse owned by Alice, Carmen’s sister, and Jean, both artists. It’s the wee hours of the morning and several party guests — drunk, stoned and sleepy — are making their way home when there is a tragic accident. A young girl is killed on a dark country road. One guest will take the blame, but they will all carry the guilt.

For the rest of their lives, the accident will play in the background — their relationships, their careers, their friendships are all tested and changed. Their lives are already intertwined: Carmen’s sister, Alice, and her brother, Nick, were in the car when the accident happened. Nick’s girlfriend, Olivia, was driving. Alice’s new lover, Maude (sister to Matt, the groom) was in the car, as was Tom, Jean’s married lover. (If you’re confused, don’t feel bad. It took me a while to sort them out in my head.) Even Carmen and Matt, who weren’t in the car, carry the guilt of letting them all drive off, knowing they weren’t sober enough to be behind the wheel. As one character says, “When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.”

I think the most tragic story belongs to Nick. He was a wild kid with an equally wild girlfriend, but that all ended the night of the wedding. After that, it was just a slow spiral — although he still has flashes of brilliance and you always believe he can pull himself out. Alice’s life is a perfect example of  ”be careful what you wish for.” Carmen tries so hard, but she just doesn’t get it when it comes to relationships. I found myself wanting to sit her down for a stiff drink and some straight girlfriend talk. But that’s life, isn’t it? Things never seem to turn out the way you planned. It’s all ups and downs with long stretches in between and nobody ever really lives happily ever after. I was proud of Olivia; she had the hardest road of all, I think, but the peace she found came at a great price.

I really loved this book. I got caught up in these stories so easily and I was surprised by how invested I felt in their stories. Even when I wanted to smack them in the head or shake some sense into them, I wanted things to turn out well. It’s really a sign of great writing, I think, when you feel all wrapped up in the story. At the same time, I found myself afraid to turn the pages, because you just knew that some stories would end in tears — and they did, quite literally, for me.

My copy of Carry the One was a review copy, provided free of charge.

Joe O’Loughlin is an unlikely hero. He’s a psychologist with a failing marriage, serious health problems a troubled relationship with his daughter. He’s in a holding pattern, not sure if he’s looking for a safe place to land or just circling until he runs out of fuel and crashes. He makes some bad choices in Bleed for Me, but it’s hard not to root for him.

Joe gets a late-night call from his estranged wife, Julianne. Sienna, his daughter’s best friend, showed up at the door, covered in blood, and then ran away. Joe finds her — wet and shivering, silent, eyes flat and staring. By the time she comes around at the hospital, Joe will have the news: her father, decorated police officer Ray Hagerty, is dead. And it looks like Sienna killed him.

Maybe I’m a little burnt out on family drama right now. This is a pretty good mystery — there’s a lot of suspense, a good lead-up to discovering the killer, some misdirection and at the center, a troubled man, struggling against some pretty long odds. I just didn’t find it as moving as I had hoped.

Sienna is a difficult character for me, although that probably means Robotham has done an excellent job of writing a teenager. Most of the time, I want to whack her on the back of the head with something. She is that special teenage blend of stubborn and pathetic; she desperately wants help but she is dead-set against doing anything to help herself. Even when it becomes clear that she is in real danger — danger of being railroaded for her father’s murder and possibly a target of the real killer, if she’s not the real killer — she is unwilling to tell the truth, unwilling to give Joe anything to work with. He’s a psychologist, he understands what he’s dealing with, but getting through to her is a long, slow process.

Mr. Parkinsons is a main character in this novel, without having a single line. Joe O’Loughlin suffers from Parkinson’s Disease; it is largely at fault for the changes that lead to his marital problems. It makes it difficult for him to continue his work, it makes it difficult for him to get through the day, in one case it gets him arrested, when an officer sees his jerky, disjointed movements and draws the wrong conclusion. It has clearly changed Joe’s outlook on life and as much as his wife loves him, I can see how it would be difficult for her.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, even if I wasn’t swept away by it. It’s a good mystery, interesting characters and a main character you can root for. Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t have teenage kids, because I found the teenagers in the book the most difficult to deal with, even as a reader.

One small note of warning: as I mentioned in an earlier post on my website, there is one small instance of rather extreme animal cruelty in this book. I struggled over mentioning it, but I think many readers will find it disturbing. It is moderately graphic, and if that bothers you, I suggest skipping it. It has a definite place in the storyline, but you will see it coming, I think. Simply turn a couple of pages and go on; the disturbing details do not come up again after that point.

My copy of Bleed for Me was a review copy, provided free of charge.

In Burned by Thomas Enger, Henning Juul is a veteran investigative reporter, returning to work after a series of personal tragedies left him changed and fragile. An apartment fire killed his son, ended his marriage and left him physically disfigured. He is struggling to deal with his fears and a case of PTSD that has left him unable to work for more than two years. A lot has changed in the world of internet news, he feels shaky, his sources and contacts may have moved on, but  he needs to prove himself, prove that he can still do the work — even if his new partner is dating his ex-wife. He’ll have the perfect opportunity: a gruesome murder committed in one of the city’s public parks. As Juul is drawn deeper and deeper into the case, both the danger — and the potential payoff — increase.

I have to admit that about 50 pages in, I almost set this aside. Early on, Juul is almost too fragile and too pathetic. It was painful to read. Here is a man who lost everything — his wife, his son, his career — and he feels responsible. He’s having a hard time adjusting to the regular rhythms of life. But I wanted to see what would happen to him and in the end, I’m glad I stuck with it.

The story is set in Oslo, Norway, which meant that the geographic references, and a lot of the cultural ones, were tough for me. There was some unfamiliar slang, but for the most part, it was easy reading. It was certainly an interesting look at the changes in the news business that have happened in just a few short years! Juul has to relearn his job while he is rushing to cover a major news story. His methods are very different from his showier colleague, but in the end, you know he’s going to be more successful.

Juul’s story is heartbreaking and you can’t help but root for him. Once I got past my frustration with Juul, it was easy to get sucked into the mystery. A young college student has been murdered — buried up to her neck and stoned to death in a tent set up in the park. The most obvious suspect, her Pakistani boyfriend, has some shady acquaintances. Her college friends, her colleagues in the film school and even her instructor all look a little suspicious. There are rumors that the murder was an honor killing, which has the potential to stir up a great deal of racial unrest. Juul is not going to have much time to get his sea legs back on this case, because he may be the next target.
I have been reading a lot of Scandinavian authors recently. Burned is Enger’s first novel, but I definitely look forward to reading the follow-up. With the cliffhanger that dangles at the end of Burned, how could I miss it!

My copy of Burned is an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

This is my first Bailey Weggins mystery! Bailey is a fun character — a true-crime journalist, based in Manhattan, writing for a celebrity magazine and getting seriously involved with a hot new boyfriend. There’s all kinds of material there for fun stories, and Kate White delivers the goods in So Pretty It Hurts. Bailey’s boyfriend is out of town (and Bailey isn’t sure she believes his story about it) so she takes off with her good friend Jessie. Jessie has the hots for music mogul Scott Cohen and Scott has invited her and a friend to a weekend house party at his retreat in the woods. It’s exactly what you’d expect: a rock star, a couple of models, a couple of journalists…and maybe a murderer.

This was a quick read — lots of fun, interesting characters and just enough introspection to keep it balanced. Bailey is trying to sort things out with her boyfriend, Beau Regan. She says that part of the reason she accepted Jessie’s invitation is that she is punishing Beau for being away. That’s crazy! If you get invited to a weekend retreat with rock stars and models, you go! Doesn’t matter where your boyfriend is, if you ask me.  But Bailey ends up snowed in with a dead model, a depressed friend and someone is lurking in the halls late at night. And once she gets home, it gets even worse.

If you like models and celebrity gossip, you’ll enjoy this book. It’s a fun mystery with a great setting and a lot of humor. Bailey’s work as a journalist gives White a lot to work with and it’s a world Kate White knows well – she is the Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan magazine! There’s the mystery to solve, her job to save and she definitely needs to work on her relationship. The storylines wrap up nicely and I look forward to seeing what Bailey does in her next book.

If you’re looking for another mystery series to add to your library shelves, this is definitely one to check out. So Pretty It Hurts is number six in the line-up, so I’ve got a little reading to do to get caught up. My copy of So Pretty It Hurts was an Advance Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is intriguing as soon as you look at the cover — it took a second or two for me to realize the little girl on the cover (her name is Olive, by the way) is floating. Floating. And such an odd expression on her face! She made me want to open the book and turn the pages.

This is the story of Jacob Portman, an unremarkable young man with a very remarkable grandfather. All through his childhood, Grandpa Portman told the most wonderful stories of his childhood — in particular, of his time on a magical island full of the most unusual children. There was a girl who could fly. There was a young boy who could lift boulders over his head and all sorts of children with peculiar skills and talents. The island itself was like a paradise, always sunny, always beautiful, and the children played and lived happily ever after.

Of course, eventually Jacob began to grow up and he began to recognize his grandfather’s stories as fantasies. His father is able to fill in some of the blanks about Grandpa Portman’s tragic young life — the loss of his parents, his time in an orphanage — turned into the fantasies he shared with Jacob.

But what if those stories were all real?

The story is a little predictable, but the strange and spooky photos give it a marvelous twist. Jacob grows up and learns a lot about himself and his family. Some of the things he learns are not pretty, and he doesn’t always do the best job coping with them, but you really root for him to get his act together.

What I loved the most about this book is that the photos are real. From the author’s notes:

“The the pictures in this book are authentic, vintage found photographs, and with the exception of a few that have undergone minimal postprocessing, they are unaltered. They were lent from the personal archives of ten collectors, people who have spent years and countless hours hunting through giant bins of unsorted snapshots at flea markets and antiques malls and yard sales to find a transcendant few, rescuing images of historical significance and arresting beauty from obscurity…”

Real pictures of floating girls and invisible boys! What is more cool than that? I can understand why these eerie photos inspired a novel — they could inspire several different types of novels, in my opinion. With no history behind them, the stories you could invent for these spooky images are endless.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a quick read — it’s meant for young adults, which isn’t my usual genre, but I definitely enjoyed it (even when the story got a little predictable). I picked this copy up for my personal library and I am definitely going to enjoy sharing it with others.

There is something I find really intriguing, at least in novels, about a female criminal. Their motivations seem so different from most male criminals — it never seems to be just about greed or power. It’s something more subtle. In The Face Thief by Eli Gottlieb, Margot is a promising young journalist. It doesn’t take long for her to realize that the lavish lifestyle she can glimpse from her assignments is just out of her grasp…but there are ways to extend her reach.

Margot meets Lawrence Billings, a man who is an expert at non-verbal communication. He teaches seminars on body language and reading a person’s face and what their physical attributes can tell you about their personality. Margot is eager to learn, maybe a little desperate, and she is able to use the things she learns from Lawrence to turn more men into her victims. She’s not a killer, but she still destroys their lives. She is beautiful and cunning and ruthless and she takes them for everything they’ve got. Even Lawrence is swept under, in his own way, as she turns his techniques against him.

This is an interesting read, told in a sort of disjointed way, with bits and pieces of the stories of the main characters told moving backwards and forwards in time. There is Margot — her troubled childhood, her ruthless nature and the destruction she leaves behind. There is Lawrence, who is interested in teaching Margot because he senses she is someone special. He eventually pays the price for getting involved with her, even though he tries to do the right thing. There is John Potash, lured into Margot’s web and faced with the destruction of his life and family. And there is Dan France, the mystery man at the hospital, who may decide to throw it all away…

I enjoyed the mystery and the way the reader had to piece the story together. I enjoyed the characters, for the most part. I have to say that I found the subject matter a little harder to swallow. I absolutely believe that you can tell a lot about a person from their body language and their non-verbal cues, but face reading goes well beyond that. Do I really believe that you can tell that someone is an obsessive-compulsive by the indentations at their temples? That people with few friends have short eyebrows or that people who seek attention have deeply cleft chins? Or that you can tell the details of my childhood from my hairline?

“The hairline is like a graph of life during adolescence.” He traced the laser dot along the ridges of her hairline. “And this jagged edge right here, well, that probably means our friend Margot’s adolescence was less than smooth sailing, am I right?”

“You’re right,” she said, speaking intentionally loud enough to be picked up by the overhead mike. “Like many people I had a difficult, um, transition to adulthood.”

No, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that you can tell anything about my personality from the shape of my ears, because I do not believe that everyone with similarly-shaped ears has certain traits in common. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying the book while I was reading it.

However, I have to admit that, writing this review only a few days after finishing the book, I find that it didn’t really stick with me. I enjoyed it, recommended it to a friend of mine who I think will also enjoy it very much, but I didn’t remember the names of the characters and I had to double check several details as I was thinking this through. Some books are just like that — a pleasure while you read them, but one that fades quickly once you’re done.

My copy of The Face Thief was a review copy provided free of charge.

There are a number of things about In Search of the Rose Notes that I really liked. For one, I love the way that author Emily Arsenault portrays the friendship between Nora and Charlotte, both as children and later as adults. I love the mystery storyline, the way the children pursue their “investigation,” the difficulty that Nora has dealing with it as an adult. I thought the portrayal of Nora was especially good, the way she has grown away from her childhood home and the difficulties she has going back to it and seeing her classmates as adults. And most of all, I enjoyed the skillful way that Arsenault leads you from one suspect to another, the way that she subtly points the finger at different players in this game, so that it is easy to believe any one of them could have murdered Rose.

When Nora and Charlotte were eleven years old, they were best friends. They made plans for their around-the-world trip when they got out of high school. They did their schoolwork together. They played the elaborate games that kids dream up together. And they spent their afternoons with Rose, Charlotte’s babysitter, until one day, Rose walked out of their lives and out of the world.

Rose’s remains have been discovered, buried in a shallow grave near one of their old childhood haunts. Nora feels compelled to return to her hometown and reconnect with her old friend, Charlotte, and revisit the long-ago days when Nora and Charlotte tried to investigate Rose’s disappearance. They might have pulled their methods from crazy science fiction stories, but they were earnest in their desire to find her, to solve a mystery that left a gaping hole in their lives.

I have to admit that I probably suspected everyone in this novel, including Charlotte and Nora, at one time or another. It’s an excellent look at the way that time changes our perception of events, the way that we never really know our close friends, and the ways that people grow up and grow apart. Charlotte was a bit of a bully, always pushing Nora around, assuming that Nora would give her her way. Nora was a girl with secrets, including one desperate act that got everyone’s attention — something she has never told her husband about. She has trouble seeing her old classmates as anything other than the kids they were, tied up in prom night revelations and childhood grudges. I loved the way these storylines played out.

My copy of In Search of the Rose Notes was a review copy, provided free of charge.

Every now and then, the hype surrounding a book does not lie. That is certainly the case with Defending Jacob by William Landay. I had been hearing a lot of buzz about this one, but I was a little late on the Request button and didn’t get my copy right away. Once I picked it up, I could hardly stand to put it down.

Defending Jacob begins in with a grand jury. It’s an excellent plot device because we don’t know what he grand jury trial is about; we don’t know who is on trial or what the charges may be. But we do know that it comes too late:

“In April 2008, Neal Logiudice finally subpoenaed me to appear before the grand jury. By then, it was too late. Too late for his case, certainly, but also too late for Logiudice. His reputation was already damaged beyond repair, and his career along with it.”

It’s a powerful beginning to a novel that kept me on the edge of my seat, sneaking a few pages here and there over breakfast and in the car, from beginning to end. Andrew Barber is our witness. We find out immediately that he is the former Assistant District Attorney. His son, Jacob, has been charged with the brutal murder of a classmate.

They live in a small town and every move the Barber’s make is under the microscope. His wife, Laurie, has always been well-liked by her neighbors and at the center of the social whirl; suddenly, she’s an outcast. Andrew has to leave the District Attorney’s office, Jacob is out of school, and they find themselves locked in the house together, avoiding their neighbors, and utterly miserable.

The book discusses how far a parent will go to defend their child. Andrew is certainly willing to fight and claw his way through the courtroom — he understands that process, he understands the research and investigation that goes into a murder case — and he is not willing to entertain even the thought that Jacob is guilty. He sees it as an attorney: it doesn’t matter what he did, it matters what they can prove. If he can be found not guilty, we can deal with the rest later.

Laurie is riddled with doubt. She desperately wants to believe in Jacob’s innocence, but it becomes clear almost from the start that the Barbers don’t really know their son. He’s a teenager and he has a ton of secrets — some innocent, some guilty — and as each one is revealed it shakes her confidence in him and in herself as a parent. And Jacob isn’t the only one in the house with something to hide.

I loved the use of the grand jury to move the plot forward. We get frequent snippets of Andrew on the stand and it quickly becomes clear that we are getting Jacob’s trial in retrospect. The trial is over and something else has called for this new trial. It could be an appeal, it could be some misconduct on Andrew’s part, it could be something that has happened to Laurie, we don’t know for sure. I probably imagined every possible outcome, all sorts of scenarios that could have lead us to this point. You’re never quite sure, so you’re never quite sure until the very end of the novel. It was one of those books where I really wanted to get to the end and find out what happened, but at the same time I wanted to drag it out, enjoy the suspense and the story.

There are a few moments in the story that require a little suspension of disbelief, but that’s true of many stories. It wasn’t enough to kick me out of my happy place, enjoying the way the drama unfolded. Honestly, the thing that bothered me the most was the prosecutor’s name: Neal Logiudice. I simply could not wrap my head around the pronunciation given (<i>la-JOO-dis</i>), the emphasis seemed wrong and every time I came across it, it was like a record skipping. When I started thinking of him as just Neal, it got a lot easier.

This is a terrific novel, exploring a damaged family that is living a nightmare. We see the story of a mother and child unfold through the eyes of the father, who has his own agenda. The courtroom drama is interesting, the investigation is surprising, and every page held my complete attention. It’s the sort of book that makes you start looking up the author’s other work to add it to your TBR list.

My copy of Defending Jacob was an Advance Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Contemplating this review, I started off thinking that This Burns My Heart has all the hallmarks of great historical fiction. It takes place in an exotic location (South Korea) in an interesting time period (1960s). It has an ambitious female protagonist, Soo-Ja Choi, who wants to do great things. There is plenty of conflict for Soo-Ja — with her parents, her culture, her husband. The world outside South Korea is changing rapidly, while her culture seems mired in the past, smothering her. But after three attempts to read the book and 175 pages, I just found myself asking, “so what?”

There is no doubt that Korean culture in this time period was repressive and male-dominated. As a woman, Soo-Ja has some freedom, but she is still ruled by her father and eventually by her husband. Her first attempt to escape her father, by applying for diplomatic school, is thwarted. Her second attempt is more successful, at least at first. She decides to marry a rather shiftless young man that she can control, someone she will be able to manipulate to get her own way. Her father agrees to the union, but things do not turn out the way she planned.

So what? She made a mess of her own life, and while I understand that she was trying to find a way to do something better for herself, she picked a pretty lousy way to do it. It has the potential to hurt a lot of people. That’s not shocking; people have been screwing up their lives for centuries. This book just didn’t seem to have anything new to say about it.

Postwar South Korea should be an interesting place, but the book doesn’t really give me its flavor. There are some small details, tidbits about festivals and bean cakes, a walk through the market, but I never felt like I was there. When I compare it to something like The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, where I felt completely immersed in the sights and sounds and smells of  18th century Japan, this could have been South Korea, or it could have been Chinatown.

I really wanted to like this book, but I never felt swept away to another era, the way you do in great historical fiction. There’s nothing wrong with the book: the writing is fine, the story has potential, but it didn’t grab me. Three attempts was enough for me.

My copy of This Burns My Heart was an Advanced Reader’s Edition, provided free of charge.