Another murder mystery, of which I seem to have had a lot more this year than usual, there is a lot to like in this story.  Set in a remote location at the destination of a successful tv star and a magazine editor, the story is told from multiple pointsof view, which narrators being more and less reliable, revealing all the hidden motives and guarded secrets they have in small bits as the story unfolds.  These back stories set the stage for the conflicts that arise, but the biggest secrets are held back and keep you guessing as more and more people have reason to murder others at the party and you don't know until the end who is murdered, let alone who did it. I really liked the story and thought it was cleverly written and the unusual format which could have felt gimmicky actually flowed really well. I will say that there was one too many backstories and as the last one played out, my willingness suspension of disbelief was pushed a little too far. It just felt too unlikely that the person with the least connect to the main circle of people just happened to have had motive to kill one of the other guests because of a connection that neither was aware of and that unfolds with way too much coincidence.  It did add a layer of extra cleverness and it was woven into the story early on in a way that made it all make sense when it came together, but really it just seemed so unlikely to have been possible that it distracted from an otherwise really tightly plotted story. Even with that, I am giving it a soft recommendation.
Recommend
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This is a fabulous murder mystery that I can't stop thinking about.  It is so well written, the characters are so richly developed, and the plot is delightfully complicated that I am seriously contemplating reading it a second time.  Set across time from 1961 to 1975 as they investigate an old murder and a new disappearance, the complexity of interpersonal dynamics and histories just pulled me in, all the time being filled with red herrings and twists, as the investigation proceeds. The standout character is the young woman detective no one takes seriously and the ending just reinforced how much I loved her.  I found the portrayal of sexism and elitism to be well portrayed, ever present, without having it be the sole focus of the story--reminding me of how even during my younger years it was so pervasive we often accepted it without noticing at all. Did I mention the ending of this book was so good? So often these complex stories have predictable, unrealistic, or just stupid endings that don't hold together, but this one was right on point.
Highly recommend.

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Another post-apocalyptic novel, which really seems to be disproportionately recommended in recent times, this one was extremely graphic in depicting gratuitous violence. This was oddly juxtaposed against explicit descriptions of sexual encounters.  I was disappointed that I did not like it more since the premise of the futuristic world felt well thought out and plausible, though incredibly depressing. 

Set in the dessert of the American southwest, the complicated backstory includes litigation over water rights, complicated interpersonal dynamics, lots of characters with compelling and believable backstories, and  a nuanced world created with attention to details that I really liked.  Ultimately, while there was a lot to like in the story, I really disliked the violence, which I did not think was needed to advance the story and which reflected a deterioration of human decency at a level that was just too dark for me.  I found that I couldn't listen to this unless I was in the right frame of mind and definitely not before bed.  

Not recommended.
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I feel pretty terrible about this review. In a time when I think it is particularly important for us to reflect on the Holocaust, the violence of othering, and the horrors of ghettos and "camps" and determining human survival based on the official papers you carry, I am very sorry to report that this WWII book about all these topics is not to be recommended by me.  WWII historical fiction is usually a pretty easy sell for me, so this is almost certainly not why I didn't like it.

It started weird. This is because the story takes place in two time periods, while also telling a fictional vampire horror story that one of the characters wrote.  But you do not discover that is what is happening until really far into the book and it makes for a very confusing read.  And it felt almost like the author was deliberately trying to make it confusing.  Maybe she thought it would build up like a mystery and, to a large extent, I would call it a mystery, but it felt forced and unnecessary.  Yet, if you ignore the bizarre allegory vampire storyline distraction at the beginning, I found the book interesting enough at first and quite enjoyed the early character development that was mired in intrigue.

But even setting aside that problem, it just became more and more complicated as it jumped back and forth between narrators and time periods and between the actual story and the story-within-the-story.  I love a complex plot that makes me pay attention, but I kept thinking that this was a plot strategy meant to hide the ball.  And indeed, there were pieces of the story that were obviously being withheld--huge pieces of the story, like why one of the main characters has facial disfigurement from some type of trauma that most everyone in the story seems to know about and is alluded to over and over, but isn't spelled out for the reader until way past the point that I still cared.  It ended up just not being this big deal after all the hype to get to it. And again, I just felt like it was deliberately being done that way despite it not making any sense not to tell the reader.

Perhaps the most prominent reason for my not liking it was the gratuitous, graphic details of the violence that felt added for shock value.  Not that the Holocaust wasn't shocking and I don't disagree that some level of description of the details is appropriate and I don't want to discount that for survivors the horrors went on and on and on, each more horrific than the last.  There was just something about the way it was written that left me feeling like it was another game the author was playing with me as the reader.  I don't know how we learn about the time period without hearing about the details of the violence, but here it was done in a way that as I was reading I was aware that I was reading this book about this horrible thing that was designed to convey to me how horrible it was instead of letting the story unfold naturally.  In the context of the other unusual plotting choices, I just could not get into it.  So much so, that I had to take several breaks from it to read other things before coming back to finish it.

Not recommended.

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I absolutely loved this quirky, unique, and entirely unexpected murder mystery with a twist--the twist being whether it was even a murder at all.  A classic whodunit, but with nothing classic about it.  The hero is simultaneously sympathetic and yet not, an unreliable narrator and yet earnest, unbelievable and yet not.  As she insists on investigating an unexplained death in her tea shop, her distrust of law enforcement and her deep desire for love, connection, and meaning drives to sometimes humorous, sometimes shocking, and always unexpected lengths.  Without giving anything away, I am just going to recommend it and tell you to go read it! 
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Highly recommend. 
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Other than the writing of this book being above average, I basically have nothing nice to say about this story.  It is steeped in rape culture and sexual terrorism--the entire backdrop of the story is about missing young girls, abducted from their community, with the message being that the only way they can keep themselves safe is by staying home or being under the protection of the men in their lives.  As if that wasn't bad enough, [SPOILER ALERT: STOP READING HERE] it add in the wrongful conviction of a gay doctor who was actually trying to help young girls.  A young boy who saves one girls from kidnapping goes on a lifelong quest to find and save other missing girls that is self-destructive, obsessive, and downright weird. 

It is a complicated murder mystery, with so much many misogynistic themes and general themes that even the twist ending that plays with the idea that it wasn't what it seemed the whole time wasn't anywhere near enough to save it.  I guess if you like a book about a serial kidnapper who evades capture amidst an unrealistic plotline that is hard to stay engaged with and follow, while also being unnecessarily shocking, then you might enjoy this read.  It was not, however, for me.

Not recommended.
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One of the best unreliable narrator books I have read in a while, the twists and turns of this little gem took me on a journey I was not expecting.  Without giving spoilers, I didn't love the ending, which was the only unexpected turn in the entire book and was kind of a let down after so much work went into the plot up until then.  It is a story of tourist, on a vacation to try to escape the recent trauma of her life, who meets a local that turns into a one-night fling that takes a dramatic turn.  It is a fun, free audible book that I can't quite recommend, but definitely cannot not recommend.  A solid end to a full year of reading.

Not not recommended.

A really slow start and if I wasn't always so committed to finishing a book, I might not have persevered.  The setup was the common plot scheme of two seemingly unrelated stories in two eras unfolding with similar themes of men betraying women, the loss of the dream of mothering in the manner dreamed of, and searching for a meaningful life when the path does not seem clear, unfolding in both time periods.  But, somewhere along the line, my interest was piqued.  It wasn't quite the story it felt like it was set up to be.  In the modern timeline an amateur, wannabe historian tourist finds an antique bottle with an etching and becomes obsessed with finding its origin.  Following a series of unlikely, but at the same time actually plausible, series of events, she ends up piecing together a marvelous story of an apothecary, a murderer, and an unlikely friendship, all while sorting through her own unhappiness and figuring out a way forward.  Turns out, I really liked how the story unfolded and I felt unusually satisfied with the ending.

​Recommend.  

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Did I just read 20 books in a row from the same series?  Pretty much, yes.  And there are many more.  I cannot explain why I was so enthralled with these books.   The books are set in coastal Oregon, but the author clearly is not an Oregonian at all and has just fundamental misinformation about living in Oregon. It felt petty to be picking at these things and I tried to let it go, but when she made a big deal about there being so many bugs in Oregon in the summer, it was just too much!  And I continued to be blown away when people write about legal cases without doing any meaningful research about the law or legal process in the place they are supposedly writing about.  In this case, no minimally competent Oregon attorney read this book before publication and I just find that irritating, especially when there are things like clear ethics violations that are completely inconsistent with the character's developed personality and the level of competence they supposedly have an attorney.  

Even with these distractions that really do throw me off because it demonstrates such an incredible lack of research, I found the stories fun and quirky.  There is a lot of willing suspension of disbelief, like way more than you would want for a story about ghosts. The ghost rules of existence are inconsistent and sometimes feel like they are changed in order for the author to write herself out of a plotting dead-end.  I did not like that, but at the same time I just kept reading...for 20 books.  I kept reading until I just didn't want to read them at all anymore and thus stopped cold turkey after book 20.  The stories got too repetitive and the plotlines just too far fetched (yes, more far fetched than a ghost living in the house that the new owner of the house can see and communicate with).  I also found the puritanistic discretion/shame the main character has about sex as just an excuse for the author not to deal with what could have been a really fun exploration of the human-ghost love affair.  This is left to the reader's imagination, except that the way it is done made me feel like it was invading her privacy to even think about because she is so private about it.  I kept thinking surely by the next book the author is going to give up the game and add some steamy details to the relationship, but, alas, 20 books in and I was finally just bored with it.  Would I go back to the series?  Maybe.  But I am going to need some distance since I really did burn myself out on them.

Do not recommend.

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Not at all what I was expecting, but I just loved this three-generation grandmother-mother-daughter murder mystery.  All three characters were spunky in their own right, with quirks and strengths and rich, complex histories with each other that wove through the predicament they find themselves in when the daughter finds a dead body, the brilliant, but eccentric grandmother thinks she sees something, and the mother is just trying to keep everything stable.

I loved the setting on a flat water bay with kayakable waterways, in a town with environmentalists and real estate developers and kids hoping to make money off their parents' lands when they die.  The sexism and dysfunctional law enforcement dynamics were believable, although at times shocking.  

This is a great read for a car trip, vacation, or rainy weekend curled up reading.  

Recommend.

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