I love character driven thrillers with a perfect sense of place. Tight plotting. Page turning. I read thrillers to transport myself. My love affair with (…the books of…) Harlan Coben, Lee Child, and David Baldacci is rooted in their characterizations of hero: Everyman against the world. Sinister sucks. These seasoned writers are tough to compete… View more
I went through a reading slump in the second half of 2016. Blame it on the siren song of social media. Blame it on the election. I couldn’t sit down and finish a book to save my life. I found other things to occupy my time. I cooked a lot. I started learning Polish. (Check… View more
Home is a desperate mix of loyalty, pain, family and friendship. But it’s loyalty that takes center stage in Harlan Coben’s latest New York Times bestselling mystery. Home stars Myron Bolitar and his lifelong friend, Windsor Horne Lockwood III (aka “Win”). When Myron gets a call for help from Win, the man who never asks for anything, he… View more
One of my favorite antiheroes, the improbable Amos Decker, is back. We met a few years ago in David Baldacci’s Memory Man, and I instantly fell in love with Amos’ exceptional brain. You see, he is gifted and cursed with hyperthymesia and synesthesia resulting from a helmet to helmet collision at his first professional football… View more
Fool Me Once is Harlan Coben’s ninth consecutive novel to reach #1 on the New York Times best seller list. Nine books in a row at #1. I mean, can you imagine that? Seriously. I almost got to brag once when I came in second in a middle school spelling bee. But I digress. In… View more
David Baldacci is the king of government conspiracy thrillers. From Absolute Power to The Camel Club to his latest series about government assassin Will Robie, Baldacci has always known how to keep his fans in suspense. The first Will Robie book, published in 2012, was The Innocent. It gave us a glimpse into this new… View more
Today I have visions of tea, scones and arsenic dancing in my head. While scouring the stacks at the Cedar Rapids Public Library, I discovered that we have an incredible selection of Agatha Christie novels. For a mystery lover, this is a treasure indeed. Dame Agatha Christie, the doyenne of the proper English murder mystery,… View more
Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant and fierce heroine of the Millennium Series, recently returned to international bestseller lists in The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Salander fans know that Stieg Larsson, the author of the original Millennium Trilogy – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked… View more
The Mickey Bolitar detective series for Young Adults is a great set of page-turners by New York Times Bestselling author Harlan Coben. The series, Shelter, Seconds Away and Found, is character and plot driven – strong spinoffs of Coben’s wildly successful Myron Bolitar series. Each of the first two books stands alone, while providing great… View more
Dutch author Herman Koch structures the entire plot of The Dinner around a sophisticated five course meal shared by two brothers and their wives. These men don’t like each other. At all. But their fifteen year-old sons are friends, and it is the boys who the parents have met to discuss. You see, the boys,… View more
