Camino Island

Camino Island

Camino Island by John Grisham
Published by Random House Audio Publishing Group on June 6th 2017
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Synopsis

A gang of thieves stage a daring heist from a secure vault deep below Princeton University's Firestone Library. Their loot is priceless, but Princeton has insured it for twenty-five million dollars. Bruce Cable owns a popular bookstore in the sleepy resort town of Santa Rosa on Camino Island in Florida. He makes his real money, though, as a prominent dealer in rare books. Very few people know that he occasionally dabbles in the black market of stolen books and manuscripts. Mercer Mann is a young novelist with a severe case of writer's block who has recently been laid off from her teaching position. She is approached by an elegant, mysterious woman working for an even more mysterious company. A generous offer of money convinces Mercer to go undercover and infiltrate Bruce Cable's circle of literary friends, ideally getting close enough to him to learn his secrets. But eventually Mercer learns far too much, and there's trouble in paradise as only John Grisham can deliver it.

Nice easy read with a fair to meddling story line. Listened to this as I did chores around the house. Would be a great listen while driving in to work.

About John Grisham

Long before his name became synonymous with the modern legal thriller, he was working 60-70 hours a week at a small Southaven, Mississippi, law practice, squeezing in time before going to the office and during courtroom recesses to work on his hobby—writing his first novel.

Born on February 8, 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to a construction worker and a homemaker, John Grisham as a child dreamed of being a professional baseball player. Realizing he didn’t have the right stuff for a pro career, he shifted gears and majored in accounting at Mississippi State University. After graduating from law school at Ole Miss in 1981, he went on to practice law for nearly a decade in Southaven, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigation. In 1983, he was elected to the state House of Representatives and served until 1990.

One day at the DeSoto County courthouse, Grisham overheard the harrowing testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim and was inspired to start a novel exploring what would have happened if the girl’s father had murdered her assailants. Getting up at 5 a.m. every day to get in several hours of writing time before heading off to work, Grisham spent three years on A Time to Kill and finished it in 1987. Initially rejected by many publishers, it was eventually bought by Wynwood Press, who gave it a modest 5,000 copy printing and published it in June 1988.

That might have put an end to Grisham’s hobby. However, he had already begun his next book, and it would quickly turn that hobby into a new full-time career—and spark one of publishing’s greatest success stories. The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on another novel, the story of a hotshot young attorney lured to an apparently perfect law firm that was not what it appeared. When he sold the film rights to The Firm to Paramount Pictures for $600,000, Grisham suddenly became a hot property among publishers, and book rights were bought by Doubleday. Spending 47 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, The Firm became the bestselling novel of 1991.

The successes of The Pelican Brief, which hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Client, which debuted at number one, confirmed Grisham’s reputation as the master of the legal thriller. Grisham’s success even renewed interest in A Time to Kill, which was republished in hardcover by Doubleday and then in paperback by Dell. This time around, it was a bestseller.

Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1988, Grisham has written one novel a year (his other books are The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Chamber, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, The Partner, The Street Lawyer, The Testament, The Brethren, A Painted House, Skipping Christmas, The Summons, The King of Torts, Bleachers, The Last Juror, The Broker, Playing for Pizza, The Appeal, The Associate, The Confession, The Litigators, Calico Joe, The Racketeer, Sycamore Row, and Gray Mountain) and all of them have become international bestsellers. There are currently over 300 million John Grisham books in print worldwide, which have been translated into 40 languages. Nine of his novels have been turned into films (The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, A Painted House, The Runaway Jury, and Skipping Christmas), as was an original screenplay, The Gingerbread Man. The Innocent Man (October 2006) marked his first foray into non-fiction, and Ford County (November 2009) was his first short story collection.

Grisham took time off from writing for several months in 1996 to return, after a five-year hiatus, to the courtroom. He was honoring a commitment made before he had retired from the law to become a full-time writer: representing the family of a railroad brakeman killed when he was pinned between two cars. Preparing his case with the same passion and dedication as his books’ protagonists, Grisham successfully argued his clients’ case, earning them a jury award of $683,500—the biggest verdict of his career.

When he’s not writing, Grisham devotes time to charitable causes, including most recently his Rebuild The Coast Fund, which raised 8.8 million dollars for Gulf Coast relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He also keeps up with his greatest passion: baseball. The man who dreamed of being a professional baseball player now serves as the local Little League commissioner. The six ballfields he built on his property have played host to over 350 kids on 26 Little League teams.

The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (Millennium, #5) by David Lagercrantz, Simon Vance
Published by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group on September 12th 2017
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Synopsis

Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, the brilliant hacker, the obstinate outsider, the volatile seeker of justice for herself and others--even she has never been able to uncover the most telling facts of her traumatic childhood, the secrets that might finally, fully explain her to herself. Now, when she sees a chance to uncover them once and for all, she enlists the help of Mikael Blomkvist, the editor of the muckraking, investigative journal Millennium. And she will let nothing stop her--not the anti-Muslim gang she enrages by rescuing a young woman from their brutality; not the deadly reach from inside the Russian mafia of her long-lost twin sister, Camilla; and not the people who will do anything to keep buried knowledge of a sinister pseudoscientific experiment known only as The Registry. Once again, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, together, are the fierce heart of a thrilling full-tilt novel that takes on some of the most insidious problems facing the world at this very moment.

While, I enjoyed this 5th installment of the Lisbeth Salander saga, The Girl who Takes an Eye for an Eye, this book doesn’t have the depth of original series. There is just something missing, I felt that the plot was just a little weak and didn’t have the same intricate balance that the first two books had.

The story was just not big enough to handle the mythical character, Lisbeth Salander. In the earlier books written by Larrson, the plot revolved around the characters, they were the forefront of the story. In this book the story was in the forefront not the characters. Lisbeth was some how diminished, along with Mikhael Blomkvist became mere shadows of their former selves.

About David Lagercrantz

Authors - davidlagercrantz.jpg

David Lagercrantz, born in 1962, is a journalist and author, living in Stockholm. His first book was published in 1997, a biography of the Swedish adventurer and mountaineer Göran Kropp. In 2000 his biography on the inventor Håkan Lans, A Swedish genius , was published. His breakthrough as a novelist was of the Fall in Wilmslow (Fall of Man in Wilmslow) , a fictionalized novel about the British mathematician Alan Turing. In David Lagercrantz 'writing you can thwart see a pattern: the major talents who refuse to follow the convention. He has been interested not only in what it takes to stand out from the crowd, but also in the resistance That Such creativity inevitably faces.

In 2011 his best-selling sports biography I am Zlatan (I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic) was published, one of the most successful books in Sweden in modern times. The biography was nominated for the prestigious August Prize in 2012, as well as shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. To date, I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic has been published in over 30 languages around the world and been sold in millions of copies.

In the summer of 2013, Lagercrantz was asked by Moggliden (the Larsson Estate) and Collins to write the fourth, free-standing sequel to Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. That which does not kill us (The Girl in the Spider's Web) was published - in August 27, 2015 - Simultaneously by 26 publishers (in 24 languages) worldwide, Ten Years After the Swedish Publication of Stieg Larsson's Men Who Hate Women (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) . The fifth novel in the series, The Man Who Hunted his Shadow, will be published September 7th 2017.

Sometimes I Lie

Sometimes I Lie

Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney
Published by Flatiron Books on March 13th 2018
Pages: 258
Format: arc_paperback
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Synopsis

My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me:

1. I’m in a coma.
2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore.
3. Sometimes I lie.

In 1987 I was living in Huntington, Long Island, that Christmas there was a strange news story of a young newly married couple who had a fight, the wife had gone missing.  For at least a week there was nightly news stories about how the young husband was assisting the police in the search and was responsible for providing information that led to the discovery of his wife’s body.  He was later convicted of murdering her.  I often wondered if something had tripped in his mind that allowed him to repress what had happened. What happens when the mind gets so so over loaded it can no long know the truth.

Alice Feeney’s Sometimes I Lie gives us a glimpse, into the dark side of how the mind works.  She also did an excellent job of messing with my mind in one of the best psychological thriller I have read.  If you enjoy this genre, this is the book to read.

About Alice Feeney

Alice Feeney is a writer and journalist. She spent 15 years at the BBC, where she worked as a Reporter, News Editor, Arts and Entertainment Producer and One O’clock News Producer.

Alice is has lived in London and Sydney and has now settled in the Surrey countryside, where she lives with her husband and dog.

Sometimes I Lie is her debut thriller and is being published around the world in 2017.

The French Girl

The  French Girl

The French Girl by Lexie Elliott
Published by Berkley Books on February 20th 2018
Pages: 304
Format: arc_paperback
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Synopsis

An exhilarating psychological suspense debut that will propel readers into the darkest edges of friendship, for fans of Fiona Barton, Clare Mackintosh, and Ruth Ware.

They were six university students from Oxford--friends and sometimes more than friends--spending an idyllic week together in a French farmhouse. It was supposed to be the perfect summer getaway...until they met Severine, the girl next door.

For Kate Channing, Severine was an unwelcome presence, her inscrutable beauty undermining the close-knit group's loyalties amid the already simmering tensions. And after a huge altercation on the last night of the holiday, Kate knew nothing would ever be the same. There are some things you can't forgive. And there are some people you can't forget, like Severine, who was never seen again...

Now, a decade later, the case is reopened when Severine's body is found in the well behind the farmhouse. Questioned along with her friends, Kate stands to lose everything she's worked so hard to achieve as suspicion mounts around her. Desperate to resolve her own shifting memories and fearful she will be forever bound to the woman whose presence still haunts her, Kate will find herself buried under layers of deception with no one to set her free...

The French Girl is one of those books that immerses you. A well written tale of six English students who spend a week in the French countryside only to have a French girl who was staying across the way go missing. Fast forward ten years and five of the six students are now settled into their lives in London when they are notified that the remains of the French girl have been found in an old well on the property where they were staying.

Thus begins the cat and mouse game between the old friends, who knows what, each person carefully searching to see what the others know. This is not a sit on the edge of your seat thriller but a nuanced study of how friends react to news that most likely one of them is a murderer. I throughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it.