Bought for me as a birthday gift and I couldn’t be happier either it! Tina Kent is all about the spice!!

Caldwell’s gritty realism tale of the squalor of Depression Era Georgia. Jeeter Lester is not a Rockwell romanticized humble cotton farmer enduring against all odds. He is mean and petty, pathetic and starving. He can’t remember the names of his 17 children, but almost all ran away as soon as they could. He is hopelessness and inertia when people value the cotton mills far more than the cotton crops.

Steve Smith is recently out of prison. He’s sworn he’s not going back to his old life, not going back to prison again. He has an adult son he’s never met. And Steve has memories of the book he found on a bus that led to a favorite teacher disappearing when he was 14. We follow Steve through transcripts of recorded notes he left on his phone. Because in trying to find out what happened to Miss Iles (or “missiles” per the transcription software) Steve falls down the vast Twyford Code conspiracy rabbit hole. Was Twyford just a children’s author? Or a spy who hid messages to other WWII spies in her books? Maybe she was a double agent? Did she help the Nazis steal Britain’s gold reserves? Or did she save the gold via bluffs and double bluffs? Her code (does it even exist?) leads to the stolen (or possibly saved) gold. Or to a supervirus and it’s vaccine. Or aliens. Or it’s the biggest internet conspiracy hoax ever. Who knows what? Who’s lying about what they know? And what did happen to Miss Iles in 1983?

Suspenseful, but at times, hard to stay engaged in.

If I could read this over again for a first time I would. Riveting and keeps you sucked in the whole time. Absolutely love this authors writing. I will be looking for more from her.

Bought for me as a birthday gift and I couldn’t be happier either it! Tina Kent is all about the spice!!

Very interesting read on women of color and their stories in the United States …………………..,..,.:::..:..

What’s true? Dorothy Sayers founded the Detection Club for the best of the best mystery fiction writers of the time. May Daniels, a young English nurse, disappeared while on a day trip to France. Sayers and her reporter husband, Mac, investigated May’s disappearance and probable murder. Marie Benedict takes these facts and creates a locked room mystery solved by the all-star Queens of Crime: Sayers, Agatha Christie, Emma Orczy, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham. At first the investigation is a bit of a lark, a way to prove their worth by solving a mystery the police and their fellow (male) mystery writers can’t. But the queens bond as they learn about the sweet, naive person May was. The press describe a very different woman, turning public opinion against the victim. She had it coming. The police jump at any excuse to unofficially stop investigating (since they aren’t getting anywhere). Only the Queens care about justice for May, and all of the expendable young women like her.

Absolutely chilling read. I didn’t realize it was a true story until I was halfway through. Made it even more intriguing and disturbing. The authors capabilities on portraying events leaves little to the imagination.

Adam Kay recounts some of the highs and lows of his medical career. Six years after leaving medicine to become a writer and script editor, Adam finds the diaries he kept while a junior doctor. He changed the names and dates, so there’s no violation of medical privacy. Most of what he shares has humor, but it’s a dark often gallows humor. And there’s no glimmer of mirth in the final entry that marked the beginning of the end for him in OB-GYN.