Category / 52/52

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Book 48 (of 52) – Hot Girl Murder Club

Hot Girl Murder Club – Ashley Winstead

Ten years after a young starlet’s sister was murdered at a famous Hollywood Christmas party, she and her best friend work behind the scenes to help troubled women escape from the bothersome men who keep them down.  When she is framed for murders, it leads her to the truth of who murdered her sister and why and brings her secret society out into the open.

Ashley Winstead’s latest, Hot Girl Murder Club, builds off of the #metoo movement from both sides, one working silently behind the scenes to help women advance and one working out in the open and trying to bring down the worst of the worst, no matter the cost.  This was another good time, so I look forward to whatever comes next from Winstead.

 

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Book 47 (of 52) – The Girl In The Green Raincoat

The Girl In The Green Raincoat – Laura Lippman

With Tess on bedrest as she awaits the birth of her first child, she becomes enmeshed in the case of a woman she claims went missing from the local dog park.  The more she digs, through intermediaries, since she can’t leave her house, the surer she is that the woman has been killed by her husband, who has seemingly done this before.  But all is not what it seems, as she is soon to find out.

The eleventh entry in Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series, The Girl in the Green Raincoat, is a novella originally serialized in the New York Times.  A baby shakes up the status quo, although with only one more entry to go in the series, that may not matter as much.  I hope to finish things up by the end of the year.

 

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Book 46 (of 52) – Caller Unknown

Caller Unknown – Gillian McAllister

A mother, travelling to Texas to reunite with her daughter for a vacation, finds her world crashing down when the daughter is kidnapped. Rather than going to the police, she follows the kidnapper’s instructions, travelling to Mexico to smuggle drugs back across the border, but a mix-up at the exchange leaves one man dead and mother and daughter on the run.  How far will a mother go to protect her daughter?  Will she give up the rest of her life if it means her daughter can go free?

Gillian McAllister returns with her latest, Caller Unknown.  She moves the action from the UK to Texas in this one, which I think may have led to some of my discontent.  Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but this was easily my least favorite of her works to date.  Here’s hoping it was just a temporary blip and that her next outing is back to where I expect.

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Book 45 (of 52) – Big Fan

Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love – Michael Schur and Joe Posnanski

Two friends and podcast partners travel the globe to find out the meaning behind fandom.  What do we as a species get from investing our time and hearts into things that bring us immense joy and bitter upset.  Whether it is baseball, basketball, chess, darts, football, soccer, pickleball, the WWE, Taylor Swift, or Star Wars, they bring us to the very heart of what it means to love something so much it hurts.

Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love, by television comedy writer Michael Schur and sportswriter Joe Posnanski, looks at all of the things we love and tries to dig into why we love them.  Along the way, the experience new sports, music, and people, gaining a greater appreciation for what it means to be a fan and of the things for which we are fans.

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Book 44 (of 52) – So Old, So Young

So Old, So Young – Grant Ginder

A group of six friends come together at five different events over 20 years.  As they grow older and their relationships shift and evolve, their connections with their old friends change.  Will the people you were closest to in your 20s remain your bestest of friends as you approach middle age?  And if not, is that ok?

Grant Ginder pops up on my radar for the first time with So Old, So Young.  It is a poignant tale about growing older and trying to maintain those relationships of your youth as priorities and availability changes as time marches on, with spouses and kids and, eventually, death.  The last part hit a little hard this week given some things going on in the real world, which probably led me to relate to it more than I may have otherwise.

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Book 43 (of 52) – The Midnight Train

The Midnight Train – Matt Haig

Shortly after his death, Wilbur Budd is visited by the Midnight Train, taking him on a journey back through his life and giving him the opportunity to relive the best and worst times of his life on his way to the afterlife.  Seeing an opportunity to risk his ever-after by fixing the mistakes of his past, Wilbur decides to throw caution to the wind, bringing his dreaming self from his long-ago honeymoon along for the end of the ride to see how they squandered the love of their lifetime for material goods.

While not a direct sequel, Matt Haig’s latest, The Midnight Train, shares some themes and characters with The Midnight Library, his award-winning book from 2020.  It takes some familiar concepts, like your life flashing before your eyes as you shuffle off this mortal coil, and mixes them up with a risky way to try and update the past.  Regret over the various roads not taken is a common theme in Haig’s work, at least the ones I’ve read, and this is no different.

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Book 42 (of 52) – In Cold Blood

Truman Capote – In Cold Blood

In November of 1959, the four members of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas were murdered in their home.  A pair of ex-convicts, who met in the Kansas State Penitentiary, were eventually tracked down and tried for the crimes.  The duo were both executed on April 14, 1965.

Learning of the crimes before the murderers were captured, Truman Capote travelled to Kansas, along with his childhood friend Harper Lee, to interview residents and the investigators assigned to the case.  Six years later, Capote turned nearly eight thousand pages of notes into In Cold Blood, considered by many to be the prototypical true crime novel.  A few weeks back, the book was the answer to Final Jeopardy, which spurred me into adding it to my waitlist at the library.

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Book 41 (of 52) – Bunny

Bunny – Mona Awad

Samantha, a lonely MFA student at an elite New England university, finds her world turned upside down when she’s invited to join the Bunnies, a bizarre, hyper‑feminine clique in her cohort called the Bunnies.  As she becomes entangled in their surreal rituals, she finds herself unsure where imagination ends and reality begins.

Mona Awad’s Bunny, a Goodreads Choice award nominee for favorite horror in 2019, found its way onto my radar recently, though I can’t exactly remember how.  This was a little bit different, and I’m not sure if I want to dig in for more or avoid her work altogether going forward.  Time will tell, I guess.

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Book 40 – The One Day You Were My Husband

The One Day You Were My Husband – Rosie Walsh

After a short, but intense, romance, Carrie and Johan get married on a remote beach in Thailand while on vacation.  Their joy is short lived, however, as a group of armed men swarm the beach, arresting Johan and throwing Carrie’s life into disarray.  Twelve years later, while looking for a short-term rental, Carrie, now married with two kids, finds a listing with Johan’s picture and, after some on-line stalking, she finds that Johan escaped from Thailand years ago and has been living in Stockholm ever since.  She becomes obsessed with discovering exactly what happened on their wedding day, but she can find out the truth without blowing up her family?

The One Day You Were My Husband was my first encounter with the work of Rosie Walsh.  While the premise was interesting, the execution fell a little flat, as the first two thirds of the book were very slow before things picked up a bit at the end.  The final twist, such as it were, came out of left field, with nothing really set up to give the reader any sort of a hint that it was coming.  Oh well, they can’t all be winners.

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Book 39 (of 52) – People We Meet On Vacation

People We Meet On Vacation – Emily Henry

After two years of silence, Poppy reconnects with her best friend Alex, hoping they can get past the awkwardness of their last vacation together and rekindle their relationship.  Agreeing to a trip to Palm Springs, harkening back to the low-cost trips of their youth before attending the wedding of Alex’s brother, they try to pretend that nothing has changed, but the stifling heat turns up the tension until they can’t ignore the truth any longer.

Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation, the 2021 Goodreads Choice winner for Favorite Romance, is her annual appearance on my Kindle for this year.  It is a story that hits a little close to home, with friends that have drifted apart in spite of themselves, but it was an entertaining read.  It had recently been adapted to a movie by Netflix, which I’m sure I’ll watch at some point.  Despite romance not being my genre, Henry is now four for four with me.