Sarah

Not my jam, at least at the moment. Too depressing (it is apocalyptic) and was taking too long to get to the crime/killer part, so DNF.

Some great stories in here, though I found the audiobook a little confusing as one narrator reads the entire collection.

A little twee and Hallmark-y, but fun to combine my favorite genre and season.

I learned some interesting information, plus this helped me be aware of my ageist biases. The kind of book where you can skip around and still glean good stuff.

I admire McDermid for crime fiction, but this book felt like a series of short stories- one plot line following another, one crisis after the next.

I liked this one so much that I'm going to reread Stevenson's first book.

Good fun, with a few plot points that could use tightening. Hope to see the nonagenarian sisters again soon.

Jewell is a master of narrative suspense and engagement. I've come around to loving a good unreliable narrator.

DNF. I should have NF'ed earlier, but I was on a long drive and needed a book. Too rote and predictable. There are important topics here that deserve more recognition, but this book didn't cut it for me.

Charming and entertaining cozy mystery that only faltered in the (requisite) tie-it-up-in-a-bow ending.

First take: DNF. The mystery plot seemed solid and interesting, but the characters fell flat.
Tried again on audio and ended up enjoying it. There are a lot of characters, which is a bit confusing, but the important ones develop through the story.

It turns out you can write a book without an ending. The reader experiences a tiny fraction of the weight of the unknown that families of missing hikers face, which is made both understandable and agonizing in this book. Lankford pulls in other (solved) search & rescue stories to try to make up for the three main unsolved cases, and is well placed to inform us of the various agencies, politics, and personalities at play in wilderness missing persons cases and SAR missions.

This was my first Lisa Jewell and I quite enjoyed it - suspenseful and engaging without veering into utter unbelievability or triteness.

Rounded up from 3.5. The Appeal remains my favorite of Hallett's mysteries. I like the fresh take she has on the genre, using layers of text to create and reveal a story.

Good stuff. Engrossing, sweet, but not saccharine.

This wasn't my favorite of Ware's books. I felt like I was one step ahead the whole way through.

DNF because I just lost interest in the saga. Still interested in reading Barnhardt's latest novel, coming in Aug or Sept.

Lots of important information and well-reasoned arguments here. The personal narrative style of Evicted worked much better for me, and I wish Desmond had used it here as well. That human element makes large numbers and remote policies easier to grasp.

DNF. Finally gave up because I was expecting something a little more gothic. This (at least the first 60%) is more of a drawn out romance with some magic thrown in.

Some of these essays were better, or more to my taste, than others. While the audiobook is excellent (Radden Keefe is a wonderful reader/speaker), the individual essays often contain so many characters that I couldn't keep track. This may be easier to separate in print form.

Nice. Mildly twee.

I'm not sure how I ended up in a fantasy book club, and whether or not I'll stay in the club, but I was a good and social book clubber and read this. It reaffirmed my affinity for most other genres. I don't really understand or care about fantasy, so I won't rate this book. It reminded me of Moby Dick in that we spent a long time on a boat to get to one important point: that we must confront and accept our darkness to be whole humans and therefore live for ourselves, “never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.”
I did discover the magic of listening to slow or plodding audiobooks at 1.25 speed, so something good came of this :)

Yes but no. Maybe this is what thriller writers are doing now with twist endings, but I think Lippman chose shock value over layering clues. I know it's not a Golden Age mystery and doesn't have to play by those rules, but I would have appreciated a few more conventions followed.
But also, salute to You're Wrong About!

Written with love, about love, but I didn't think the framing device of the future Raine writing to Lister provided enough momentum. There was no real catalyst to move the story along.

All over the place!