Saving Rachel by John Locke

 

 

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FROM THE AUTHOR’S WEBSITE:

What if the best morning of your life suddenly turned into your worst nightmare? Sam Case is about to find out. Saving Rachel is the story of what happens when killers force a man to choose between his wife and his mistress…and the one he rejects must die. But wait–all is not as it appears to be. In fact, nothing is what it appears to be!

Saving Rachel is a scary, funny, roller coaster ride through hell, with twists, and turns that will slap your face and suck you in!

 

REVIEW:

This suspenseful mystery will leave you confused but deeply intrigued.  There are crazy twists, turns and round abouts that will leave you regretful to put it aside.  I imagine that if Dean Koontz collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock at the circus, this would be their brain child.  This is a novella worth reading, no doubt about it.

RATING:

CLOSED – Book Giveaway: The 3 Secret Pillars of Wealth

This giveaway will be announced on 12/18.  If you want to enter, just post a comment with your name and email address below.  To learn more about this book, read what the author, James Burns, has to say about it HERE.

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Guest Post: James Burns

The following is a guest post for “The 3 Secret Pillars of Wealth” by the author, James Burns.

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Hope is not an investment strategy. If you’re like most people, you hope for a comfortable retirement doing what you like to do, free from financial worry. But have you asked yourself the tough questions that need answering before you can begin attaining your retirement goals? Do you even know, in specific detail, what your goals are? Do you want to live in the lap of luxury or merely continue living the lifestyle you currently enjoy? And do you know what it’s going to take to be able to do those things?
Most people have never really taken a hard look at where they are financially and what it would take to reach their goals. That’s because financial decisions are emotional and difficult, and change often involves risk. But change is what’s needed if you want to start thinking and acting like someone in control of his or her finances. Investors think differently than non-investors and I need you start thinking like an investor if we’re going to get your money to start working for you.

Before we get started, though, I want you to understand a few things about my approach to wealth building. While I believe that you can amass great wealth by sticking to these pillars of wealth, I don’t want you thinking that this is a get-rich-quick book or that I expect you to immediately understand everything about wealth building just because you’ve read my book. This is going to take work and patience and planning, and maybe even help from a financial professional.

I believe in planning for the entire length of your lifetime, and that your plan will need updating and adjustment to survive as long as you do. Financially successful people understand that amassing wealth isn’t about gimmicks or following the crowd. In order to create wealth you have to take a serious look at what’s best for you and your family. There is no one-size-fits-all financial plan.

I’m going to ask you to think like a corporation and honestly look at your personal cash flow. Would you buy your family business as it is today, based on your personal balance sheet? Are you running the family finances to the best of your abilities, and are you using the Three Secret Pillars of Wealth? Recently, three of the richest men in the world were asked by Forbes magazine what the best investment advice that they’d ever heard was.

Together, these three men identified the three pillars of wealth, and I want you to learn how to use them to the same great effect as these billionaires.

-James Burns

Hannibal’s Elephant Girl – Ariion Kathleen Brindley

Hannibal's Elephant Girl

 

This is a historical fiction set in 218 BC and follows a young girl, Liada who suffers from amnesia. Liada is plucked from the river by an elephant, Obolus which sets the first book in the (coming) series in motion.

From the website:

“This is the story of my life as a young girl following Hannibal and his army from Carthage in North Africa to Iberia, and then over the Alps toward Rome. I never reached Rome, but then neither did Hannibal. I left him after the battle of Trebbia, taking with me his last remaining elephant, Obolus, and my friend, the slave girl Tin Tin Ban Sunia. This book recounts the first month of our long journey.” ~Liada

REVIEW:

From the moment I opened the pages of this story, I found myself riveted and thrilled.  There is a melodic cadence that seems to run the author’s words fluidly from the book to your mind and the images of scenes described seem to pop from the page as if the book were a miniature movie screen.  The balance of right and wrong and proportion of development, conflict and resolution could not have been better poised than if put on an actual scale.  I walked away from this book feeling satisfied but yet with hope for more to come of this 12 year old phenomenon and her elephant.

RATING

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A Circle of Souls – Preetham Grandhi

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FROM THE AUTHOR’S WEBSITE:

The sleepy town of Newbury, Connecticut, is shocked when a little girl is found brutally murdered. The town’s top detective, perplexed by a complete lack of leads, calls in FBI agent Leia Bines, an expert in cases involving children.  

 Meanwhile, Dr. Peter Gram, a psychiatrist at Newbury’s hospital, searches desperately for the cause of seven-year-old Naya Hastings’s devastating nightmares. Afraid that she might hurt herself in the midst of a torturous episode, Naya’s parents have turned to the bright young doctor as their only hope.

 The situations confronting Leia and Peter converge when Naya begins drawing chilling images of murder after being bombarded by the disturbing images in her dreams. Amazingly, her sketches are the only clues to the crime that has panicked Newbury residents. Against her better judgment, Leia explores the clues in Naya’s crude drawings, only to set off an alarming chain of events.

 In this stunning psychological thriller, innocence gives way to evil, and trust lies forgotten in a web of deceit, fear, and murder.

 

REVIEW:

This psychological and paranormal thriller commands the reader’s attention and drags them into the story by their collar from page one.  It is a true page turner that is irresistible and devastating to put down.  There is a perfect balance of plot and character development, suspense, climax and closure tied together with smooth, fluid prose.  The feelings of connection to the characters Dr. Peter Gram, Naya Hastings and Detective Leia Bines that the writer invokes, will pull you into the novel irrevocably through the end and leave you anxious to see what Preetham Grandhi will put forth next.

RATING:

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New Reviews: Coming Soon!

I took a bit of a reviewing hiatus but I’m back in action.  I have an exciting review coming up in just a day or two so come back by to see what I think of this:

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Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? By Steve Lowe & Alan McArthur

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Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit is for the most part, a table book set out on the cocktail table to amuse your guests with the raucous title. There are some funny bits but overall has the feel of a blog compilation. It contains zilch in the way of creativity and would not hold up to the label of literature, and yet…there’s a Volume Two.

RATING:

Queen’s Cross By Lawrence Schoonover

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Of all the books I have read in my life, there isn’t a single book that I have come across that would earn a rating worthy of 5 pens, until I read “Queen’s Cross”.  It is rare to read of war in such an elegant, poetic prose.  It’s meaty but not raw.  It has war and it has (era and stature appropriate) romance and love, politics, grandeur and simplicity.  It is a perfect medley of real history and creative fiction.  You’ll find yourself, be you man or lady, falling for Isabella, the Queen of Castile, nay, Queen of Spain. 

The title is apropos in the sense that the Queen wears a cross allegedly fashioned from one of THE three nails (yes, those three nails) but also for the cross that is her burden to bear of uniting Spain.

Read this, and you’ll not be disappointed.

RATING:

Guest Post: Author Chris Tusa, on “Dirty Little Angels”

Though it may seem (from the back cover) to be concerned primarily with religion, the book is actually about the extent to which a young girl will go to save her family. In many ways, it’s also about adolescence, specifically the problems a young girl (with a developing mental illness) encounters as she navigates her way through a world of drugs, sex, and violence. 

 

One of the main questions I receive from readers (about my novel) concerns why I have chosen to write about such desperate and downtrodden people. My short answer is that readers learn more about themselves when they read about desperate people.

 

Unfortunately, happy, content characters don’t teach us much about ourselves. But tragedy, desperation, violence, these force us to look inward, to contemplate our lives and more importantly, to consider our own flaws. These are the emotions that transform us, that make us learn about ourselves in ways we hadn’t before. 911 changed Americans in a way that gazing at the Statue of Liberty simply can’t. Horrible experiences (even when read about) wake people up. To be honest, I have no desire to write comfortable, safe little books filled with characters that readers grow to admire. Don’t get me wrong, of course I want readers to walk away somehow changed by the book, and I certainly want them to experience a gamut of emotions while reading (love, hate, grief, sadness, etc.). Like any writer, I enjoy when readers like a character I’ve developed, but in all honestly I’m happiest when a reader tells me they hate one of my characters. When I hear this, I know I’ve impacted them on an emotional level, mostly because when readers begin to hate a character, they begin to learn about themselves in a way they simply don’t when they admire a character.

 

 

 

Chris Tusa

 

*Read the VintageDM review of “Dirty Little Angels” by Chris Tusa.

“Dirty Little Angels” by Chris Tusa

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FROM THE AUTHOR’S WEBSITE

Set in the slums of New Orleans, among clusters of crack houses and abandoned buildings, Dirty Little Angels is the story of sixteen year old Hailey Trosclair. When the Trosclair family suffers a string of financial hardships and a miscarriage, Hailey finds herself looking to God to save her family. When her prayers go unanswered, Hailey puts her faith in Moses Watkins, a failed preacher and ex-con. Fascinated by Moses’s lopsided view of religion, Hailey, and her brother Cyrus, begin spending time down at an abandoned bank that Moses plans to convert into a drive-through church. Gradually, though, Moses’s twisted religious beliefs become increasingly more violent, and Hailey and Cyrus soon find themselves trapped in a world of danger and fear from which there may be no escape.

 

REVIEW (Review Request)

This book gently draws you in to the story and the characters.  It enables you to visualize each character as you think the author visualized when writing about them.  The book’s choppy prose and poor grammar, while normally a negative point for me, was perfect and right on with the story and the characters and made the story come alive for me.  This book is what I like to describe as a “sleeper”, just when you think the story isn’t really going anywhere…BLAM!  It punches you in the face and has you completely riveted and on the edge of your seat until you’ve devoured the last page.  I will look forward to more novels from Chris Tusa, as I’m sure there will be many more where this came from.

170 Pages, Livingston Press

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RATING:

Preface to the rating; this book probably would have earned a 2.5-3 pens had it not been for those final chapters.  Those chapters alone earned every bit of the four pens!

Walking In Circles Before Lying Down by Merrill Markoe

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FROM THE AUTHOR’S WEBSITE:

WALKING IN CIRCLES BEFORE LYING DOWN is a novel about a woman who so loses track of the direction her life should be taking that when she can suddenly talk to dogs, she starts wondering if they are offering advice worth taking.

Dawn Tarnauer’s life isn’t exactly a success story. Married twice before she is even out of her twenties, she now has yet another boyfriend. But at least she hasn’t married him. She’s still not sure what she does for a living, or even what she wants. But after her second marriage crumbles, she finds herself moving in with her sister Halley and taking over her job babysitting dogs at a doggy day care center so Halley can use the time to launch her career as an internet certified Life Coach. As a roommate, Halley leaves something to be desired. She not only has many difficult to understand life coaching affirmations and techniques she wishes to practice on Dawn, but a well-documented attraction to sociopaths having once dated Scott Petersen (Yes, that Scott Peterson). Then there’s Dawn and Halley’s narcissitic mother, Joyce; always in search of a grandiose identity. Joyce is currently marketing something called “The Every Holiday Tree” that she developed with her Korean boyfriend Ng and is hoping to sell to Wal-mart. Completing the package is their mostly absentee father, Ted, who models his life (and wardrobe) after his long-dead rock idol Eddie Cochran, and is mourning the end of his brief third marriage by scheduling two dates for the same night.

The one reliable constant in Dawn’s life is her new dog, Chuck, a pit-bull mix she adopted from an animal shelter. When Dawn’s boyfriend surprises her one morning with an announcement that he’s leaving her for someone else, her world begins to unravel. Never having been dumped before, she finds herself sobbing into Chuck’s fur; “Now what am I supposed to do?”

To her shock Chuck replies, “I knew I should have said something sooner. I could smell her on his pants.” He then vows to take over as the new alpha of their pack since he feels that Dawn’s instincts have proven continuously unreliable. Chuck claims he will use his much more reliable centuries-in–the-making canine instincts to help Dawn find better solutions to all of her dilemmas.

And from that point on, Dawn realizes that she can talk to all dogs, (Or is she going crazy?) It soon becomes a case of be careful what you wish for because although the dogs have much to say to Dawn, what they consider good conversational topics aren’t always the kind of thing most of us want to hear. And then there is the dilemma of what to believe. When a dog in her care tells Dawn that she is being abused, Dawn wants to act on this. But should she? How does she know if the conversation she is hearing is real ? What if the actual problem is that Dawn is delusional?

 

REVIEW (Purchased)

Walking in circles had me completely enraptured.  This is a laugh out loud page turner that I will continually bring out on my worst days to cheer me exponentially.  Merrill Markoe has proven to be quite delightful.  What the book lacks in a plot line, it makes up for in content and humor.  The few mentions of adult material (including the dog) and foul language would not make this suitable for younger readers but surprisingly enough, adds to the humor. 

This book is written in the narrative of the main character, Dawn Tarnauer and it is written in the perspective that it is Dawn writing this book, not Merrill Markoe.  What I didn’t like about the book was at the beginning of the chapters; the main character described the technique she was using in writing the next chapter.  I also didn’t enjoy the detail of the family crisis with Dawn’s mother.  I found myself skipping entire pages just to get back to Dawn and her dog, Chuck.

Aug. 2006. 256p. Random, $22.95.

RATING

Casting Spells by Barbara Bretton

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FROM THE AUTHOR’S WEBSITE:

Sugar Maple looks like any bucolic Vermont town, but when the tourists go home it’s a different story–inhabited as it is with warlocks, sprites, vampires, witches, and an ancient secret. And I know all about secrets. I’m Chloe Hobbs, owner of Sticks & String, a popular knit shop where your yarn never tangles, you always get gauge . . . and the knitter sitting next to you comes out only after dark.

I’m also the sorcerer’s daughter–a single sorcerer’s daughter with Sugar Maple’s future in her hands which means the whole town is casting spells meant to help me find Mr. Right. Who’d have guessed I’d find him in Luke MacKenzie, a cop investigating Sugar Maple’s very first murder? Bad news is he’s 100% human which could spell disaster for a normal future with a paranormal woman like me–in love, in danger, and in way over my head.

REVIEW (Recommended)

Because Barbara Bretton is typically a romance writer, I never had the urge to pick up her books but when I saw the cover of Casting Spells on the shelf at my mother’s house, the knitting needles caught my eye.  As an avid crocheter and novice knitter, I love anything that is set in a yarn shop so I thought I’d give it a try.  I was pleasantly surprised.  I was caught up with the main-character-turned- heroine Chloe Hobbs and her eclectic group of friends.  This book combines a real world setting with fantasy and a smidgen of romance.  This novel has a smooth flow of the plot line though a bit expected and was what I would consider a light, but enjoyable read.   I am looking forward to the sequel Laced With Magic.

Rating: