Category: Book Baristas

Fasten your seatbelt and get ready for a great ride…meet Rose, police stenographer in New York, 1923.  She confidentially records the confessions of criminals.  What happens when she meets Odalie, a new stenographer, and is lured into Odalie’s faster moving evening circles?  Should she enjoy some side benefits of their friendship-evenings out, free meals, a nicer place to live?  These are all

Brilliant and mesmerizing, one of the best novels of 2013, five stars, a must read!  Loved Sisterland! Sisterland is about twins Violet and Daisy.  Both have “senses”–and Violet turns hers into a cottage industry, finding lost children, predicting natural disasters, but mostly counseling people.  She predicts an upcoming earthquake in St. Louis, Missouri, and then navigates the media frenzy caused by

Young socialite Lily Dane returns to the family home in Seaview, Rhode Island for the summer of 1938, expecting a peaceful and idyllic season.  Her parents are there with her much younger sister.  Also there for the summer: her old best friend Budgie and Budgie’s new husband, architect Nick Greenwald (who also happens to be Lily’s ex-fiance.)  Despite their marriage and the temptation to steer clear, Lily can’t resist

Summer is a great time to catch up with family and friends over a cookout, a trip to the beach, a walk at Mackworth Island, a pool party…  it is also a great time to catch up on recreational reads.  What is the hot book this summer?  I recently posted a list of books I plan to read this summer

Best Beach Read this summer…  I devoured Beautiful Day over a couple of afternoons at Crescent Beach and Reid State Park, and savored every minute.  This is the first Elin Hilderbrand novel I’ve enjoyed, though I chased it with Summerland  and have Castaway in my book pile.  It has been a recreational reading kind of summer! Beautiful Day recounts the

Finally, the first Inspector Harry Hole book has been released in the states and I couldn’t resist reading it.  I have read this series completely out-of-order,  but I must admit I was really excited to read the first Harry Hole book.  I believe “The Snowman”,  book #7,  was the novel that really got people in the US reading Jo Nesbo and Harry Hole

The third in the Maggie Hope Mystery series, His Majesty’s Hope is a thrilling mystery featuring one of my favorite spies parachuting behind enemy lines during World War II.  Maggie Hope has quickly risen in the ranks from Winston Churchill’s secretary to an elite member of a black ops organization.  As a spy and code breaker, Maggie is dropped in

For me, a certain smell can vividly bring back a memory–bread baking, the ocean, a drive by the B & M Baked Bean factory when the weather is just right…  Other scents tell a story–incense when I enter a church, smoke on a cool fall afternoon, charcoal on a summer evening… What is most intriguing to me about The Perfume

Ah summer reading…every summer I say I am going to read Anna Karenina, and every summer I am distracted by all of those delicious, lighter pleasure reads advertised to complement your visit to the beach, enhance your vacation, carry you through the dog days of summer…  The Astronaut Wives Club is just such a distraction.  Koppel’s book paints a portrait of

Tuesday’s Gone is the second book in Nicci French’s series featuring the main character psychologist Frieda Klein.  This was somewhat of a departure for the husband and wife duo who in the past of written mostly standalone thrillers.  Sometimes you can read series books out-of-order, but in this case I would recommend that you read the first book in this series, “Blue