Gone Tomorrow: Lee Child

New York City. Two in the morning. A subway car heading uptown. Jack Reacher, plus five other passengers. Four are okay. The fifth isn’t.
In the next few tense seconds Reacher will make a choice–and trigger an electrifying chain of events.
Susan Mark was the fifth passenger. She had a lonely heart, an estranged son, and a big secret. Reacher, working with a woman cop and a host of shadowy feds, wants to know just how big a hole Susan Mark was in, how many lives had already been twisted before hers, and what danger is looming around him now.

In a novel that slams through one hairpin surprise after another, Lee Child unleashes a thriller that spans three decades and gnaws at the heart of America . . . and for Jack Reacher, a man who trusts no one and likes it that way, it’s a mystery with only one answer–the kind that comes when you finally get face-to-face and look your worst enemy in the eye.

I'm still enjoying the Reacher novels. This one had a few gory bits and the odd " well of course" moments but nothing to make me walkway.




The Household Guide to Dying: Debra Adelaide

Delia has made a living writing a series of hugely successful modern household guides. As the book opens, she is not yet forty, but has only a short time to live.

She is preoccupied with how to prepare herself and her family for her death, from writing lists to teaching her young daughters how to make the perfect cup of tea. What she needs is a manual – exactly the kind she is the expert at writing. Realizing this could be her greatest achievement she sets to work. But, in the writing, she is forced to confront the ghosts of her past and she realizes that there is a journey she needs to make and one last vital thing she needs to do.

Absolutely loved it. Cried great big tears.



How to Buy A Love of Reading: Tanya Egan Gibson

Carley Wells, nearly 16, has reportedly never met a book she likes. Aghast, her nouveaux riches parents decide that their daughter needs a "passion," and so to ensure that she does not remain intellectually impoverished, they commission a previously under appreciated writer to live at their estate and write a book to Carley's specifications. As she finds herself drawn into the story being assembled, Carley's life is dramatically altered. Complications persist in the form of Hunter, Carley's F. Scott Fitzgerald-obsessed best friend bent on self-destruction, and Bree, the hired novelist now separated from her previous existence. From the opening sentence of this strongly sardonic satire, Gibson's debut, it is clear that nothing is sacred. Whether examining trendy charity functions or the muted morals of the so-very-rich, her acerbic, acidic book is right on the money. The major surprise is that the novel also has a heart, and Carley leaps off the page as the most real character. Gibson's inventive language also enlivens this overly long novel; especially winning is the construction of the novel-within-the-novel.

Some reviewers didn't care for the style of this book. I found it easy to read, loved the satire and found the characters true enough.





Courts of the Sun: Brian D'Amato

A mind-bending, time-bending, zeitgeist-defining novel about the days leading up to December 21, 2012--the day the Maya predicted the world would end

December 21, 2012. The day time stops. Jed DeLanda, a descendant of the Maya living in the year 2012, is a math prodigy who spends his time playing Go against his computer and raking in profits from online trading. (His secret weapon? A Mayan divination game--once used for predicting corn-harvest cycles, now proving very useful in predicting corn futures--that his mother taught him.) But Jed's life is thrown into chaos when his former mentor, the game theorist Taro, and a mysterious woman named Marena Park, invite him to give his opinion on a newly discovered Mayan codex.
Marena and Taro are looking for a volunteer to travel back to 664 AD to learn more about a "sacrifice game" described in the codex. Jed leaps at the chance, and soon scientists are replicating his brain waves and sending them through a wormhole, straight into the mind of a Mayan king...
Only something goes wrong. Instead of becoming a king, Jed arrives inside a ballplayer named Chacal who is seconds away from throwing himself down the temple steps as a human sacrifice. If Jed can live through the next few minutes, he might just save the world.

Bringing to mind Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Gary Jennings's Aztec, yet entirely unique, In the Courts of the Sun takes you from the distant past to the near future in a brilliant kaleidoscope of ideas.

Started off loving it but there are segments that go on and on and on and if you can flip read through it works. Lots of pop references that I enjoyed but I'm not sure I can wade through 2 more installments unless they edit out a lot of the material that while possibly of historic interest, adds pages and pages to an already wordy author.



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The Sugar Queen: Sarah Addison Allen


Josey Cirrini is sure of three things: winter is her favorite season, she’s a sorry excuse for a Southern belle, and sweets are best eaten in the privacy of her closet. For while Josey has settled into an uneventful life in her mother’s house, her one consolation is the stockpile of sugary treats and paperback romances she escapes to each night…. Until she finds her closet harboring Della Lee Baker, a local waitress who is one part nemesis—and two parts fairy godmother. With Della Lee’s tough love, Josey’s narrow existence quickly expands. She even bonds with Chloe Finley, a young woman who is hounded by books that inexplicably appear when she needs them—and who has a close connection to Josey’s longtime crush. Soon Josey is living in a world where the color red has startling powers, and passion can make eggs fry in their cartons. And that’s just for starters.

Garden Spells is another of her novels both are light reading with a hint of magic.

5 books