What to Read? … What to Read?

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Hi everyone, I just wanted to tell you that I am hosting a giveaway for The Gate House written by Nelson Demille.  I have 3 lovely copies to giveaway and one of them could be yours. All you have to do is follow these simple steps. I will be picking 3 winners on November 11, 2008.

1.      Mention the giveaway on your blog

2.      Leave me a comment and link to your blog

Do not worry; if you do not have a blog; just leave me a comment telling me why you should be one of the winners. Check back November 11, 2008 to see if you are one of the 3 winners.

Happy Reading

Sarah

Thank you Amazon for the picture

“ I never asked Susan how, when, and where she began her affair with Frank Bellarosa – this is not the sort of information one needs to hear in any detail – but it was something that remained missing from what I did know.  So, my shrink, if I had one, would say that my dream was an unconscious attempt to fill in this lacuna – the missing piece of the affair.  Not that it mattered a decade after I divorced her.  In legal terms, I charged adultery, and she admitted to it.  The state did not require any juicy details or explicit testimony, so neither should I.”

Did you know that Nelson DeMille is releasing his newest book called The Gate House; it will be in bookstores near you on October 28, 2008; just in time for Halloween.

When John Sutter’s aristocratic wife killed her mafia don lover, John left America and set out in his sailboat on a three-year journey around the world, eventually settling in London. Now, ten years later, he has come home to the Gold Coast, that stretch of land on the North Shore of Long Island that once held the greatest concentration of wealth and power in America, to attend the imminent funeral of an old family servant. Taking up temporary residence in the gatehouse of Stanhope Hall, John finds himself living only a quarter of a mile from Susan who has also returned to Long Island. But Susan isn’t the only person from John’s past who has reemerged: Though Frank Bellarosa, infamous Mafia don and Susan’s ex-lover, is long dead, his son, Anthony, is alive and well, and intent on two missions: Drawing John back into the violent world of the Bellarosa family, and exacting revenge on his father’s murderer–Susan Sutter. At the same time, John and Susan’s mutual attraction resurfaces and old passions begin to reignite, and John finds himself pulled deeper into a familiar web of seduction and betrayal.

This is DeMille’s 14^th novel and is the sequel to The Gold Coast. Will this be another hit for DeMille? Let’s hope so. Now what to do until the 28^th? Why start on that new book you just acquired.

Happy Reading

Sarah

Thank you Amazon for the picture

“Forest Park was pretty in the summer. Portland’s ash sky was barely visible behind a canopy of aspens, hemlock, cedars, and maples that filtered the light to a shimmering pale green. A light breeze tickled the leaves. Morning glories and ivy crept up the mossy tree trunks and strangled the blackberry bushes and ferns, a mass of crawling vines that piled up waist-high on either side of the packed dirt path. The creek hummed and churned, birds chirped. It was all very lovely, very Walden, except for the corpse.”

It’s cold, it’s rainy and it’s the perfect day to curl up under a blanket and grab a good thriller off of the shelf; and I did just that. What did I indulge in today why that would be Sweetheart written by Chelsea Cain.

When the body of a young woman is discovered in Portland’s Forest Park, Archie is reminded of the last time they found a body there, more than a decade ago: it turned out to be the Beauty Killer’s first victim, and Archie’s first case. This body can’t be one of Gretchen’s–she’s in prison–but after help from reporter Susan Ward uncovers the dead woman’s identity, it turns into another big case. Trouble is, Archie can’t focus on the new investigation because the Beauty Killer case has exploded: Gretchen Lowell has escaped from prison.

Archie hadn’t seen her in two months; he’d moved back in with his family and sworn off visiting her. Though it should feel like progress, he actually feels worse. The news of her escape spreads like wildfire, but secretly, he’s relieved. He knows he’s the only one who can catch her, and in fact, he has a plan to get out from under her thumb once and for all.

This is the second book in her series that features Gretchen and Archie. Sweetheart is fast paced; edge of your seat won’t let you go until you finished; thriller. If you are a Cain fan you should love it, if you are not you should still love it. If you do love it, try her other books.

Happy Reading

Sarah

Thank you Amazon for the picture

“She dropped her hand, considering his question, then began fiddling with some knobs on the dashboard. The screen didn’t change, but the air-conditioning whirred higher. Will chuckled, and she cut him off with a nasty look, suggesting, “Maybe while we’re waiting for Caroline to find a street map, you can get the owner’s manual out of the glove box and read the directions for me.”

Will tried the latch, but it was locked. He thought this pretty much summed up his relationship with Amanda Wagner. She often sent him the way of locked doors and expected him to find his way around them. Will liked a good puzzle as much as the next man, but just once, it would have been nice to have Amanda hand him the key.”

A lot of things can be fractured; a bone, mirror, picture frame and even a book Fractured was written by Karin Slaughter and is a sequel to Triptych and again features Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Wil Trent.

With its gracious homes and tree-lined streets, Ansley Park is one of Atlanta’s most desirable neighborhoods. But in one gleaming mansion, in a teenager’s lavish bedroom, a girl has been savagely murdered. And in the hallway, her horrified mother stands amid shattered glass, having killed her daughter’s attacker with her bare hands.

Detective Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is here only to do a political favor; the murder site belongs to the Atlanta police. But Trent soon sees something that the cops are missing, something in the trail of blood, in a matrix of forensic evidence, and in the eyes of the shell-shocked mother. Within minutes, Trent is taking over the case—and adding another one to it. He is sure that another teenage girl is missing, and that a killer is on the loose.

Armed with only fleeting clues, teamed with a female cop who has her own personal reasons for hating him, Trent has enemies all around him—and a gnawing feeling that this case, which started in the best of homes, is cutting quick and deep through the ruins of perfect lives broken wide-open: where human demons emerge with a vengeance.

Slaughter’s ability to provide her readers with an excellent storyline and superb mystery, she is able to delve into the characters emotions and backgrounds so deeply that readers feel they know these men and women. The return of our favorites like Will and his boss Amanda paired with new intriguing characters like Faith, Abigail and the monstrous villains will surly please its audience. Fractured is by far one of Slaughter’s best works, she gives her readers everything and then some.

Happy Reading

Sarah

Thank you Amazon for the picture

“The brickbat whistled through the air as Pyke slammed it down on to the wooden stall, snapping the stall in half and sending its contents tumbling on to the cobblestones. Another lunge with the same weapon shattered a barrel filled with pickled cucmbers and herrings, the sour liquid spraying all those standing within a ten yard radius. Drawing his sleeve across his mouth, Pyke stared into the hooded eyes of the man standing in front of him, ignoring the sear of sullen faces gathered in the walled pen at one end of Petticoat Lane.”

Give me a good old London murder mystery and I’m hooked and it’s no different with The Revenge of Captain Paine written by the ever talented Andrew Pepper. This is the second in Andrew Pepper’s series of Pyke novels; this is a step up on the first, The Last Days of Newgate.

A headless corpse in Huntingdon, the disappearance of a female trial witness, and the apparent suicide of a wealthy railway contractor: if Pyke thought that by leaving the murky world of the Bow Street Runners he could escape the violence of pre-Victorian England, he was very much mistaken.

It is 1834 and Pyke-erstwhile Runner, now London banker and landowner is uneasy with the luxury his aristocratic marriage has brought him. When he is asked unofficially by Sir Robert Peel to investigate a decapitation in Cambridgeshire, and to discover more about the radical unrest brewing there between striking railway workers and townspeople, he cannot resist the chance to resuscitate the old skills he learned on the streets.

But with the industrial world comes a new and faceless enemy: men who have money and power and who will stop at nothing in their pursuit of both. For Pyke, with his young wife and child and an elevated place in society to protect, the stakes have suddenly become alarmingly high.

Pepper has a knack of making his novels very atmospheric; dark, dank streets with swirling mists from the river and thick vaporous fog; something we rarely get nowadays. If you are like me and enjoy a good murder mystery or just enjoy a good old Victorian novel then you won’t want to miss out on this.

Happy Reading

Sarah

Thank you Amazon for the picture

“He found the body on the forty-third day of his walk. By then, the end of April had arrived, although he had only the vaguest idea of that. Had he been capable of noticing his surroundings, the condition of the flora along the coast might have given him a broad hint as to the time of year. He’d started out when the only sign of life renewed was the promise of yellow buds on the gorse that grew sporadically along the cliff tops, but by April, the gorse was wild with color, and yellow archangel climbed in tight whorls along upright stems in hedgerows on the rare occasions when he wandered into a village. Soon foxglove would be nodding on roadside verges, and lamb’s foot would expose fiery heads from the hedgerows and the drystone walls that defined individual fields in this part of the world. But those bits of burgeoning life were in the future, and he’d been walking these days that had blended into weeks in an effort to avoid both the thought of the future and the memory of the past.”

Oh I am so excited I got a hand me down book! Careless in Red is a fabulous detective novel written by the talented Elizabeth George, like any decent detective novel you can’t keep a good detective down. George has put longtime series hero Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley of New Scotland Yard through quite a bit lately; in her last novel, With No One as Witness, Lynley’s much-loved wife was shot to death on the street, reducing him to a grief-stricken shell and leading to his resignation from the Yard. How to resurrect him? George uses a pretty clunky deus ex machina device. Lynley has embarked on a walk along the coastal path in Cornwall; his rationale is that if he doesn’t keep moving, despair will overtake him. Sure enough, on day 43 of his walk, he spots, far below, what seems to his trained eye to be the vivid red and crumpled shape of a man who has plunged to his death. The machine creaks into place, with Lynley being treated as a suspect, then with grudging respect from the local, bumbling constabulary, and finally as someone his old associate Barbara Havers of New Scotland Yard seeks to restore to his post.

Fans of Barbara Havers may be disappointed that she doesn’t appear until partway through the novel, but she is always a treat to watch in action, and she doesn’t miss a beat in this one. Especially when she is working with Bea Hannaford, the two of them in a wicked variation of good cop/bad cop.

With the use of exotic names and locals of the Cornish countryside add a very rich flavor to the story. Another plus are the use of sports such as surfing and rock climbing. It’s an England that we’re familiar with, but not quite.

I have to say, Elizabeth George is back with this novel. There are plenty of details, an ingenious use of the color red, and the fraught relationships here are stretched so tight that they hum with tension. This is a real plus. Right up to the final pages the story keeps at a very tight pace and I found myself reading well into the night, wanting to know just what happens next.

Now go beg, borrow or steal… Well ok not steal but you get the idea. Go get a copy of your own.

Happy Reading

Sarah

“Hmm … dead, rotting, decomposing flesh of carcasses. Doesn’t sound like something you’d want to eat, huh? Not to mention the pesticides, hormones, steroids, and antibiotics. Oops! We almost forgot mad cow disease, bird flu, salmonella, E. coli, trichinosis, and mercury. Well, no wonder Americans are suffering from obesity; cancer; liver, kidney, lung, and reproductive disorders; birth defects; miscarriages; and nervous system disorders.

You can call it steak, tuna, bacon, or chicken. No matter how you slice it, it’s a piece of decaying, decomposing carcass. We know you like the taste, but there are other foods out there that mimic the flavor of meat but don’t come with the same side effects. Smarten up, bitches.”

I got my hands on Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin’s new book Skinny Bitch in the Kitchen and I was pleased to see actual recipes in this one. However I was slightly disappointed with the lack of pictures to go with the recipes. I don’t know about you but I like to know what it’s supposed to look like so I know whether or not I screwed it up.

The bestselling Skinny Bitch inspired thousands of gals to live clean, healthy, pure, and skinny–while keeping them laughing with the author’s trademark acerbic wit, so of course they would bring out another one to keep the first one company.

Skinny Bitch in the Kitchen helpfully condenses the entire content of the first book down to three pages (meat is murder; carbohydrates do not make you fat; always read the ingredients and don’t eat anything you can’t pronounce). The first book barely mentioned cooking, suggesting an eating style based on fruit, snacks and frozen food from the health-food store. It was a vegan version of the fast-food diet the authors say they used to follow equally zealously.

The cookbook makes little use of traditional Asian meat substitutes (there is one recipe each for seitan and tempeh) but there is a lot of frozen Italian “sausage” and vegan creamer sprinkled around. Recipes without those foods were tastier, such as spaghetti squash with spicy braised greens, raisins and nuts, a huge hit at my table because of its subtle infusion of chipotle chilies.

The authors go beyond veganism at many points, rejecting olive oil for cooking in favor of coconut oil (they believe heating olive oil makes it dangerous to health) and disallowing non-whole-grain foods like semolina pasta and white rice.

The authors do occasionally take a break from swearing to write loving disclaimers, in which they say health and well-being are more important than skinniness, disavow bitchiness as a way of life and encourage readers to eat their fill of foods like avocados, nuts and fruit without worrying about calories and carbs.

With more than 75 recipes, this collection is sure to satisfy any crazy craving and cooking quandary that you may have; I know I have enjoyed the recipies. Now I shall leave you here for I am off to cook.

Happy Reading

Sarah

Thank you to Amazon for the picture

“Tommy had just awakened for the first time as a vampire. He was nineteen, thin, and had spent his entire life between states of amazement and confusion.

“I wanted us to be together.” Jody: pale, pretty, long red hair hanging in her face, cute swoop of a nose in search of a lost spray of freckles, a big lipstick-smeared grin. She’d only been undead herself for a couple of months, and was still learning to be spooky.”

While waiting for my better half who was lurking around in the ever popular electronics store I decided to mosey on down to the book store, grab a large latte and slowly (some might say painfully) scour the shelves for a new read. Look what I found in what’s hot. That’s right the sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends. You Suck A Love Story was released 12 years after Bloodsucking Fiends. 12 years? Yes that’s right 12 years, I was intrigued, I had read a few of Moore’s other books and thought well at least I know I will get a good laugh.

Whilst many years may have passed in the real world between Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck, the storyline for You Suck takes up exactly where Bloodsucking Fiends left off. Jody has turned her boyfriend/minion Tommy into a vampire and he’s not really sure that he’s cut out for the job. For starters he’s so pale that he looks sick, also he is stuck with his nineteen-year-old body as it was at the time of his transition and to top this off his fashion sense didn’t evolve with his vampirism either.

The Animals, Tommy’s old work pals, are also back and this time they have been briefly liberated from stocking shelves at the Marina Safeway. They invest all of their money that they got for the art collection that they stole from the old vampire Elijah in a blue Las Vegas call-girl named, you guessed it Blue.

The Animals and Blue provide a huge amount of amusement in this story but by far the funniest part of You Suck is the chronicles of Abby Normal. Abby is a sixteen year old Goth girl that Tommy recruits as his and Jody’s new minion. The chronicles are actually entries from Abby’s diary. The chronicles of Abby Normal are funny and are worth taking a look at.

You Suck is a humorous take on the vampire genre. While the plot may not be as compelling as the plot of Bloodsucking Fiends the true strength of this book lies in its quirky characters and the comically bizarre scrapes that they manage to get themselves into.

If you liked Bloodsucking Fiends and you are looking for a light and fun read then this just might be fore you.

Happy Reading

Sarah