A backlist romantic suspense from Nora Roberts, I enjoyed Tess and her empathetic heart, but found Ben's disdain for her profession hard to deal with. There were other places where the book definitely showed its age...the constant smoking, for one.
But the description of the avant garde art show had me snort laughing my tea.

Difficult to categorize - a white man gets a call to come visit with an Indian elder and help him write a book of his observations. It's fascinating, frustrating and meaningful. Worth picking up for sure.

Abby Cooper is recovering from being shot in the last instalment and eases back into the psychic game working with her PI friend Candice on one of Dutch and Milo's cold cases, not quite with his blessing. The mystery is fine, but largely forgettable with the psychic aspect relatively light. Abby's tendency to run rather than speak to Dutch when she has done something he won't like (often potentially-his-career-ending) isn't cute, it's irritating.

The newest member of a lyrical dance team, Jasmine struggles to keep up and let her emotion shine through. When her teammates and her teacher all become more focused on competition than their performance, all the joy gets sucked out of dancing until they learn to come together again. A really good sense of the dance and how it unfolds but emotionally a bit one-note.

When Emma Saylor's summer plans fall through, she ends up at North Lake staying with her grandmother (on her mother's side) - and working through memories of her mother and getting to know that side of the family. As usual, Dessen's characters have real flaws, they figure themselves out with hard work and new friends and a summer romance. Plot was slow to build and the romantic plotline less swoony than others, but I enjoyed it.

I liked the ambiguity, the twistiness and the true crime show framing - this reminded me (in a good way) of Sadie and A Good Girl's Guide to Murder.
Brynn Gallagher pitches an idea to her true crime internship - to investigate the murder of her English teacher 4 years ago. He was found by 3 13yos, one of whom used to be Brynn's best friend.
Clever and full of twists and turns, I enjoyed this one.

Set at the Elizabethan court at Christmas, Rosamund falls for a handsome member of the Swedish delegation. We have the Frost Fair, skating parties, the volta, masquerades, hunting, Dudley dramatically sulking, palace intrigue and conspiracies.
I would have preferred somewhat more focus on intrigue, but the category length meant a tight focus on the smooching and our main couple. Enjoyable.

Liz Buxbaum is quirky and lives her life as if she's living in one of the beloved romcoms she shared with her mother. So when her childhood crush moves back to town, it seems just the thing to enlist the hot enemy next door's help to get him to notice her All Grown Up...
Trope-tastic and funny, I grinned at the banter between Liz and Wes. Plus the crush reads romance! No Daniel Cleavers here.

Pic is romcoms referenced in the book.

A new cyberbully at Bayview High - this time with a twisted game of truth or dare that ends in someone's death.
I sped through this fun thriller - I liked Maeve and Luis particularly and enjoyed glimpses of the Original Bayview Four.
We have a revenge pact and a bunch of different threads that aren't revealed until the end. I guessed the most shocking twist fairly early but raced to the end to see if I was right.

A fun collection of literary comics about bibliophiles, classic novels, writing life and covid rules as applied to literary characters. I chuckled at several and related hard to some. Very fun afternoon.

Self-published fanfic contemporary retelling of Pride & Prejudice that bears no resemblance to the original other than character names.
We start with Elizabeth's psychic sex dream about handsome business hunk Will Darcy and then spend 100 pages squishing things to make them fit. It would have been no more than a forgettable interlude if the author hadn't harped on about how lust-crazed 17 year old Will was at the sight of 12 year old Lizzy. Ew.

Soft pick. Very silly teen romcom that tackles one too many plotlines in its 195 pages.
Jo Vincent is dragged along on a ski vacation with her largely absentee father and his new girlfriend. On her first day she is "rescued" by a handsome young ski instructor. Throw in mistaken identity, too much diet talk, missing jewelry and big decisions over holiday romance. Some nice emotional beats with the boy (he's nervous about sex too) esp given its date

A thriller about a smart, tech savvy sitting judge who is also a serial killer - patiently waiting years to murder those who have slighted, humiliated or harmed him. The premise is clever, but we neither get a legal showdown, nor is our heroine Lacy the one doing the investigating.
This one fell flat for me as the reader isn't along for the ride of piecing everything together nor in securing justice.

A memoir written in 1982 about screenwriting and movie production. A large chunk of it still feels very relevant (studios want to make sequels because they are a given and don't want to take risks - and nobody knows what movies the public will want), but a lot of the specifics are about movies I'm not familiar with or didn't like.
The section at the end about adapting his short story was interesting though I disagreed with him about a ton.

The tagline is mostly wrong. The bulk of this story is our intersex, mixed race protagonist searching for a place to belong while improbably being at the fall of the Medici court and with Caterina Sforza as Forli falls to Cesare Borgia. There is a half-hearted attempt at magical realism with wolves that is abandoned and our protagonist's age is muddled. Everyone is horrible and unpleasant to spend time with. Not even soapy goodness, just dull.

Not for me. Our protagonist is a bundle of rage, self destruction and grief and I found him too self-absorbed by his own grieving to acknowledge that he isn't the center of the universe.
Undertandable? Sure. Someone I want to spend 250 pages with? Nope. Not at all.
Add to that a soap operatic Dramatic Secret and a Manic Pixie Japanese Girl Guide to His Emotions and I was more exasperated than empathetic.

At first I didn't think I was going to like Quinn or Carter, but this was a charming story about standing up for yourself, facing your fears and making the effort to live life. And that sounds like it's cheesy and manipulative with Chariots of Fire music, but it's lovely. Quinn really comes into her own and my teenaged self could have used a nudge from her and this book.

A case turns personal when Pike asks Elvis Cole for a favor - an old girlfriend has gone missing but the police won't look for her yet. When she tragically turns up dead, Cole and Pike are told to keep an eye on the police investigation - a task made more difficult by Pike's troubled past with the LAPD.

Pike's backstory was interesting, Cole's self-inflicted romantic woes are annoying and the murderer's motives made no sense. But a fun pastime.

At 117 pages, this tried to tackle all the problems usual over a several ballet book series and so did none of them justice. Five girls, five problems (bulimia, injury, family pressure, interest waned, fish out of water) all resolved in a scene each or ignored.
Too simplistic and therefore not very satisfying as we don't get the page time to be invested.

A psychic travel agent teams up with a police officer working on a cold case. Right up my alley!

Unfortunately, while there were elements I loved (the found family at Castaways, the klairvoyant karaoke, clairsentience), I found Leda more irritating than charming. She seemed to sulk whenever she was reminded that arrests need to be based on evidence and policework, not just her psychic flashes.

Felt like a 2000s chicklit but not in a good way.

Lindsay Reynoso works as a cultural archaeologist - researching history for impact reports. She loves to restore hidden gems. The last person she expected to be holding up a development for is former tennis star Chris Brandt. For him, the house holds bad memories of his broken family.
But the two need to come to some sort of accord because a college one night stand means that Lindsay and Chris have a son that he doesn't know about yet...
Sweet

A historical novel about Norman lady Marian Fitzwater who schemes to meet Saxon folk hero Robin Hood to enlist his help in escaping an unwanted marriage and recovering her rightful lands. Marian longs to escape the drudgery of needlework, of fieldwork and to actively govern.

An interesting read drawing on class differences and prejudices, but not enough adventure for me, and the romance was weak.

The protagonist was incredibly self-absorbed. The Ripper element seemed more like decoration than integral (and the explanation therefore deeply unsatisfactory), and both of the love interests were caricatures at best. The most interesting aspect was the connection to the Pre-Raphaelites, but it was overshadowed by dubious psychic powers... Not for me

I think I just have to accept that (although the profiling and investigations intrigue me) true crime just isn't really my genre.
This one is about little known serial killer Israel Keyes, how he was caught and what little investigators learned from him about his crimes.
The author was focused and thankfully avoided revelling in the gruesome, so I would read her again. But I'm just not sure we know enough for the book to satisfy me.

After a Valentine's Day gone awry, Abby Cooper heads to Denver to be bridesmaid to her childhood best friend Ellie. But the bridesmaid she's replacing looks flat in photos, so Abby knows she is dead. And the signs are pointing toward Ellie's fiance.
Fairly predictable and slow going despite Abby starting off with her death. The situation with Dutch felt contrived and the Replacement Love Interest is dull. Not enough predictions to puzzle through.

A cute YA romcom with a volleyball player who enters a modeling competition to have an excuse to share her number with the handsome photography intern Brent.
The ANTM nods were fun, but not enough to keep this one. The pop culture references dated this one pretty hard, but it was a fun read.

A cat burglar hero with a heart of gold, an eidetic memory and a ruthless enemy. A writer heroine not sure if she can forgive him for a youthful betrayal. He cooks, he cleans, he steals jewels...what more could you want, really?
Don't make this your first Nora Roberts, but a fun example of her usual good people competently doing things and ending up happy. And so was I after reading it.

In some ways a quick fun mystery with the dynamic we remember from Princess Diaries - Heather Wells is a former teen pop star working at a college dorm so she can enroll in classes, trying to figure out what to do with her life. She is also living with a sexy private investigator, Cooper, who is the older brother of her former boy band fiance.
Then freshman girls are found dead, ostensibly from elevator surfing and Heather grows suspicious.

Cute - a series of Not Always Right style conversations overheard/had in bookshops. I chuckled and shook my head at the nonsense that must be endured from clueless, entitled and/or bigoted customers the world over.

Most cringey: customer earnestly inquiring whether Anne Frank had written a sequel

I love a book with a map...

His artwork was lovely, but the narrator drove me to distraction moping through Morocco wallowing in grief, yes, but a lot of self-pity and a deep clingy neediness around "the lover who left him" and his inability to be alone.
Look, you need time to grieve, fine. But a few woebegone whining sessions in and neither the author nor I wanted to spend any time with himself.

Entertaining - parallel stories of Maud West's life and career and the author's sleuthing through archives to discover more about her, interspersed with lurid penny-dreadful style stories written by Maud West about her adventures as a lady detective during the Golden Age of Crime.
The first half hooked me more than later when the author was focused on tracking her family tree rather than Maud's work, but I found it engaging and readable.

Infuriating, fascinating, heartbreaking.
A deep dive into the history of the Sackler family and the sources of their fortune and philanthropy - most notably the avaricious cupidity that led them to aggressively promote their opioid painkiller Oxycontin even as it led to a tidal wave of addiction, crime and death. And how they essentially dodged all actual consequences.

What disappointing claptrap.
None of this has even passing familiarity with how the US legal or legal education system works. Fine.
It is set in Virginia and has people wearing coats in August. Ooookay.
The "twists" are either blatantly obvious or don't make any sense. It just wasn't satisfying and the "both sides" argument it tried to make weirdly attacked the premise of the much-needed Innocence Project in a way I found distressing, not fun.

A look at the unjust conviction of Jewish German immigrant Oscar Slater of a sensational murder he did not commit. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was sometimes consulted to use his character's unique observational and reasoning skills to help with real world mysteries - and he campaigned to get Slater released.
A lot of tangents into bios and inspirations and such and I enjoyed all of it.

A pretty (love the art nouveau touches) collection of quotes and passages from the Bridgerton novels arranged by character (the family and other beloved characters) giving a taste of each of their personalities and tied together with new Lady Whistledown columns.
This felt like an enjoyable morning call at the Bridgertons with them all vying to be charming to the reader and vexing to one another.

I was far more interested in the adventures of female solo travellers which were sadly only afforded a few paragraphs before tenuous transitions into memoir. Unfortunately I found the author fairly obnoxious and her "journey" cliched. How many times must I read about the only REAL way to experience travel being hostels and food poisoning?
We are clearly very different travelers. At least the bibliography offers more interesting narratives.

A story of the decipherment of Linear B - a script from the (then) earliest known European civilization first found on Crete. Fox discusses archaeologist Arthur Evans, who found the tablets, and Michael Ventris an architect and amateur linguist, who ultimately deciphered the script. But Fox's main interest lies with the largely overlooked Brooklyn born classicist Alice Kober whose painstaking and meticulous work laid the groundwork.

Enemies to lovers on a road trip to Scotland! Singer Grace and stuffy lawyer Richard travel to Inverness to settle a blackmail scheme and encounter all sorts of unexpected dangers along the way: bullies, murderous servants, hypothermia, a kangaroo court and a boxing match.
For me, there was a bit too much going on and too much prickliness instead of banter. I hoped for more heart, less plot.

An Indiana Jones quest for hidden outlaw treasure, a second chance reunion between two former lovers, a band of misfits on an adventure vacation & a tribute to Romancing the Stone. This basically came emblazoned with *stuff Caramellunacy likes* and it wasn't wrong!
I missed some of Christina Lauren's witty banter, but the adventuring made up for it. More like this, please!!!

I picked this up because Edinburgh! Burke and Hare! But ultimately I was disappointed. To me, the book seeme more like a narrative jumping off point for a school discussion (history of medicine, body snatching, poverty, alcoholism) than a story in its own right. 14 year old Robbie spent most of the book in a self-destructive cycle that rarely touched much on the actual Burke & Hare crimes.

I didn't find myself eager to pick it up again.

"Three other officers had turned up a few nights previously, one dropping down from an RAF plane apparently in a kilt - an unfortunate choice of uniform considering he landed on top of a pine tree."

Sooyong Park spends months at a time in cramped bunkers dug in the wilderness of the Ussuri peninsula. But as a result, he gets to know generations of a Siberian tiger family, seeing them at play and hunting, and gets to know their individual personalities.
The writing is lovely and poetic and Park's perspective is unique due to the lengths he goes to in pursuit of footage and experience of these beautiful elusive creatures.

My first foray into the series. Here the Krewe is called in when a ghastly murder occurs in a historic house museum in Philadelphia and there is a historical mystery to unravel.
I enjoyed the ghost bits, but didn't really buy the love story. Allison is a historian and tour guide who adamantly doesn't believe in ghosts (even when she is seeing one) and spends at least half of the book being hostile to everyone before suddenly being all in
soft pick

A return to form for Grisham in a lot of ways. We have a determined smart investigator seeking to root out corruption, a complicated conspiracy and a quick plot involving a corrupt judge, Indian casinos and organized crime. Throw a murder or two into the mix and you end up with an enjoyable airplane read.

A sweet Hallmark movie of a novel that leans heavily on the previous book for emotional investment. The narrator character I found distracting rather than charming

Jimmy Sullivan writes a love song that is a "perfect" Christmas song and has to choose between his big break and being with his love/family for Christmas. Charlotte has no discernible personality. The end strings a lot of "miraculous" coincidences together and didn't pay off for me.

I found the mystery here far less compelling than in the first - and, honestly, it feels like the author did too. We didn't have the same sense of investigation either and the payoff was disappointing. Add to that too much unnecessary detail (how many coffees, exact shopping lists, exact routes etc.) About banalities and not enough about the crimes...
Also - why do so very many characters have surnames that begin with B?

Maybe this was an expectations problem, but I wanted to read about the Amazon - wildlife, people, preservation. Stafford doesn't give much of that (too tired, doesn't speak the language). Instead it is a lengthy, often dull look at his day to day state of mind (often poor) and some weird motivational speaker crap.
Plus, I didn't like the guy. He seems overconfident, underprepared, wholly self-centred and not at all self-aware.
(See comments)

A true crime story that starts off as an investigation into the murder of an archaeology grad student and becomes an examination of misogyny, sexual harassment and the power of narrative to blind us to the truth.
While I found this a bit bloated at times (I didn't care about the author's boyfriend), it was a fascinating look at the pitfalls of true crime in addition to being a true crime story. Plus it has an actual resolution.
Don't Google!

I really enjoyed this fan/TV star plus pre-existing connection through fanfiction. Neither of our protagonists are a cookie cutter romance hero/ine and I loved the emphasis on them dealing with that through fanfic and then having to learn to translate to their actual lives (with corresponding angst).
I particularly loved seeing the ridiculous movie scripts and fanfic tags as part of the story - just felt right at home. Plus Steamy!