Hercule Poirot's Christmas

Fiction by Agatha Christie

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

A rich and rather crotchety old man decides to gather his family for Christmas, including in the party his two estranged sons, his two faithful stay-at-home sons, and a long-lost grand-daughter. Then just to spice things up a bit more, he decides to tell everyone he's about to change his will. Is anyone surprised when this rich old man gets murdered?

Oh, but which one of them did it? Only Hercule Poirot knows....

I also read recently by this author: Murder is Easy

The Guardians

Fiction by John Grisham

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

I'll call it a legal thriller because that's the official Grisham genre, but this novel is much more "legal" than "thriller." This is the way John Grisham's books have been going recently, it seems. It's not necessarily bad, but it's not very thrilling either.

This story is about a lawyer who tries to help wrongly convicted people get out of prison, which sounds amazingly noble and (frankly) kind of hopeless. I mean, first you've got to find a prisoner who was actually innocent (sifting him out of all the others in prison who just claim they are innocent), and then you've got to get the government to admit that they made a mistake. And we know that no one likes to admit they made a mistake, especially not a bureaucrat. So this seems like a tough job.

I know that there are such people, both the wrongly convicted and the lawyers who defend them, but there sure aren't very many. There just can't be.

This story was pretty good; I liked the main character and the case was interesting. But this was not a thriller.

I also read recently by this author: The Reckoning

The Perfect Husband

Fiction by Lisa Gardner

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Jim Beckett thinks he is the perfect husband and demands that Theresa be the perfect wife for him in return. Except he's actually an abusive psycho and a serial killer...

This thriller novel is pretty good but not great. It's an early release of Lisa Gardner's (more than twenty years old) that they have re-released because she is more popular now. This is really more of a romance story with the psycho killer business thrown in, rather than a mystery thriller with romance thrown in.

I've liked some of Lisa Gardner's books and disliked some; this one I'd say 75% like 25% disliked? I don't think I have a thumb for that.

I also read recently by this author: Crash and Burn, Fear Nothing 

On Wings of Eagles

Nonfiction by Ken Follett.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

What do you know about Ross Perot? All I personally knew before reading this book was about his failed election campaign of 1992. I was in college at that time, and mostly I remember my Republican relatives blaming Perot for the fact that Bill Clinton had been elected. (I don't think this is completely unfair, either; the fact is that he split the conservative vote by running against the party nominee, and he should have known it was impossible to win without a major party nomination.) At the time Perot was a bit of a comic figure, a billionaire who thought he could be president, and failed to win.

Well, this book is all about something I DIDN'T know about Perot. He was a bit of a bad-ass, apparently. In 1978, Perot's company was working with the Shah of Iran on a government computerization project when a couple of his employees got caught in the political crossfire of a revolution and ended up in Iranian jail with an exorbitant bail/ransom price-tag on their heads. Perot was determined to get them out, and this book is the story of how that happened.

I also read recently by this author: Triple

Warning! Long parenthetical aside about classification: (I couldn't decide whether to categorize this book as fiction or nonfiction. I've read most of Ken Follet's books, and most of them are fiction, although many are based on true historical events. This one, however, is about rather recent history, and the author explicitly states in the beginning that everything written in it is true to the best of his knowledge, and not a novelization. Still, I was unsure. I had listened to the story on audiobook, and so I did not have a paper copy to refer to, and the barnesandnoble.com record referenced above did not classify one way or the other. I decided to try to settle the question by checking to see if the library categorized the book as fiction and filed by author's name, or if they had assigned it a Dewey Decimal number and marked it as nonfiction. Interestingly, my local library system had a record of several copies of this book, and about half of them were filed under fiction, and half under nonfiction. So the library didn't know what to do either!)

Maid

Subtitled: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive
Nonfiction by Stephanie Land.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Stephanie starts this book out in a homeless shelter with Mia, her toddler daughter; she's left Mia's abusive dad and has nowhere else to go. To be honest, the place she starts out in is way better than most homeless shelters I've come into contact with, but still, it's not where she wants to be. The next steps are far from easy for Stephanie.

This book chronicles her long crawl out of poverty and into a better life for herself and Mia. Stephanie explores the world of food stamps, WIC, transitional housing, section 8, childcare subsidies, and all other the helpful-but-demoralizing government social programs. It's exhausting. Most of her time and attention is on working as a house cleaner (hence the title) and she tells some good stories about the people she works for.

The main idea seems to be that hard work can only sometimes get you where you need to go. As social commentary, this story doesn't really work for me; however, it is a fairly honest memoir and interesting to read. It's better than Nickel and Dimed (on NOT Getting by in America), which got much more annoyingly political and was less personal.

How It Happened

Fiction by Michael Koryta

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Rob Barrett is an FBI agent who specializes in confessions; he knows both how to get suspects to confess, and how to tell if the confessions he hears are true or false. Or at least he is supposed to know all of this, and it's on the basis of this expertise that he gets assigned to return to the small Maine town where he spent summers with his grandfather as a kid, searching for what really happened to a pair of eighteen-year-olds who are presumed dead.

But when Barrett finally gets what he is sure is a true confession from an unreliable girl called Kimmy, he can't understand why her story doesn't seem to check out. Is Kimmy lying again, like everyone thinks she is? Or is something else going on?

I also read by this author: Those Who Wish Me Dead

A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

Fiction by C.A. Fletcher

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

I chose this book solely for the title. I just liked the sound of it.

Fortunately it was a really good story. It's about exactly what the title says: In the dystopian future, there are very few humans left in the world, but there is Griz, and his dog. And when someone steals Griz's dog, what can he do but chase down the thief and get that dog back?

Safe Haven

Fiction by Patricia MacDonald.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This is the twentieth book by Patricia MacDonald I've read within the past year. I think I am at the end of the library's stock here, which is very sad for me.

In this story, a girl called Dena has recently moved back to her old hometown to start a new life with her boyfriend Brian, a boy she'd crushed on in high school and had been excited to reconnect with at the tenth class reunion. But now that she is less than two months away from having her first baby with Brian, she's starting to feel less than sure she made the right choice.

This was an exciting thriller with a surprise ending!

I also read recently by this author: Mother's Day

The Apartment

An Audible Original
Fiction by K.L. Slater

https://www.audible.com

In this story, a young woman is enticed into a fancy London apartment that she can't afford, because the landlord says he gives discount rent to "special people" like her. Gee, does that sound suspicious? The story is interspersed with ostensible diary entries from the past that the author claims to be "based on truth." the story is convoluted and does not unravel properly.

I got this audiobook to listen to on a road trip but it was not a good choice. Unfortunately I was stuck in the car and continued to slog through, waiting for the story to get better. It did not.

I also read by this author and LIKED: The Mistake

Double Identity

Fiction by Margaret Peterson Haddix

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This book was in the kids' section of the library, but I'd call it more like a young adult story. It was an exciting novel for me to read as an adult as well.

Bethany is almost thirteen when her usually over-protective parents inexplicably fall apart, freak out, and dump her on an aunt she's never met. Her mom and dad then disappear, and Bethany doesn't know why. Her aunt doesn't want to talk about it but everyone is treating her strangely....

The answer to the mystery in this story was very surprising! I really liked this book.

Good Riddance

Fiction by Elanor Lipman

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Daphne's mother June left Daphne something strange in her will: a high school yearbook from 1968. The weird thing about the yearbook is that June was not in the graduating class of 1968; she was the yearbook adviser and a first-year teacher that year. And the yearbook is full of little notations about the students, made by June over the years as she attended every single reunion that the graduating class of 1968 held.

In a fit of annoyance at this strange legacy, Daphne decides to toss out the yearbook while "de-cluttering" one day.... but what happens if someone else finds it? What follows is a fun little story that I found really enjoyable.

The Other Mrs. Miller

Fiction by Allison Dickson.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

At the beginning of this story, privileged heiress Phoebe Miller is dissatisfied with her marriage and her life, but she seems unable to do anything about it. Plus there's someone watching her from a parked car outside her house every day, that she also isn't doing anything about. When she finally does something, however, it's the wrong thing.

This was a pretty good thriller; it was interesting and exciting. My only problem was how very far-fetched it got, but I guess it is supposed to be fiction...

Everything to Lose

Fiction by Andrew Gross

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

I've never read anything by this author, I don't think, although I've seen his name a lot. Recently he's been co-writing with (which I think means ghost-writing for) big-name author James Patterson.

This was an exciting thriller about a single mother who is tempted to do something (maybe) illegal to dig herself out of a financial hole. Her recent job loss and deadbeat ex make her feel she has no choice but to take a chance that she may regret. The characters were believable and the action was fast-paced.

I'll definitely look for more by Andrew Gross.

The Great Alone

Fiction by Kristin Hannah

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Leni is thirteen years old when her unstable father decides to uproot the family once again, this time to move to the wilds of Alaska. It's both a wonderful and a terrible thing for her, and of course it changes her life completely.

This is an amazing story and a vivid portrait of life in the Alaskan bush. Having lived in Alaska myself, albeit (thankfully) in the civilized part, I can relate to the crushing darkness of winter and the manic exuberance of summer pictured here. It's an awful place, and a beautiful place.

This was a really really good book!!

I also read recently by this author: The Nightingale