The Innocents

 Fiction by Michael Crummey

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

In a lonely cove on Newfoundland around the turn of the nineteenth century a family lived and fished. Their only contact with the outside world was a ship called The Hope that came twice a year: once in the spring to bring supplies and once in the fall to haul away the family's summer catch of fish.

Then the parents caught sick and died, leaving twelve-year-old Evered and nine-year-old Ada alone. Knowing no other life, the children were determined to continue their lonely existence of subsistence fishing. 

Although that description seems awfully bleak, this story was surprisingly good. It wasn't exactly happy, but neither was it sorrowful.

The Idea of You

 Fiction by Robinne Lee

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

When Solene Marchand takes her twelve-year-old daughter to see the girl's favorite British boy band she doesn't expect to fall in love. But apparently one of the boys in the band is into older women....

This was a pretty good straight romance with some graphically raunchy parts I had to skim. They are making it into a Netflix movie with Anne Hathaway which should be good.

Thief River Falls

Amazon Prime Kindle Fiction by Brian Freeman

https://www.amazon.com

Lisa Power is a bestselling author whose new mystery/thriller Thief River Falls is causing a stir in book clubs everywhere. But when she gets caught up in a mystery of her own, will she be able to handle it like the heroine in her book?

This was a pretty good thriller, but I didn't like the ending.

I also read recently by this author: The Deep Deep Snow

I also read recently (for free!) by Amazon Kindle Prime: In the Time of Our History

Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It

 Nonfiction by Greg Marshall

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Greg Marshall was born with cerebral palsy but he didn't know it until he was thirty years old.

Apparently his mother didn't want him "labelled," and just said his bad leg and weak arm were just due to "tight tendons." She felt that Greg could just act like he was normal, and then it would be so. Interestingly enough, it worked somewhat. Greg grew up with a can-do mindset that served him well in many ways. But that didn't stop him from being absolutely livid when he found out the truth.

This was an interesting set up for a memoir, but the bulk of the book was just random disconnected stories, so it's not the kind of memoir I really like.

Triptych

 Fiction by Karin Slaughter 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This is the first book in the Will Trent series, from which I have read a couple of books before I knew it was a series. (See Unseen, The Last Widow )

This story begins with an Atlanta police detective called Michael who starts working on the case of a dead prostitute in the projects. This wouldn’t normally garner much special attention from the Atlanta PD, but some similarities to other murders in the state catch the interest of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and Agent Will Trent enters the scene. 

Will starts out as a peripheral character but gets to main-character status by the end of the book. This was an exciting (but gory) murder mystery with several surprises.

I also read by this author recently: Girl Forgotten

An Unwanted Inheritance

 Fiction by Imogen Clark

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

At the beginning of this story, Caroline Frost finds a suitcase full of money under her late father-in-law’s bed, cash adding up to over a quarter of a million pounds. 

What would you do in this situation? Keep it all? Divide it among all of the family? Report it to the police?

This was a really good story about how money can cause trouble in family relationships, and how different people’s feelings can be about money in general.

Island Beneath the Sea

 Fiction by Isobel Allende

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

The island of Haiti was once called Santa Domingue and was owned by the French. In the late eighteenth century there was a bloody slave revolt, a result of the constant oppression that sugar production engendered.

The story follows one slave woman and her life, first on the island and then in New Orleans after her master’s family flees the island and ends up there.

This novel, translated from Spanish, was tough for me to read. I think it was just the heaviness of the subject matter. I’d say it was a really well written story but I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it. 

I also read by this author: The Japanese Lover

The Shadow Wife

 Fiction by Dorothy Eden

https://www.amazon.com

This was an old-fashioned Gothic novel: naive English girl falls in love with handsome but unscrupulous foreigner and marries him in haste, only to discover her mistake too late when she is trapped in his family mansion in the middle of nowhere.

It was a pretty good story; it reminded me of romances I read from my grandmother’s bookshelves as a kid. 

(I found this while looking for a different book of the same name; see The Shadow Wife by Diane Chamberlain.)