Dead Silence

Fiction by Wendy Corsi Staub

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This is a sequel to Little Girl Lost, which I read a few weeks ago. It takes place nearly thirty years after the first story, but it's still connected. Amelia, the main character from Little Girl Lost, is now established in her career as a research genealogist. She helps other people find their lost relatives, but she still hasn't discovered any answers about her own mysterious parentage.

At the same time, a little boy is found abandoned in a field by an Amish farmer. The child appears to be at least four, but seems traumatized and refuses to speak. Who is he, and could he be in danger?

This was an exciting book, but it did not complete the story. There is apparently a third novel coming out in August....

Pieces of Her

Fiction by Karin Slaughter

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This was a great thriller!! It started out with just a mom and her adult daughter having coffee and then went right into WOW! There's a shooter at the coffee shop and that fifty-five year-old mother goes into mama-bear-protecting-her-cub mode. And the story just gets better from there!

I also read by this author: Pretty Girls

Where the Crawdads Sing

Fiction by Delia Owens

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/
I've been hearing about this book for a while; everyone seems to love it. Well, I finally read it, and I admit to loving it too.

At the beginning of this novel, a little girl called Kya is abandoned by her mother in the marshlands of North Carolina. Years later, the body of a local young man is discovered in the area. Are the two events connected? The story moves forward on both timelines to connect the dots.

I really liked this book and the characters.

Ada Blackjack

Nonfiction by Jennifer Niven

https://www.barnesandnoble.com
Even though I have moved away from Alaska, I'm still very interested in stories of the arctic.

This is the true story of an expedition begun in 1921 by an "explorer" and lecturer called Stefansson. He insisted that the frozen north should be called "the Friendly Arctic," and that it was no more "dangerous" to live there than in a modern city. He set up an expedition with four young men from the lower forty-eight and one Eskimo woman and sent them to live on an arctic island for a year. Wrangel Island, their destination, is an ice-bound and desolate place north of Siberia, and Stefansson planned to "colonize" it for Canada, even though the island had already been claimed by Russia. (I'm using a lot of quote marks here because I really didn't like this guy.)

You can guess that this expedition didn't end well.

This book was pretty good; I probably would have like a fictionalization of the story better because this version is not very personal.

Little Girl Lost

Fiction by Wendy Corsi Staub

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This was an exciting story about an abandoned baby and a serial killer (or two!). It is supposed to be the beginning of a trilogy, so I'm looking for the next book.

I also read by this author: Blood Red

Wool

Fiction by Hugh Howey

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/
In the dystopian future, after the world is destroyed, people are forced to live underground in huge silos 144 levels deep. Life is carefully and rigidly controlled, and the most dangerous thing to wish for is to go OUTSIDE.

Because if you want to go outside, they'll let you out... but you won't come back. Instead you will have to clean off the camera lenses that give the people inside a view of the barren and inhospitable world, and then you will lie down and die from the toxic air.

As you can see, this book is pretty dark. But hey, the dystopian future is no picnic, right?

Nameless Series

Fiction by Dean Koontz

https://www.amazon.com
This is a series of six novellas available only though Amazon Kindle. While I am not a fan of electronic readers (I strongly prefer paper books), I AM a fan of Mr. Koontz. So, I downloaded the Kindle app on my phone and read these stories.

(In the interest of full disclosure: I also was away from home without anything to read over Christmas break, AND this series was free with my Amazon prime membership. These factors completely persuaded me to put aside my distaste for e-readers.)

These stories were really good! The protagonist is a man called Nameless, who can't remember anything about his past, even his own identity. (That's why he's called Nameless; get it?) Anyways, he goes around finding people who have been victimized by those the law can't or won't rescue them from, and saving these poor souls in vigilante, butt-kicking style.