ginasbookreport

People to Follow by Olivia Worley Publisher:  Wednesday Books a division of St. Martin’s Press Ginasbookreport Rating:  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Genre:  Mystery / Young Adult / New Adult Read This If You Love:  Pretty Little Liars / One of Us Is Lying  / And Then There Were None “We need to search the island. Now.” When ten social influencers agree to film a new reality show where they are disconnected from their phones and their followers, they end up on a secluded island. We all know what happens when a group of people are trapped on an island in a mystery novel! In short order, the show’s S ponsor  starts to text them orders on their one-way watches. Follow the instructions or you might just find yourself cancelled and on this island that could be permanent. I was drawn to this book because of the clear nod to my favorite mystery novel, And Then There Were None . While People to Follow  does pay tribute to the classic mystery concept, it brings the plot into the modern day via the social media angl

The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett Publisher:  Atria Books  Ginasbookreport Rating:  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Genre:  Mystery / Cozy Mystery Read This If You Love:  Janice Hallett / Alternative storytelling / Solving Puzzles One Christmas Play One Dead Santa Everyone’s a Suspect Once again we find ourselves back with the Fairway Players and all their antics. While they set out to put on a pantomime for charity, they end up with a dead Santa. Oops! Told in Hallett’s signature structure and style, this short novella is a hilarious romp of a cozy mystery. Presented via emails, text messages, WhatsApp, interviews, and letters, The Christmas Appeal  is structured so that you, the reader, get all the information and have the ability to solve the mystery. Can you do it before the investigating detectives? It’s a perfect whodunnit as Christmas past and present collide. Would be a great holiday read for mystery lovers. Pop on the tea and curl up on a snowy day to gobble up this fun book.

West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman Publisher:  Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC Ginasbookreport Rating:  ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75 Genre:  Mystery / Thriller Read This If You Love:  Fans of Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and all serious mystery book lovers “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout?”—T.S. Eliot “Don’t hold back on us. Tell us a detective story.”—Otto Mayer  West Heart Kill  isn’t a mystery novel like other mystery novels. Well, or it is. Well, or it is about all other mystery novels. Set at the hunting club of West Heart, our author takes us on a journey through the history of mystery novels as he unveils the secrets and bodies that pile up over the July 4th holiday at this remote club. It’s a very meta take on the genre that is so well loved by many. You, the reader, are a character in this account of neighborly friendship gone awry. Will you (or anyone) solve all the puzzles? What tropes, cliches, or clev

None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell Publisher:  Atria Books Ginasbookreport Rating:  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Genre:  Mystery / Thriller / Psychological Thriller /  Suspense Read This If You Love:  Samantha Downing / Tarryn Fisher / Gillian Flynn “The people who seem boring can sometimes have the most interesting stories to tell. You just have to get it out of them somehow.” When Alix goes out to celebrate her 45th birthday, she meets her “birthday twin” Josie. Soon enough, Alix decides to produce a podcast about their shared birthday and the way two people born on the same day in the same hospital can lead very different lives. The problem? Alix has no idea that she has stepped into her own true crime podcast. Everyone’s lives are tossed upside down and the story is told between narrative, podcast interviews, and documentary scenes.  None of This Is True a fascinating fictional take on our obsession with true crime properties. Let’s leave the plot description at just that vague bit. Jewell’s books a

The Only One Left by Riley Sager Publisher: Dutton an imprint of Penguin Random House Ginasbookreport Rating:  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Genre:  Mystery / Thriller / Horror  Read This If You Love:  Stephen King “Lenora Hope is the one patient nobody—not even the police—will mind if I kill.” Kit really  messed up and now the only job available is caring for the town’s own Lizzie Borden…Lenora Hope. Lenora has a dark reputation, but what is the true story behind what happened to her family on a dark and stormy night in Hope’s End? That’s all you are going to get out of me in terms of a synopsis. I don’t want to spoil anything! However, …Wow. Wow. Wow. I absolutely loved this book and it easily takes top spot for Sager novels. Gripped from the first page, I walked away with the same feeling I had when I read Misery  by Stephen King for the first time. The Only One Left is set in the 1980s and it not only nails the setting of the decade, it pays homage to that era’s fiction and horror novels. It is writt

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett Publisher:  Harper Ginasbookreport Rating:  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Genre:  Literature Read This If You Love:  The Dutch House  / The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls   “Cricket, it’s your past.”   “I understand that joy is inappropriate these days and, still, we feel what we feel.”   Tom Lake is an exploration of life, love, and the fact that each and every person can never be truly and completely known…even by those that love us most. Every step we take in life leads us to the next, and when that role becomes parent, children think of us as starting the day they were born. In this masterpiece, Lara is on her family farm during COVID lockdown and her three daughters have returned to help harvest the cherries. As they spend this scary and uncertain time together, the women pepper their mother with questions about her past as an actress and her time with the famous Peter Duke. What they think they knew of their parents is peeled back.  Told through Lara’s experien

Good Bad Girl by Alice Feeney Publisher: Flatiron Books Ginasbookreport Rating:  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Genre:  Mystery / Thriller Read This If You Love: Shari Lapena “People say there’s nothing like a mother’s love. Take that away, you’ll find there’s nothing like a daughter’s hate.” Three suspects, two murders, and one victim. Twenty years ago a baby was kidnapped from her stroller. Now a woman is murdered in a care home. What unfolds next is a thrilling mystery full of surprises and twists. Who is good? Who is bad? Who is the victim? Mother and daughter relationships are complicated even when they are good. When they are bad, they can be deadly.  Told in short chapters with alternating narrators, Good Bad Girl  continues Feeney’s signature style of fast-paced and edge-of-your-seat storytelling. I LOVED Sometimes I Lie  and Rock Paper Scissors , and this book is right up there regarding the level of engrossing entertainment. “The future can seem too uncertain when your past catches up with your pr

A Traitor in Whitehall by Julia Kelly Publisher: Minotaur Books Ginasbookreport Rating:  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Genre: Historical Fiction / Mystery  Read This If You Love:  The Rose Code  / spy novels / WWII historical fiction / mystery novels “You see, I simply adore detective fiction. Each new story contains within it the tantalizing possibility of a puzzle so fiendishly twisted that the solution may elude me until the final pages.”  Evelyne is doing her part in the war effort by endlessly stuffing bullets. Her only intrigue are the mystery novels that she loves. Soon, she finds herself reassigned to a secretive mission and finds herself locked in a room with a dead body. Working with a mysterious minister’s aid named Mr. Poole, the two set out to unravel all of the puzzles surrounding them. “I wasn’t sweet at all. I was curious and determined to find the killer.”  This book reminded me so much of The Rose Code  and the TV series The Bletchley Circle . The war efforts, the fashion descriptions, t

The Death of Us by Lori Rader-Day Publisher:  William and Morrow a imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ginasbookreport Rating:  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Genre:  Mystery / Thriller / Domestic Suspense Read This If You Love:  Broadchurch “Here’s the thing not everyone understands about crime in a small town: When it goes down big for the first time in a generation—when some farmer gets out his buck-hunting rifle, say, and turns it on his wife—everybody’s asking the same questions: How could it happen? Here, in this quiet town?” When a car is found submerged in water at the old quarry, Liss Kehoe’s entire life is turned upside down. They might already know who is in the car, but how they ended up there is a bombshell that unleashes a trail of revelations and reckonings.  First off, if you haven’t been reading books by Lori Rader-Day, you need to get that fixed right away. She is a master writer in the crime fiction genre. Plus, fans of Agatha Christie and historical fiction should not miss Death at Gree