A Little Something For The Mystery Novel Lovers

It’s 11:30 at night. You’ve settled in bed with your book, read several chapters already, and it’s past time for you to turn out the light and go to sleep.

Maybe you have to be up early for work tomorrow. Maybe it’s the weekend, but you have young kids who wake you up early no matter what day it is.

You know what you should do. But you’re not going to, because you have to read just one. more. chapter. It might just be the one that puts all the pieces together.

And if it’s not? Well, maybe just one more chapter will do it. Who needs sleep, anyway?

The next time you check the clock, it’s 2 a.m. Either you’ve finished the book or you’re almost there… so you might as well just read until you’re done.

Sound familiar?

Just about any great page-turner book can prompt a reader to stay up way too late, but for me, it’s almost always an addictive thriller or mystery novel.

So today when I ran across a book rack containing some awesome mystery novels, I went bananas and bought me a few!

I want to share these incredible reads with you guys, and if you've read any of the books listed, PLEASE send spoilers my way!

Cuba Straits

by Randy Wayne White

Doc Ford’s old friend, General Juan Garcia, has gone into the lucrative business of smuggling Cuban baseball players into the U.S. He is also feasting on profits made by buying historical treasures for pennies on the dollar. He prefers what dealers call HPC items—high-profile collectibles—but when he manages to obtain a collection of letters written by Fidel Castro between 1960–62 to a secret girlfriend, it’s not a matter of money anymore. Garcia has stumbled way out of his depth.

First Garcia disappears, and then the man to whom he sold the letters. When Doc Ford begins to investigate, he soon becomes convinced that those letters contain a secret that someone, or some powerful agency, cannot allow to be made public.

A lot happened between Cuba and the United States from 1960–62. Many men died. A few more will hardly be noticed.

Devil's Waltz

by Jonathan Kellerman

In one of the most frightening and challenging cases of his career, Dr. Alex Delaware must confront a strange medical mystery involving a child.

“Reads like wildfire . . . harrowing suspense.”—The New York Times Book Review

Twenty-one-month-old Cassie Jones is the picture of health. Yet her parents rush her to the emergency room night after night with symptoms no doctor can explain. Cassie’s parents seem genuinely concerned. Her favorite nurse is a model of devotion. When Delaware is called in to investigate, instinct tells him that one of them could be a monster. Then a physician is brutally murdered. A shadowy death is revealed. And Alex and his friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, have only hours to uncover the link between Cassie’s terrifying condition and these shocking, seemingly unrelated events.

Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

A nation on the verge of a new era - and a girl caught between her past and the ever-expanding present.

The year is 1972, and the beaches of Los Angeles are the center of the world. Dropping into the embers of the drug and surf scene is Suzy Whitman, who has tossed her newly minted Vassar degree aside to follow her older sister into open skies and the borderless adventures of stewardessing for Grand Pacific Airlines.

In Sela del Mar, California - a hedonistic beach town in the shadow of LAX - Suzy skateboards, suntans, and flies daily and nightly across the country. Motivated by a temporary escape from her past and a new taste for danger and belonging, Suzy falls into a drug-trafficking scheme that clashes perilously with the skyjacking epidemic of the day.

Rendered in the brilliant color of the age and told with spectacular insight and clarity, Fly Me is a story of dark discovery set in the debauchery of 1970s Los Angeles.

If You Knew My Sister

by Michelle Adams

If You Knew My Sister is a highly anticipated psychological suspense audiobook from debut author Michelle Adams.

If you knew my sister, you'd run, too....

First there was the Robert Kneel incident.

Then what happened to Margot Wolfe.

And now she's found me again.

Dr. Irini Harringford was given away by her parents just before her fourth birthday. Although she has spent her whole life trying to convince herself she doesn't need them, deep down Irini longs to understand why she was abandoned, while her parents kept her older sister, Elle.

So when Elle gets in touch with news that their mother has died, Irini reluctantly agrees to return to the family home. But she is ill at ease. She and Elle are not close. Irini knows only too well what Elle is capable of. Inexplicably drawn to her enigmatic sister, yet terrified of the sway she holds, Irini tries to protect herself even as she is sucked back into her family's toxic web of secrets...and soon realizes that the past is more complicated than she imagined, and that her very future rests upon discovering the truth about why she was really given away.

The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

An unforgettable cast of characters is unleashed into a realm known for its cruelty - the American high school - in this captivating debut novel for listeners of Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You and Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep.

The wealthy enclaves north of San Francisco are not the paradise they appear to be, and nobody knows this better than the students of a local high school. Despite being raised with all the opportunities money can buy, these vulnerable kids are navigating a treacherous adolescence in which every action, every rumor, every feeling, is potentially postable, shareable, viral.

Lindsey Lee Johnson's kaleidoscopic narrative exposes at every turn the real human beings beneath the high school stereotypes. Abigail Cress is ticking off the boxes toward the Ivy League when she makes the first impulsive decision of her life: entering into an inappropriate relationship with a teacher. Dave Chu, who knows himself at heart to be a typical B student, takes desperate measures to live up to his parents' crushing expectations. Emma Fleed, a gifted dancer, balances rigorous rehearsals with wild weekends. Damon Flintov returns from a stint at rehab looking to prove that he's not an irredeemable screw-up. And Calista Broderick, once part of the popular crowd, chooses, for reasons of her own, to become a hippie outcast.

Into this complicated web, an idealistic young English teacher arrives from a poorer, scruffier part of California. Molly Nicoll strives to connect with her students - without understanding the middle school tragedy that played out online and has continued to reverberate in different ways for all of them.

Written with the rare talent capable of turning teenage drama into urgent, adult fiction, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth makes vivid a modern adolescence lived in the gleam of the virtual but rich with sorrow, passion, and humanity.

***

And there you have it my fellow book-lovers. A short list of some fab books I found at my nearest market. I can now say I am officially ready for a few more weeks of being quarantined (Low-key not enjoying this COVID-19 shenanigans any longer)!

Please stay safe and practice social distancing.

♥ WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER ♥ 

Be You, Be Totally Bookish