Rachel Caine: Stillhouse Lake

In the first in a series, Rachel Caine shows how far a mother will go to protect her children:

Gina Royal has an ordinary life, two kids and a husband who loves her, the white picket fence is where her life it, that is until a car accident changes everything. It reveals that her husband is a serial killer. Now Gina, now Gwen, is forced to run, not from her husband who is behind bars, but from the internet trolls and family members of the women who her husband murdered, not believing that she could not have known. Gwen finally feels that she has a found a place where her and the kids can settle down for a little while but when the first body shows up and then threatening letters from a familiar address, Gwen does everything she can to keep the truth of who her and are kids are hidden, but you can only hide from evil for so long before it finds you.

This book/series has been on my TBR for a very long time and I should not have put it off this long. I was hooked right from the beginning, I mean it is hard not to be, as it is not every day that your FMC discovered that her husband is a serial killer and just the night before there was a woman strung up in your garage who was being tortured to death. I mean if you like thriller books, that is a hard start to stop reading at. Caine did an amazing job of keeping the story flowing and fast paced that you do not want to put this book down.

I liked that there were multiple mysteries that Caine presents in the book and you wonder are they connected are they not connected, who could be involved, things like that. Although, I was able to figure out some of the twists that Caine was going to do, I did not figure out all of them. I certainly did not think that Caine was going to end the book the way she did and it left be wanting for more.

You cannot help but feel and root for Gwen who has everything stacked against her, and there are those out there that not only want to hurt her but her children as well. All she is looking for is a place and a way to keep them safe. I appreciate that she tries to balance safety and normalcy for them even though it is restrictive at times.

You better believe that after I finished this book I went right out and got the next book in the series. If you have been eyeing this book/series, don’t wait any long pick it up and start reading it, you'll probably want to get it done in one day.

Enjoy!!!!!

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Catherine Mack: Every Time I go on Vacation Someone Dies

In Catherine Mack's debut novel, it shows how a vacation can turn from good to bad to worse:

All Eleanor wants to do is get through the latest book tour. The Pros is that it is taking place in Italy, the MAJOR Con is that her ex and blackmailer and muse for the male lead in the series, Connor is also going to be on the tour. That is why Eleanor has decided to finally Kill Connor, well not in real life, but in her series so that she can move on and start writing something different. But when someone tries to kill Connor in real life, and the only thing they know that there is only 10 days to figure out who the killer is, but as other bodies start falling, the suspect list keeps getting shorter. This is the vacation to die for, literally. 

As a debut novel I appreciate that Mack was trying to do something a bit different here with the format of the book and how all the information is laid out and I think that Mack succeeded on some points but not on others. I really enjoyed the ideas that Mack presented of an author who's first book is based upon real events of her vacation as well as that the book was only told from Eleanor's POV. However, I wasn’t a fan of the format of Eleanor talking to the readers instead of just telling the story and the never-ending footnotes. I can say that I did not read all the footnotes. Also how does this translate in other formats like audio, are the footnotes at the end of each chapters?

I did like the overall plot of this book and I think that Mack did a good job of placing people against each other, and determining that the killer was in or connected to their group in some ways. I also thought that the methods of murder were different from a lot of books that I read. I was able to figure out most of the twist before the end.

I’m not sure a ever like Eleanor as a character, she was annoying a lot of the time, and pretty selfish throughout the book, even when she realizes that she was being selfish she never changes from being so. But I did like she is an unreliable narrator as we only get her POV and there are always 2 sides of the story you know as the reader you are not getting all the information or sides to the relationship and story.

This book really took me down memory lane from a trip to Italy 10 years ago and that was probably the best part of the book, getting to relive some of my own memories.

This book was just not for me. I think that Mack tried to do a bit too much with this book and that lead it to not be for me.

Cheers!!!!!

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