The Invisible Husband of Frick Island by Colleen Oakley has been described as a love story, but I would classify it as Women’s Fiction, maybe Fantasy. I found the novel to be a light read that was just silly in my point of view. The premise of a woman with an invisible husband just did not hold up.

Piper Parrish lives on fictional Frick Island, based on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay. Her husband was killed when his crab boat capsized but she pretends that he is still alive, and the 90-some population of the island go along with the fantasy.

Instead of rapidly running away from this woman who is said to be suffering from post-bereavement hallucination experiences, journalist and podcaster Anders Caldwell falls in love with the young woman who has a strong interest in science.

WorldCat labels this book as Fiction : Secondary (senior high) school, which may be my whole problem with it. It is a story for a younger audience.

Colleen Oakley’s You Were There Too was long listed for the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize.

Where the Grass Is Green and the Girls Are Pretty by Lauren Weisberger

 

Taking her title Where the Grass Is Green and the Girls Are Pretty from “Paradise City” by Guns ‘N’ Roses, Lauren Weisberger has written a novel that encompasses the recent college admissions scandals.

Isaac Marcus, husband of celebrity news anchor Peyton, is arrested for a college admissions offense on behalf of their daughter Mackenzie, otherwise known as Max. He has put his daughter’s reputation, his wife’s job, and his sister-in-law’s project to help underprivileged girls in jeopardy.

However, the truth is Isaac did not do it, yet he takes the fall to protect Peyton’s career, which makes the seemingly righteous ending seem meaningless.

Lauren Weisberger is the bestselling author of The Devil Wears Prada. A graduate of Cornell University, she lives in Connecticut with her family.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting March 13, 2021.

I would like to thank Random House Publishing Group for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica

 

In Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica, two women, both mothers, go missing ten days apart in a community outside of Chicago eleven years ago. Worse, one of them had her daughter with her when she disappeared. One case goes cold, both cases leave families in distress.

In another state, a young girl held captive in a dark basement makes a shiv out of her spoon with which she is fed from a dog bowl. After stabbing one of her captors, she makes a break for it. She tells the person who finds her that her name is Delilah Dickey, a girl who has been missing for eleven years.

While one woman’s husband is behind bars for her murder, the other husband, Delilah’s father, is a shadow of his former self when he and his son Leo are reunited with Delilah. Through police investigation, therapy, and hypnosis, Delilah may be able to put the pieces together about what happened on a day eleven years ago.

But then something strange happens. Even though the DNA test confirms Delilah’s identity, her best friend from childhood notices that a facial feature is missing, one that cannot be accounted for through eleven years of growth and change. Doubt builds about the girl claiming to be Delilah, and Delilah’s father is shattered again.

At that point, Kubica slams the plot into reverse when the false Delilah makes a run for it and accelerates at full speed to an unexpected climax. I was a little unsettled about the resolution as it did not seem feasible to me but news stories about captive women do support such an ending.

Mary Kubica, a one-time high school history teacher, lives outside of Chicago with her family. This is her sixth psychological thriller.

Find You First by Linwood Barclay

 

Find You First by Linwood Barclay is a fast-paced thriller readers won’t want to put down until the crashing finish! A tech millionaire, nine people created with help from a fertility clinic, a narcissistic mastermind, and cold-blooded killers come together in this book, about which writer Stephen King says “… starts with a bang and ends with an even bigger one. . . . It’s the best book of his career.”

When Miles Cookson, who has more money than a person could spend in a lifetime, finds out he has a genetic terminal illness, he calls to mind those days 20-some years ago when he needed fast money and became a sperm donor. With a 50-50 chance that his Huntington’s disease has been passed on to any children fathered by him, Miles realizes he needs to warn and provide for them.

Using an underhanded method, Miles learns the names of the nine children who were born because of his donation to a fertility clinic in New York. He sets his assistant on an information journey to find out more about these nine people so he can find them and fund them with enough to take care of them no matter what.

As he begins his search, one of his children has already begun a hunt on her own to find her biological father, and Chloe Swanson has already found and developed a relationship with a half-brother, Todd Cox, through DNA matching. Coincidentally, she is first on Miles’ list as she lives in Providence, Rhode Island, closest to his home in New Haven, Connecticut, than the eight others.

When Miles and Chloe connect, she immediately wants to take him to Todd’s house to share the news. But something is amiss as Todd is gone along with all of his belongings; his unusually messy trailer is sparkling clean and reeks of bleach. A call from his assistant Dorian clues in Miles that two of his other children have “disappeared.” He soon suspects someone is hunting down his children, but he does not share his suspicion with Chloe yet. His mistrust is spot on as the gruesome murders have been revealed to readers in interspersed chapters.

Who is killing his offspring and why? Is one of the nine trying to secure all the inheritance? Just what is going on in this enthralling page-turner?

Linwood Barclay is the bestselling author of Elevator Pitch and 17 other novels. He adapted his novel Never Saw it Coming for the movie starring Eric Roberts and Emily Hampshire. Born in the United States, his family moved to Canada when he was a toddler. Prior to writing books full-time, he was a newspaper journalist and columnist. He lives with his wife in Ontario.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting March 6, 2021.

I would like to thank William Morrow and Custom House for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave

The Last Thing He Told Me was “Protect her.” In this domestic thriller by Laura Dave, Hannah Hall is thrown into a tizzy when her husband Owen goes missing and her 16-year-old stepdaughter brings home from school a duffle bag filled with thousands of dollars.

Hannah knows the “her” in the mysterious note refers to Owen’s daughter, who lost her mother when she was a small child. Worse, Bailey does not like Hannah’s intrusion into her perfect life with just her father.

With a U.S. Marshall to her left and the FBI to her right, Hannah does not know what to believe beyond what the news says: the company Owen works for has committed fraud. Hannah leans on her former fiancé who is an attorney for guidance. When it appears that the U.S. Marshall is legit and has his office in Austin, Texas, Hannah decides to take Bailey and leave their home in Sausalito, California, and head to Austin for some answers.

Trying to investigate on her own, Hannah soon finds that she has put both herself and Bailey in peril as they start to come close to the truth, a truth Bailey never knew about. How will Owen’s deep, dark secrets change all of their lives?

I have read all of Laura Dave’s books including Eight Hundred Grapes and The First Husband, and I could not put this one down until I finished it. This latest book has already been optioned for a movie. Dave lives in Santa Monica, California.  

 

Sunshine Girl: An Unexpected Life by Julianna Margulies

 

Sunshine Girl: An Unexpected Life by actress Julianna Margulies is a well-written autobiography arranged in chronological order for the most part, which I truly appreciate as a reader. Dubbed “Sunshine Girl” by her mother Francesca because she was always a cheerful baby and young child, Margulies recounts both challenges and opportunities in her life.

The biography focuses largely on her life as a child and an adolescent growing up in a home her father Paul left soon after her birth because of differences he had with her mother. Always present in her life – though just not nearly enough – her father had well-paying jobs in advertising that afforded him the opportunity to provide for higher education for all three of his daughters.

Her mother, a trained ballerina, created many difficulties in all their lives, causing Margulies’ oldest sister to move in with Paul during her teen years, leaving just the two younger girls to deal with a complicated situation at home. Both unreasonable and erratic, Francesca put herself ahead of her daughters and had lots of men coming and going through their household. The worst was when as a woman in her forties, Francesca took up with a 21-year-old, which caused a great divide between her and Margulies, though they later reconciled.

Margulies’ intelligence and strong writing ability are evident throughout her book. Her drive to be the best she can be at everything she does comes through. Growing up in an unconventional home in New Hampshire, New York, Paris, and in England, she is fluent in French as well as in English.

Mostly thought of for her role as Nurse Hathaway on the television show ER and as attorney Alicia Florrick on The Good Wife, Margulies also has experience on the stage and in film. Many were surprised when she left ER after her contract expired, leaving millions of dollars on the table. She explains her choice and still remains confident it was the right one for her at that time. She accepted the role in The Good Wife because she was able to have it filmed in New York where she lives with her lawyer husband and son.

She does not hesitate to reveal intimate stories about relationships, difficult choices, and rejections, both personal and professional. Her ability to recall so many events in detail is enviable. I highly recommend this autobiography for those who enjoy reading about the lives of celebrities.

Julianna Margulies is an actress, a producer, and an author. She published a children’s book in 2016 called Three Magic Balloons, based on a story her father wrote for his three daughters.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting March 4, 2021.

I would like to thank Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

The Summer of Lost and Found by Mary Alice Monroe

 

In The Summer of Lost and Found, Mary Alice Monroe, the Queen of Low Country Fiction, takes readers back to the Beach House of the Rutledge family. While I feared authors would be writing novels with coronavirus plots, I found that Monroe handled the story line with a calm but firm hand incorporating wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing.

Linnea Rutledge, Lovie’s granddaughter, just lost her job at the aquarium because of the coronavirus pandemic. Fortunately, her aunt Cara owns the Beach House, and she assures Linnea that paying rent will cease during these difficult times. In exchange, Linnea will help Cara with her daughter Hope as husband David has just returned from England and must quarantine, although soon he has all the symptoms of the virus.

Linnea’s new boyfriend Gordon is struggling to get back to the Isle of Palms, but he is having difficulty getting out of England because of the pandemic. To complicate things, Linnea’s former boyfriend John is visiting his mother who lives next door to Linnea.

To say Linnea soon becomes confused about all her feelings regarding Gordon and John is an understatement. Too add to the growing pandemic concerns, she finds herself temporarily housing cousin Hope while her dad quarantines, her friend Annabelle who has no family to help during the pandemic, and her brother Cooper, who is fresh off of quarantine in his parents’ house where he is going crazy.

Six-year-old Hope helps bridge the gap between Linnea and her “lost” love John, starting first with the paper airplanes he sends down from the carriage house where he is quarantining. He and Linnea had a bad breakup, and he realizes he made a big mistake in letting Linnea go. With the paper airplane notes to Hope and fun games starting with leaving items in hiding places, Linnea has “found” her feelings for John softening and changing. To complicate matters, Gordon is back on US soil, and Linnea becomes overwhelmed with emotions and concerns.

Nobody handles complex family situations and relationships better than Mary Alice Monroe. She is one of my handful of go-to authors for “beach reads.” The late Dorothea Benton Frank called Monroe’s writing “sensitive and true.” Both of those qualities were desperately needed in a book capturing life during the pandemic.

This is Mary Alice Monroe’s 24th novel. Monroe is a conservationist and a turtle lady in South Carolina, where she lives with her husband on the Isle of Palms, a small barrier island just outside of Charleston. They also have a hideaway in the mountains somewhere in North Carolina. Her Beach House novel, the first in the Rutledge family series, was recently made into a Hallmark movie starring Andie MacDowell and Chad Michael Murray.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting March 2, 2021.

I would like to thank Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

The Newcomer by Mary Kay Andrews

The Newcomer by Mary Kay Andrews is thirty-something Scarlett Carnahan who discovers her sister’s dead body in an apartment in New York and grabs her four-year-old niece and heads for a motel on the beach on Treasure Island in Florida. She’s sure Tanya’s lover Evan killed Tanya although the newspapers are reporting that Letty herself killed her sister then vanished with her niece.

Turns out Tanya was afraid of what Evan might do and told Letty that if something happened to her, take little Maya and run. She even had a bag hidden for Letty to take with her that contained money and an expensive diamond ring.

On Treasure Island, Letty practically begs for a room at the Murmuring Surf Motel although the sign says “No Vacancy.” But owner Ava has a tender heart and allows Letty to clean out the storage unit then she and Maya can stay there. Ava’s son Joe is a police officer, and he starts digging into Letty’s background.

The regulars at the Surf are upset that not only has Ava rented to a young person when they consider the motel as a winter respite for seniors but Letty is also someone with a child. As Letty tries to figure out what to do next, she finds she is only a few steps ahead of Evan who has hired someone to make Letty vanish and bring Maya back home to him.

As Joe gets closer and closer to the truth, he finds he has a soft spot for Letty and refuses to believe she could have killed anyone. But when the FBI comes calling, he finds his failure to turn Letty in could have severe repercussions.

Only someone as skilled as Mary Kay Andrews, the Queen of Summer Reads, could write a believable way through this precarious situation. Andrews, a pseudonym for Kathy Hogan Trocheck, is definitely one of my go-to authors for beach reads. A former journalist, she is based in Atlanta with her own hideaway on Tybee Island.