Category: Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday time again! And April’s host is Mari at MariReads

Just one book this past week. Something a little out of my comfort zone, but it sounded intriguing when I spotted it on Shelf Awareness.

After Visiting Friends: A Son’s Storyby Michael Hainey

Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family’s back door early one morning with tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael’s father, had been found dead in the night, alone on a dark Chicago street. The cause of death, a heart attack. Thirty-five years old, Bob was a bright and shining star in the hard-living brotherhood of the 1960s big-city newspapers, where booze-soaked nights bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was gone, leaving behind a young widow, two sons, a fractured family, and questions about the mysteries of his death that would obsess Michael long into adulthood.

Man years later, and now a seasoned reporter himself, Michael finally summons the courage to search out the truth of what happened that night – no matter the toll on his family. At the heart of his riveting quest is Michael’s mother, a woman of great courage and tenacity – and a steely determination not to look back. Prodding his relatives and tracking down a network of his father’s colleagues who abide by an honor code of silence, Michael sees  beyond the long-held myths and ultimately reconciles the father he had imagined with the man that he comes to discover. Perhaps most powerfully of all, his decade-long journey leads him to a moving rediscovery of his mother.

After Visiting Friends is a heartrending and beautifully written memoir of a family’s legacy of secrets, a universal story about how we find ourselves.

Mailbox Monday time again! And March’s host is Caitlin at Chaotic Compendiums

Lots of goodies came this week!

From Paperbackswap:

 Want to Go Private ? by Sarah Darer Littman

When Abby meets Luke online, she can’t believe her luck. He’s nice. He’s funny. He listens to her and he thinks she’s pretty. He even gets jealous of other guys, which is adorable. Without Luke, Abby’s not sure how she’d make it through her first year of high school. Everyone, including her mom and her best friend, Faith, tells Abby that if she just made more of an effort, she’d be having fun instead of dreading each and every day as if it’s a prison sentence. But there’s nothing fun about being the lowest link in the social food chain.

Abby knows she’s not supposed to chat with random guys online. But Luke isn’t random, and he isn’t a stranger. Best of all, he loves her. So what if she never goes out with her friends anymore and her grades are slipping? All she needs is Luke. Luke is her secret, and she’s his – it’s perfect that way. So when Luke suggests that they meet each other in person, Abby agrees. And then she’s gone. Missing. Without a trace. And everyone is left to put together the pieces. If they don’t, they’ll never see Abby again.

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In A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin has created a genuine masterpiece, bringing together the best the genre has to offer. Mystery, intrigue, romance, and adventure fill the pages of the first volume in an epic series sure to delight fantasy fans everywhere.

In a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the North of Winterfell, sinister and supernatural forces are massing beyond the kingdom’s protective Wall. At the center of the conflict lie the Starks of Winterfell, a family as harsh and unyielding as the land they were born to. Sweeping from a land of brutal cold to a distant summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, here is a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens. Amid plots and counterplots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, the fate of the Starks, their allies, and their enemies hangs perilously in the balance, as each endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.

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From LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program:

 In Mistrial, Mark Geragos and Pat Harris debunk the myth of impartial American justice and draw the curtain on its ugly realities – from stealth jurors who secretly swing for a conviction to cops who regularly lie on the witness stand to defense attorneys terrified of going to trial. Ultimately, the authors question whether a justice system model drawn up two centuries before blogs, television, and O.J. Simpson is still viable today.

In the aftermath of recent high-profile cases, the flaws in America’s justice system are more glaring than ever. Geragos and Harris are legal experts and prominent criminal defense attorneys who have worked on everything from celebrity media-circuses to equally compelling cases defending individuals desperate to avoid the spotlight. Mistrial’s behind-the-scenes peek at their most fascinating cases will enthrall legal eagles and armchair litigators alike – as it blows the lid on what really happens in a courtroom.

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For Review (I’m scheduled for a blog tour stop on 4/12)

As her husband, Nick, and daughter, Lindsey, embark on a weekend camping trip to the Texas Hill Country, Abby looks forward to having some quiet time to herself. She braids Lindsey’s hair, reminds NIck to drive safely and kisses them both goodbye. For a brief moment, Abby thinks she has it all – a perfect marriage, a perfect life – until a devastating storm rips through the region, and her family vanishes without a trace.

When Nick and Lindsey are presumed dead, lost in the raging waters, Abby refuses to give up hope. Consumed by grief and clinging to her belief that her family is still alive, she sets out to find them. But as disturbing clues begin to surface, Abby realizes that the truth may be far more sinister than she imagined. Soon she finds herself caught in a current of lies that threaten to unhinge her and challenge everything she once believed about her marriage and family.

Mailbox Monday time again! And March’s host is Caitlin at Chaotic Compendiums

I know better than to go to the bookstore 🙂

Purchased:

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For review (I’m scheduled for 4/11):

Estranged from his wife and daughter, former undercover cop Mark Mallen has spent the last four years in a haze of heroin. When his best friend from the academy, Eric Russ, is murdered, all the evidence points to Mallen as the prime suspect.

Now Mallen’s former colleagues on the force are turning up the heat and Russ’s survivors are asking him to come up with some answers. But if he wants to serve justice to the real killer, Mallen knows he’ll have to get clean. Turning a life around is hard work for a junkie, especially when a gang of low-life thugs wants him dead. Bruised, battered, and written off by nearly everyone, can Mallen keep clean and catch a killer?

Mailbox Monday time again! And March’s host is Caitlin at Chaotic Compendiums

Only one book this week. For review from Katie at Shelton Interactive:

 Shoog Clay: The nation’s winningest inner-city high school football coach resists pressure to move up to the college level because his kids in the Bronx mean everything to him. But more powerful people won’t take no for an answer.

Antwon Meeps: One day Harriet Tubman High School’s star running back is a shoe-in for a college scholarship. The next day he’s accused of a rape he didn’t commit, his life begins unraveling, and he doesn’t know how to stop it.

The Mean: This incognito Greenwich hedge fund manager is so rich he keeps a giant sea creature as his pet. But a risky investment threatens to ruin him, and a stubborn high school football coach holds the key to his redemption.

Soon a tragic hanging in the school gymnasium will lay bare a secret force that none of these men understands. In a “dark pool” marketplace, insatiable Wall Street players have wagered everything on certain real-world outcomes. When fortunes hang in the balance, financiers cloaked in anonymity won’t hesitate to pay off their claims with the blood of others.

 

 

 

Mailbox Monday time again! And February’s host is Audra at Unabridged Chick

No physical copies came into the house this week (whew!) But I did purchase two e-books for my Nook (Hey, they were $2.99 each – how could I resist?!)

Super excited about these two 🙂

Wonder how long it will be til I get to them … sigh … I’m so bad about that!

Mailbox Monday time again! And February’s host is Audra at Unabridged Chick

Had another good mailbox this week … three books … two from Paperbackswap, one from the publisher via Shelf Awareness, and one from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program.

From Paperbackswap:

From Publisher via Shelf Awareness

Snow White Must Die introduces the investigative police detective team of Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein, who, on a rainy November day, are summoned to a mysterious traffic accident: a woman has fallen from a pedestrian bridge onto a car driving underneath. According to a witness, the woman may have been pushed. The investigation leads Pia and Oliver to the little village of Altenhain, and the home of the victim, Rita Cramer. Eleven years earlier, two seventeen-year-old girls vanished from the village without a trace. Their bodies were never found. In a trial based solely on circumstantial evidence, the then-twenty-year-old Tobias Sartorius, Rita Cramer’s son, was sentenced to ten years in prison. Bodenstein and Kirchhoff discover that Tobias, after serving his sentence, has now returned to his hometown of Altenhain. Did the attack on his mother have something to do with his return? In the village, Pia and Oliver encounter a wall of silence. When another young girl disappears, the events of the past seem to be repeating themselves in a disastrous manner. The investigation turns into a race against time, because for the villagers it is soon clear who the perpetrator is – and this time they are determined to take matters into their own hands.

From LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program:

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barry Siegel tells the gripping legal story of a man who has spent almost forty years in prison for murders he denies committing and follows as well the tenacious lawyers who are fighting for his freedom. In 1962 the mysterious killing of a young couple on an isolated desert lovers’ lane bewildered the sheriff’s department of Maricopa County, Arizona. Despite a few promising leads – including several chilling confessions from Ernesto Valenzuela, a violent repeat offender – the case went cold. More than a decade later, a clerk in the sheriff’s department, Carol Macumber, came forward to tell police that her estranged husband was responsible for the 1962 Scottsdale Road murders. Though the evidence linking Bill Macumber to the crime was questionable, authorities arrested and charged him with a double homicide. During the subsequent trial, the judge refused to allow the confession of the now-deceased Ernesto Valenzuela to be admitted as evidence because of the attorney-client privilege. Bill Macumber was found guilty and has been in prison ever since, but for a brief interlude out on bail.

The Macumber case, rife with extraordinary irregularities, has attracted the sustained involvement of the Arizona Justice Project, one of the first and most respected of the nonprofit groups that represent victims of manifest injustice. This story illuminates the troubling nature of our criminal justice system, which as kept a possibly innocent man locked up for almost forty years, and introduces readers to the dedicated lawyers who are working to fix that system. With precise journalistic detail and evocative storytelling, Barry Siegel will change your understanding of American jurisprudence, police procedure, and what constitutes justice in our country.

Mailbox Monday time again! And January’s host is Lori’s Reading Corner.

Just one book this week (good thing after last week’s haul!) From my Paperbackswap Wish-List:

Lindsay Boxer is pregnant at last! But her work doesn’t slow for a second. When millionaire Chaz Smith is mercilessly gunned down, she discovers that the murder weapon is linked to the deaths of four of San Francisco’s most untouchable criminals. And it was taken from her own department’s evidence locker. Anyone could be the killer – even one of her closest friends.

Lindsay is called next to the most bizarre crime scene she’s ever witnessed: two bodiless heads elaborately displayed on the patio of a world-famous actor’s home. Five more heads are unearthed in his garden, and Lindsay realizes that the grounds may hold hundreds of victims.

A reporter launches a series of vicious articles about the cases, and Lindsay’s personal life is laid bare. But this time she has no one to turn to – especially not Joe, her husband. 11th Hour is the most shocking, most emotional, and most thrilling Women’s Murder Club novel ever.

Mailbox Monday time again! And January’s host is Lori’s Reading Corner.

I know better than to go to the library book sale … but I went 🙂 Got some good older books 🙂

                

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And I also got one review book:

Section 8: The Men and women called upon by The Organization to do the impossible. They are the soldiers who have nothing to lose. They make up a top-secret unit tasked with what others call suicide missions.

The Organization pulled strings long before the founding of the United States. It dates back to the destruction of the Knights Templar and even further in history. As secrets from the Golden Lilly Operation and the infamous Unit 731 from World War II become exposed, you have to wonder who the real enemy is.

Captain Jim Vaughn is an officer in disgrace. Commanding a Special Forces mission to rescue hostages in the Philippines, Vaughn’s team is destroyed, and when the smoke clears, he is the one made the scapegoat. Forced into the shadows by the scandal, Vaughn is offered a chance to redeem himself when he is approached by an enigmatic government agent working for The Organization looking for a few desperate men.

Vaughn is shocked to meet his new teammates, a group of men and women outside of the regular chain of command. These are soldiers who have used up all their second chances. These are men and women who have crossed the line one too many times. Drug users. Felons. The terminally ill. These are now the soldiers that Vaughn must trust with his life. Even with a traitor in their ranks. But is the traitor actually the patriot?

This group of misfits has been assembled for two reasons – they are skilled, and they are expendable. These are the kinds of men and women who are needed to attempt missions the government can’t acknowledge, the country can’t condone, and the team cannot fail. But the deeper Vaughn gets into the unique group, the more he realizes that The Organization may be concealing more than the rap sheets of its most unusual operators. A team of such unique properties is the perfect tool to use against America’s enemies … and possibly America itself.

Mailbox Monday time again! And January’s host is Lori’s Reading Corner.

Got some goodies this week 🙂

From NetGalley:

Susanna Calkins’s atmospheric debut novel, a chambermaid must uncover a murderer in seventeenth-century plague-ridden London

For Lucy Campion, a seventeenth-century English chambermaid serving in the household of the local magistrate, life is an endless repetition of polishing pewter, emptying chamber pots, and dealing with other household chores until a fellow servant is ruthlessly killed, and Lucy’s brother is wrongly arrested for the crime. In a time where the accused are presumed guilty until proven innocent, lawyers aren’t permitted to defend their clients, and—if the plague doesn’t kill them first—public executions draw a large crowd of spectators, Lucy knows she may never see her brother alive again. Unless, that is, she can identify the true murderer.

Determined to do just that, Lucy finds herself venturing out of her expected station and into raucous printers’ shops, secretive gypsy camps, the foul streets of London, and even the bowels of Newgate prison on a trail that might lead her straight into the arms of the killer.

In her debut novel, Susanna Calkins seamlessly blends historical detail, romance, and mystery into a moving and highly entertaining tale.

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From Edelweiss:

Laura Andersen brings us the first book in an enthralling trilogy set in the dramatic, turbulent, world-altering years of Tudor England. What if Anne did not miscarry her son in January 1536, but instead gave birth to a healthy royal boy? Perfect for fans of Philipa Gregory and Allison Weir.

Henry IX, known as William, is a 17-year-old king struggling at the restraints of the regency and anxious to prove himself. With the French threatening battle and the Catholics plotting at home, Will trusts only three people: his older sister, Elizabeth; his best friend and loyal counselor, Dominic; and Minuette, a young orphan raised as a royal ward by Anne Boleyn. Against an undercurrent of secret documents, conflicting intelligence operations, and private murder, William fights a foreign war and domestic rebellion with equal resolve. But when he and Dominic both fall in love with Minuette, romantic obsession menaces a new generation of Tudors. Battlefields and council chambers, trials and executions, the blindness of first love and the betrayal of true friendship…How far will William go to get what he wants? Who will pay the price for a king’s revenge? And what twists of fate will set Elizabeth on the path to her destiny as England’s queen?

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From the author for a Pump Up Your Book blog tour (My stop is scheduled for 2/26!):

I knew it. I knew it, he repeated to himself. A conspiracy. But who had planned the murder? Was Lee Harvey Oswald even involved? If only one could go back in time and solve the mystery. I have to pursue this, he told himself. Someone has to find out the truth once and for all.

Mailbox Monday time again! And December’s host is Suko’s Notebook.

No books made it into my mailbox this week (thank goodness!) However, I did purchase 4 e-books for my new Nook!

Oh, and I was approved for two review books on Netgalley: