Category: Meme

Mailbox Monday has returned home to Mailbox Monday’s site this year.

Two books this week. One is a review book:

After losing her on-air job two years ago, the television host Robin Trainer has fought her way back and is now hotter than ever. With her new show climbing in the ratings and her first book a bestseller, she’s being dubbed a media double threat.

But things begin to go wrong. Small incidents at first: a nasty note left in her purse; her photo shredded. But the obnoxious quickly becomes threatening when the foundation used by her makeup artist burns Robin’s face. It wasn’t an accident – someone deliberately doctored the product.

An adversary with a dark agenda wants to hurt Robin, and the clues point to someone she works with every day. While she frantically tries to put the pieces together and unmask this hidden foe, it becomes terrifyingly clear that the person responsible isn’t going to stop until Robin loses everything that matters to her … including her life.

And one book from a Paperbackswap box of books trade:

Somewhere … deep inside the United States government is a closely guarded list. Once your name is on the list, it doesn’t come off … until you’re dead.

Someone … has just added counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath’s name.

Somehow … Harvath must evade assassination long enough to untangle who has targeted him and why.

Somewhere, someone, somehow … can put all the pieces together. But Harvath must get to that person before the United States suffers the most withering terrorist attack ever conceived.

Mailbox Monday has returned home to Mailbox Monday’s site this year.

No physical books this week, but I did get approved for an e-galley that I’m super excited about!! I read and reviewed the first book in the Lucy Black series, Little Girl Lost, earlier this year and was beyond excited to get the chance to read the next one!!

On the outskirts of a picturesque Arcadian city, just before Christmas, a 16-year-old-girl is found dead on the train tracks. Detective Lucy Black is called to identify the body. The only clues to the teenager’s last hours are stored in her mobile phone and on social media – and it soon becomes clear that some of her friends may have been her worst enemies.

This second book is another e-galley I had signed up for a chance to review through a Shelf Awareness ad.

Four simultaneous plane crashes. Three child survivors. A religious fanatic who insists the three are harbingers of the apocalypse. What if he’s right?

The world is stunned when four commuter planes crash within hours of each other on different continents. Facing global panic, officials are under pressure to find the causes. With terrorist attacks and environmental factors ruled out, there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between the crashes, except that in three of the four air disasters a child survivor is found in the wreckage.

Dubbed ‘The Three’ by the international press, the children all exhibit disturbing behavioural problems, presumably caused by the horror they lived through and the unrelenting press attention. This attention becomes more than just intrusive when a rapture cult led by a charismatic evangelical minister insists that the survivors are three of the four harbingers of the apocalypse. The Three are forced to go into hiding, but as the children’s behaviour becomes increasingly disturbing, even their guardians begin to question their miraculous survival…

Mailbox Monday has returned home to Mailbox Monday’s site this year.

Just two books this week, both for review.

Born to slave-holding aristocracy in Richmond, Virginia, and educated by Northern Quakers, Elizabeth Van Lew was a paradox of her time. When her native state seceded in April 1861, Van Lew’s convictions compelled her to defy the new Confederate regime. Pledging her loyalty to the Lincoln White House, her courage would never waver, even as her wartime actions threatened not only her reputation, but also her life.

Van Lew helped to construct the Richmond Underground and orchestrated escapes from the infamous Confederate Libby Prison under the guise of humanitarian aid. Her spy ring’s reach was vast, from clerks in the Confederate War and Navy departments to the very home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. In Chiaverini’s riveting tale of high-stakes espionage, a great heroine of the Civil War finally gets her due.

In 1947, a young unknown Norma Jean meets a mysterious man in Los Angeles who transforms her into Marilyn the worldwide star. Twelve years later, he comes back for his repayment, and Marilyn is given her first assignment from the KGB: Uncover something about JFK that no one else knows.

But what begins as a simple job turns complicated when Marilyn falls in love with the bright young President, and learns of plans to assassinate Kennedy. Now the most famous woman on the planet will do anything to save her man, the leader of the free world. Part biography, part love story and part thriller, The Blonde is a vivid tableau of American celebrity, sex, love, violence, power, and paranoia.

Mailbox Monday has returned home to Mailbox Monday’s site this year.

So um, my mailbox *might* have been overflowing this week. I will start with some new-to-me goodies I found in my local used book store and then move on to the ones I received in my mailbox and finish up with the ones I received for review.

I made one last trip to my local used book store before it closes. It technically doesn’t close  until April 26th, but their inventory is already reduced dramatically and there isn’t much else left there that would compel me to go back. I’m still super sad about this store closing. I didn’t go there nearly as often as I should have during the years I’ve been living here. Anyway, I picked up 5 more books this last trip. They were ones I’d had my eye on during previous trips, but it was  the 30% off that made me finally pick them up.

I went kind of crazy on Paperbackswap the last few weeks and ordered these books:

And one from my grandmother:

And finally I received a couple of review books in the mail as well:

Now … I need to start reading!!!

Mailbox Monday has returned home to Mailbox Monday’s site this year.

Quite a few this week. Two new purchases, four from a Paperbackswap box-of-books trade and one ARC for review!

I’ll start with the ARC, sent from the publisher after requesting it through an ad in Shelf Awareness:

On scholarship at a prestigious East Coast college, ordinary Mabel Dagmar is surprised to befriend her roommate, the beautiful blue-blooded Genevra Winslow. Ev invites Mabel to spend the summer at Bittersweet, a cottage on the Vermont estate where her family has been holding court for more than a century; it’s the kind of place where children twirl sparklers across the lawn during cocktail hour. Mabel falls in love with the midnight skinny-dips, the wet-dog smell lingering in the air, the moneyed laughter carrying across the still lake, and before she knows it, she has everything she’s ever wanted: wealth, friendship, a boyfriend, and, most of all, the sense, for the first time in her life, that she belongs.

But as Mabel becomes an insider, she makes a terrible discovery that leads to shocking violence and the revelation of the true source of the Winslows’ fortune. Mabel must choose: either expose the ugliness surrounding her and face expulsion from paradise, or keep the family’s dark secrets and redefine what is good and what is evil, in the interest of what can be hers.

Then I purchased these two new (hey, they were both on sale!)

And these four came from a PBS Box-of-Books swap. I have a feeling a couple of them will get traded again pretty soon (unread, too)…