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Beach Read
RECOMMENDED: Beach Read by Emily Henry is $1.99! Thanks to everyone who let us know about this one. Catherine gave it an A:
I love this book. It does take you down into the darkness at times, but it leads you out again, and shows you the path so that you will be able to find it next time. It is sweet and sharp and clever and extremely funny and it left me with a happy sigh and a smile on my face.
A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.
Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.
They’re polar opposites.
In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they’re living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer’s block.
Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really.
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The Sun Down Motel
RECOMMENDED: The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James is $1.99! Elyse loved this one and gave it an A:
I love a good scary mystery, and The Sun Down Motel had all the elements to make it perfect. I loved the Gothic atmosphere, the theme of women coming together to get justice for other women, and the excellent momentum of the pacing. Other than possibly being too spooky for some, I can’t come up with a single reason why anyone should avoid this book.
Something hasn’t been right at the roadside Sun Down Motel for a very long time, and Carly Kirk is about to find out why in this chilling new novel from the USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of The Broken Girls.
Upstate New York, 1982. Viv Delaney wants to move to New York City, and to help pay for it she takes a job as the night clerk at the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York. But something isnʼt right at the motel, something haunting and scary.
Upstate New York, 2017. Carly Kirk has never been able to let go of the story of her aunt Viv, who mysteriously disappeared from the Sun Down before she was born. She decides to move to Fell and visit the motel, where she quickly learns that nothing has changed since 1982. And she soon finds herself ensnared in the same mysteries that claimed her aunt.
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Sleeping Giants
RECOMMENDED: Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel is $1.99 and a Kindle Daily Deal! It’s a scifi novel with some great female characters. Readers say that though this scifi is a little darker and less “feel good,” they loved it. However, some felt a bulk of the book was just setup and information dumping for the next book. It has a 3.8-star rating on Goodreads. Elyse enjoyed this one and I really loved the audiobook.
Sleeping Giants is a thriller fueled by an earthshaking mystery—and a fight to control a gargantuan power.
A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near her home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand.Seventeen years later, the mystery of the bizarre artifact remains unsolved—its origins, architects, and purpose unknown. Its carbon dating defies belief; military reports are redacted; theories are floated, then rejected.
But some can never stop searching for answers.
Rose Franklin is now a highly trained physicist leading a top secret team to crack the hand’s code. And along with her colleagues, she is being interviewed by a nameless interrogator whose power and purview are as enigmatic as the provenance of the relic. What’s clear is that Rose and her compatriots are on the edge of unraveling history’s most perplexing discovery—and figuring out what it portends for humanity. But once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, will the result prove to be an instrument of lasting peace or a weapon of mass destruction?
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Maisie Dobbs
Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear is $1.99! This is the first book in a beloved (and very long) historical mystery series. I read this one and here are my thoughts: I wish it focused on the mystery more and wow, it will bum you out. Have you read them?
Maisie Dobbs isn’t just any young housemaid. Through her own natural intelligence and the patronage of her benevolent employers, she works her way into college at Cambridge. When World War I breaks out, Maisie goes to the front as a nurse. It is there that she learns that coincidences are meaningful and the truth elusive. After the War, Maisie sets up on her own as a private investigator. But her very first assignment, seemingly an ordinary infidelity case, soon reveals a much deeper, darker web of secrets, which will force Maisie to revisit the horrors of the Great War and the love she left behind.
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Beach Read is pretty light But readable, so at that price point is a very safe bet for a weekend’s entertainment.
I’m a few books behind on the Maisie Dobbs series, but I can verify that your assessment of the first book holds true for the rest. There’s way too much navel-gazing and not enough mystery. Plus, the reader isn’t always privy to all the information needed to solve the mystery. Often, Maisie makes big leaps based on woo woo-level intuition. And, yes, the books will bum you out. At this point, I’m half-expecting the author to just set Maisie on fire or something equally dire since she’s running out of ways to punished her main character. But I must be a masochist because I keep buying/reading the books.
On another note, I’ve been wanting to read The Sun Down Motel since Elyse’s review, so I snapped it right up. Thanks.
Murder at Melrose Court by Karen Menuhin is on sale at Amazon for 99 cents.It’s the start of the Healthcliff Lennox cozy “country manor” mystery series and is a funny and lighthearted. The series is also available on Kindle Unlimited.
Josh Lanyon’s ALL’S FAIR trilogy is on sale as a set on Amazon for $2.99. This is a well reviewed series of M/M books.
Sarah MacLean’s The Day of the Duchess and Lisa Kleypas’s Marrying Winterborne are both $2.99 on Kindle.
I really like the Maisie Dobbs books, but I wouldn’t read a bunch of them at once—they’re more the “quiet mysteries that reflect on human nature” rather than the real “whodunnit thriller” kind.
I liked the first 75% of Beach Read, but the ending felt super rushed and jammed up and entirely too pat (which is too bad because it starts off so well!)
CLAIMED, the second book of Rebecca Zanetti’s Dark Protector series is onsale on Kindle for $1,99. This is a paranormal romantic suspense, and while I’ve not read them, they have been recommended to me and this book has a 4.19 rating on Goodreads.
Also on sale is PARTY OF TWO by Jasmine Guillory for $1.99. I think this one might have been mentioned earlier this week, but FYI.
I totally recommend reading any of Simone St. James books. They are terrific. The Masie Dobbs books are interesting. I have read most of them but the books take a turn that I was not comfortable with and I gave up on the series. Still need to read Sleeping Giant.
The Sun Down Motel was the first Simone St James that I picked up, after I read Elyse’s review, and by now I’ve read her entire backlist. Her books are exactly what I want out of a mystery–a whole lot of feminist subtext, plots that aren’t obvious but also aren’t too convoluted to follow, and really effectively creepy without being overly gory. My favorites are The Broken Girls and Silence for the Dead, but The Sun Down Motel is a steal for $1.99.
Hands down best cover ever: Sundown Motel</u) such a great pulp fiction noir vibe to it.
I gave Sleeping Giants and Waking Gods each 5 stars but Only Human only 4. It did some really interesting and unexpected things, but the first two books were better.
On an unrelated note, now that Audible is giving subscribers access to “Plus” books as part of their subscription, are there any romance recs among those offerings? The Plus books don’t seem to be easy to sort by genre.
@Ulrike Plus has a couple of KJ Charles trilogies available, all 16 books of Robin D. Owens’ Celta’s Heartmates series, and Lois McMaster Bujold Penric novellas.
I listened to the Penric novellas first (the ones I don’t already own) and am now trying to make my mind between SFF or queer historicals. I guess we’ll see what I’m in the mood for…
Susan’s thumbnail review of Maisie Dobbs is perfect, though I’ll add that nobody needs another woman detective whose main tools are empathy and intuition.
I read several of the Maisie Dobbs books until like @SandyH it got a bit weird. I picked up the Sun Down Motel – been waiting for that to go on sale!
@ReadKnitSnark, thanks! I own all the Penric audiobooks already, but I’ll check out those others.
I can’t rave enough about the brilliance of Simone St. James’s The Sun Down Motel. Truly creepy and unsettling and full of insights about American culture. I’ve loved all of her books but it is one of my favorites.
I was a lot less enthralled by Beach Read, unfortunately. I didn’t connect or really understand the characters, and I felt decidedly unenthusiastic about what the book has to say about romances. I’m still likely to try this author again but this was a problematic book for me.
It’s usually VERY hard to get me to read a contemporary romance.
But. I’m thinking of reading Beach Read next summer because all of the historical romance booktubers I watch have been raving about it. (Which makes me wary. Almost more than half the time if it’s a book others love, I’m one of the few who doesn’t.)
I found Maisie Dobbs very meh. I finished it, but there’s no way I’d ever re-read it or go for any of the sequels. Neither the story nor the characters grabbed me.