This was okay. Josephine has just gotten married. As a child, she was known as a "Divine" - she went to a very expensive school for entitled rich people, where the children were taught nothing academic and mostly just how to treat people they considered beneath them poorly. She hasn't thought about her years there much since she left, but when her husband starts asking questions about the box of mementos she's kept, she's forced to relive her past and confront some of the darker moments within - especially the tragic tale of her roommate, Gerry. The mystery part takes a bit to develop, and really isn't the focus of the story? It seems more like the struggle of a young girl to find her place in the world, and to deal with the pressure to conform to what her friends and family want her to be. The chapters alternated between her years at the school and her adult life, and I honestly didn't really care about her as an adult. Those chapters didn't really add anything to my experience. By the end I was left with this vague feeling like I'd missed something important, but I'm not sure what? This was the sort of book that seemed like my jam, because I love a good boarding school mystery, but something about it fell flat and I just didn't adore it like I expected to.

I listened to this book on audio. I found it very hard to stay engaged in this. Perhaps already knowing the outcome diminished the story for me, the details provided went into the minutia. The author should not have done the audio - whew his accents were awful.

This was a quick read. I listened to the the audio version on Overdrive. Peter gives you some different ways to tackle downsizing to get by emotional attachment to items in your own house or in someone else house. I like that he touched on the importance of not taking in things from family members just because they're downsizing doesn't mean they should give it to you.

This book was great! I loved the character of Sam Hill. Sam was born with a genetic abnormality, ocular albinism, which gives him red eyes! How he deals with that all the way through his life, with his loving parents, and best friends Ernie and Mickie! I really enjoyed this story.

Three characters, two timelines, and a lot of predictable occurrences. Estelle, glamour queen of Paris, is living the life, or so it seems, at the Ritz Hotel. Meanwhile, Sophie is preparing to return to France after her perilous and tragic escape from Poland. And, present day Lia who is trying to figure it all out after inheriting Estelle's Paris Apartment. A good, and also a little predictable, read.

It’s unusual for me to quit after reading half a book, but I just couldn’t get into this one. I had high expectations because I really liked Underground Airlines by the same author.  The Quiet Boy is told in two timelines 10 years apart. This is a common enough plot structure, but here the jumping back and forth makes the story confusing and disjointed. Jay Shenk is a medical malpractice lawyer who thinks he's found the case of a lifetime. Jay's adopted son Ruben is Jay's precocious assistant as a young teen and is trying to figure out who he is as a young adult. I liked these two characters and the scenes involving the lawsuit are both funny and spot on realistic. But I kept waiting for something to happen. What is this book about? I couldn’t figure it out after 197 pages so I gave up.

Probably more of a three and a half star read, but rounded up because I couldn't seem to put it down. Mia is a London actress headed to LA to find her big break. While auditioning there, she meets a girl named Emily - who proceeds to be the weirdest person ever. After panicking about potentially running past her meter, Emily proceeds to give Mia her wallet and car keys so Mia can pay it for her. And then she vanishes. Gone. She leaves no contact info of any sort, nor does she wait by her car - instead she seems to disappear for days, leaving Mia, a complete stranger, with all her valuables and no idea what to do. Thus starts Mia's quest to find Emily, which is much harder than you would think it today's world - especially when it takes Mia a long time to figure out she should really open the wallet so she can at least have a last name for Emily. The book was quick paced and full of action, and I really felt for the terribly awkward position Mia was placed into. However, I didn't love the weird moments of sexism that the author threw in - I'm not sure why we had to have Mia have a "gut feeling" that it clearly could not have been a woman behind Emily's disappearance, for instance. The ending was also kind of over the top. I didn't LOVE this book, but I did enjoy it and I think it's good for a fun read.

I was given this book but was reluctant to read it because of the cover! However I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy a very good read once I decided to persevere and read it. It follows the trials and tribulations of a once landed family in England who are trying to maintain the inheritance despite overwhelming current circumstances. I really enjoyed it.

In the book What Happened at Midnight, Frank and Joe Hardy had to keep a special electronic away from bandits, smugglers, and gangs. They were basically playing keep away from the bandits, smugglers, and gangs. They had to protect it because their father was helping the owner of the special electronic be safe.

This is another one of those books where the journey is really fun, but then the author proves that writing endings is really challenging. You can have a great idea for an atmospheric mystery, but you also need to have a great idea for how you are going to close things out, which Sarah Pearse didn't seem to have. The book follows Detective Elin Warner, who isn't really a detective anymore after a case went wrong and she decided to take some extended leave. Elin and her boyfriend, Will, have arrived at a hotel in the Swiss Alps to celebrate her brother's engagement. The hotel just happens to also be a really creepy former sanatorium, because the designer thought that would be a super cool place to build a fancy hotel. To continue with wonderful decision making skills, Elin also decides that this would be a fitting trip to accuse her brother of possibly killing their younger sibling during a childhood vacation. Because, hey, nothing says "happy engagement!" like "did you kill our brother, though? You can totally tell me if you did." There are just a few problems with this plan - first, Elin doesn't really talk to her brother anymore, so finding time to accuse him of this is a challenge. Second, his fiancée just went missing, and it may or may not be in poor taste to accuse him of anything given those circumstances. Third, there is an avalanche approaching the hotel, so they really all need to leave. And, of course, fourth, some people are starting to get murdered. After staying behind and getting trapped from the avalanche, Elin has to really deal with all her personal issues at once because she is the only cop-like person on the mountain who can investigate anything. No one can come help until the weather clears, which probably won't be for a while. There were a few issues I had with the book, two of which I found to be major issues. The first is that this was a fun crime novel, but ultimately it seems like no one could ever be punished for the murders that happened here. Elin isn't a detective in this area, as she points out again and again, and she tends to disobey the orders she is given (or just hides what she is doing because if she doesn't ask permission, she isn't doing anything wrong?) so it seems like everything she has gathered would be utterly useless. She also has a weird tendency to tell everyone around her everything she has discovered. Like, maybe they don't all need to know every piece of evidence you have gathered? You know someone around here is killing people, maybe stop telling everyone everything and you'd have better luck. The second is that the ending was just really dumb. The culprit didn't really make any sense, and it seemed like a massive overreaction for that person to be the one responsible for everything. I think it's worth it for the fun atmosphere of being trapped in the mountains with a killer, as long as you keep your expectations in line for the ending.