The books centers around Catherine always wondering what would have happened if she had a baby with her teen love. She thinks she missed out on a life of love and happiness, but does not realize the extent of the betrayal by her lover and her friend carried on throughout their marriage. The books drags in the middle with way too much description about the music career of Jimmy and could have had more of a focus on the emotions Jimmy experiences during the loss of his marriage.

All of the bikes are really cool. My favorite is the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-12R because I am wondering if ninjas use this bike and it is the "king of all sports bikes."

Really great read for people who like a little romance and friendship.

Book Eleven in the Maggie Hope series. Maggie sets out to 1943 Hollywood where she agrees to help her previous beau, John Sterling, solve the mystery of Gloria Hutton's death. It is here she encounters American Nazism, the Zoot Suit Riots, Segregation, and the glittery stars of Hollywood. There is also a great, highly anticipated (at least by this reader) foreshadowing of a storyline for Book 12! Love this series!!

Grace leaves an unfulfilling marriage in Australia and travels to Paris where she becomes a model for the House of Dior. Supposedly based on a true story, Grace finds her true self far away from home. Some of the setting seemed implausible; otherwise it was a quick and educational read (learning about fashion in the post WWII era).

Although I read to the end, I disliked this book very much, and I'm surprised it has so many great reviews. The writing is stiff and cliched and the characters are the same. The narrator Anna is a missing persons detective with a troubled past that’s revealed bit by bit through flashbacks as she works on multiple cases in an "unofficial" capacity while on leave from her job. It's clear that we're expected to see Anna as compelling and sympathetic, but I found her to be unlikable and her backstory was so dragged out that it became boring. The plot jumps from one case to another without a coherent connection and there are so many characters and events jammed into the past and present scenes that it's easy to lose track of things. I was also put off by the way the author weaves the real life case of Polly Klaas into the story - this feels sensationalistic and inappropriate, and it does nothing to make the fictional part of the story seem more real.

After getting into a fight with her roommate and abandoning her at a party, Charlie Jordan has become known on campus as "the girl who let her roommate get murdered." Though few will come out with their blame towards Charlie, the same can't be said for her roommate's family. You see, Charlie was at the party her roommate was last seen at, and she's pretty sure she saw the man who killed her. Unfortunately for Charlie, she has a tendency to get lost in her thoughts and hallucinate, so she's not sure what the man actually looked like - just what the figment of her imagination looked like, and he was something out of a Hollywood movie. Unable to deal with the guilt of being useless in the investigation, Charlie decides to use the local ride board to hitch a ride off campus and go home. Cue Josh Baxter, who just so happened to be at the board at the exact same time, and who is going in the same exact direction as Charlie needs to go. It seems like a perfect match! Unfortunately for Charlie, the further along the ride she goes, the more certain she is that the man she's with is not actually Josh Baxter. And he's probably not actually going to where she needs to go. And he seems to know things about her roommate's murder that he shouldn't know, things that were never released to the public. Stuck in the car with him for the rest of the night, Charlie has to do whatever it will take to survive. This is a great quick read, but there's nothing really spectacular about it. The main character getting "movies in her mind" was kind of weird and didn't really seem necessary to the plot at all. I really loved the idea of this book, but the execution of it wasn't there. It's definition something I couldn't put down, but it's not something I'd be likely to remember in a year.

Louise Erdrich’s novel speaks of her ancestors and Chippewa culture. Her grandfather fought termination bringing his flight to Washington DC to help defeat the proposed dispossession of the Chippewa from Turtle Mountain, North Dakota. At points the book dulls and could have been shorter, but her characters come to life and her story teaches.

Well in depth, lots of details and action, ends on a cliffhanger to start the next book. A very good read.

This is very much more of a character-driven story, and a character-exploration story, rather than a page turning, thrilling mystery novel. The main character, Anna, has just recently returned home after suffering a family tragedy and being kicked out by her husband. A detective who specializes in missing children, Anna's hometown has long haunted her as a girl she went to school with went missing in a still-unsolved case. Just as she returns, as it happens, another girl has gone missing - and Anna very quickly finds herself involved in solving the case. As she does so, her past trauma comes to light and becomes a force she will need to deal with if she is going to find Cameron and return to her family. I didn't really find this to be a page turner. In fact, it took me a while to get past the first section, because it's really just setting the stage and nothing much happens. I finally sat down and just plowed through the book in a day. It wasn't bad, but everything felt kind of flat and I didn't really care about Anna as a character. Even as she cried about the unknown trauma she had experienced, I never felt myself dying to know what had happened to her that led to her husband kicking her out. I just didn't care. I also don't love using real-life cases in a fictional story. It just felt exploitive and gross to me. Polly was a real girl who underwent something terrible, as did her family, and using it as some form of entertainment just doesn't sit right with me. Especially when you're going to make it a big piece of your plot, with your character investigating her bedroom and listening to a psychic talk about her.