Number #16 in the Maisie Dobbs series. It is 1941 and Maisie works for SOE and is in pursuit of a murderer amongst the Free French stationed in London. If you've enjoyed the Maisie series, you will enjoy this one, too. Always well-written and engaging.

A multigenerational love story about a grandmother and granddaughter and the lives they shared and the secrets that were kept. When the grandmother dies, her granddaughter travels for the first time to her grandmother’s native land of Cuba. There she learns about Cuba’s past, Cuba’s current state, and family secrets. Great read. Is book #1 in the series!

This book is beautifully written. Inspired by a real life phone booth in Japan. It is a story of love and hope after devastating loss and grief. A window into Japanese culture and the terrible loss of the 2011 tsunami. I was living in Texas at the time of the tsunami and on the night of a terrible tornado and hail storm in our town I thought of the people who had endured the tsunami in Japan. I was surprised at the calming effect and hope this story left me with.

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.

Fixie loves her life, but her mom needs a break. So her brother and sister help her take of her dad's prized possession his store. Fixie realizes that her siblings do not see the store the way she does. Which causes some friction. A chance meeting in a coffee shop. Fixie saves Sebastian's laptop, he gives her an IOU. Will she ever use it and how. Will this chance meeting help her life. Great Quick read by Sophia Kinsella.

It is June 1940. Paris is occupied by the Germans and Adolf Hitler is scheduled to visit. Kate Rees, an American sharpshooter, who learned to shoot on a farm in rural Oregon, is living in England with her Welsh husband when he and her baby daughter are killed during a German bomb attack. Kate is recruited by British intelligence and after some brief training, armed with only a rifle and a need for revenge, she parachutes into Occupied France to assassinate Hitler. She misses and runs for her life coming to the realization that the plan was a decoy, and she was set up. Extremely well-written historical thriller. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Jack and Annie saw wagons going to CA. They met a teacher that was 16 or 17 years old living in a dug out with a storm protector on it that she built. My favorite part of the book so far is that Jack is better at reading than everyone in his class. Can't wait to read more tomorrow.

A very amusing and entertaining story with unusual characters held captive in an apartment during a real estate viewing. During the course of the novel, each person's story is revealed, friendships are formed, questions are answered and all come together for a common humanity.

Evelyn Valpey, aware of her painful past and unsure of her role in society and the war effort, takes on a job with the "War Office" where she takes on the enemy--Fifth Column--by adopting a character unknown to herself and her friends. A bit rambling at times and moving from 1939/40 to 1948, the story explores MI5, counter intelligence, and Evelyn's inner turmoil.

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.