The truth of what really happened between Paul and Lee and Wendy is told primarily through a series of interviews between Paul and Dr. Lisa Boyers, a forensic psychologist with her own troubled past. As Paul relates how he met both Lee and Wendy and shares the disturbing patterns that developed among them, Dr. Boyers must face not only the memories of her own difficult childhood and abusive marriage, a relationship that ended only with the death of her husband, but also the media attention that includes their delving into her past looking for dirt.

It seems that my reading has definitely veered towards the dark side lately, with this being my third review in a month that involves abuse issues or dysfunctional teenage relationships, or both. While I wouldn’t seek that out just for the sake of it, I have found all of them to be quite well written, each in their own way.

With Lovesick, I found myself squeezing in a few pages whenever I had a moment to spare, not wanting to wait any longer than absolutely necessary to find out the conclusion for both stories. This was definitely a psychological thrill ride worth taking!

Lovesick was published as an ebook in October 2011 and is coming out in hard copy this June. Right now, we have one galley copy to give away. Just leave a comment below to be entered to win – US & Canada only. We’ll announce the winner in our giveaway column on February 22nd.

Don’t miss a thing: Check out our current giveaways. Subscribe to our feed or video reviews on YouTube. Follow us @5M4B on Twitter or on Facebook.

Trish thanks Media Muscle and PublishingWorks, Inc. for the review copy of this book. When she can pull herself away from her reading, Trish blogs at In So Many Words.

Although I have read a few of the books in this series, it has been a while and I am a bit fuzzy on the details of their lives. That didn’t stop me from being pulled into this story, however.

In Gun Games, Peter and Rina are hosting Gabriel Whitman, a fifteen-year-old, home-schooled piano prodigy whose mother and father are preoccupied with their individual lives. As the book opens, Gabe encounters a group of local bullies and finesses his way out of a confrontation with impressive cool, despite his internal panic. Decker, meanwhile, is meeting a woman who has come to the police questioning her own teenage son’s recent death, which has been labeled a suicide. She raises enough questions that Decker agrees to investigate, propelling him into looking at the same prep school gang that threatened Gabe.

The story moves back and forth between the police investigation and Gabe’s personal life, as he meets and falls in love with Yasmine, a fourteen-year-old Persian Jew who loves music as much as he does. Their first date is a clandestine trip to, of all places, the opera—a secret almost as much because Yasmine’s father doesn’t approve of her passion for music as for the fact that he most certainly would not approve of her spending time with a non-Jewish boy.

Although I am a few years removed from the teenage scene, I thought Kellerman did an admirable job of writing from the perspective of Gabe and Yasmine. I also appreciated how she wove the two plotlines together, letting you see how disconnected the adults were from their kids’ lives without making you feel like you were jumping between two different stories. This is a fascinating, although disturbing, tale that makes me thankful to have survived adolescence.

CONTENT NOTE: Even though the book centers on adolescents, it is definitely written for a mature audience. There is strong language as well as teenage sexual encounters, bullying and violence.

When she’s not too busy reading, Trish blogs at In So Many Words. A review copy of this book was provided by HarperCollins.

The arrival of a drifter named Charlie Memphis, hired to help her crippled father with maintenance, throws a stone into the placid waters of their lives. He’s handsome, a stranger, and treats Callie’s mother, Teal, with appreciation—something she doesn’t get from her husband. You can feel the attraction cracking between them, and it’s a wonder that Callie’s father doesn’t start worrying sooner. Callie is also growing up, in that awkward stage between tomboy and young woman. She’s got a crush on Virgil, the high school boy spending his summer working at the drive-in, and a crush on Charlie Memphis too.

One thing I loved about The Starlite Drive-in was how well the characters were fleshed out. People may tip the scale to the side of “good guy” or “bad guy” but, as with their real-life counterparts, they are a mix of both. The Starlite Drive-in is packed with detail; reading this book is a sensory experience. You can easily picture settings, people’s outfits, expressions. I feel as if I would recognize them on the street.

And although the discovery of just whose bones they were won’t be a total shock, the joy of this novel lies not in the revelation of a mystery, but in the journey to get there—a path filled with sun-splashed afternoons, first love and painful revelations, and a woman who made an unexpected choice and had the backbone to keep on with it.

Highly recommended. The Starlite Drive-in is haunting and evocative, the kind of novel that stays with you for a long time. I give it 5 stars.

We have a copy to give away to one of you, thanks to the publisher! Just leave a comment here, and we’ll announce the winner in our giveaway column on February 1. This is open to U.S. and Canadian addresses. This giveaway is now closed.

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Elizabeth is glad she never has to be 12 again, but she still enjoys reading of other’s travails. Learn more at her blog Planet Nomad.

In an attempt to learn more about the man, Rutledge goes to the scene of the purported murder, a small village east of London, set in the marshes and forgotten by time. Getting information there is more than difficult—the villagers are beyond taciturn, and are unwilling to permit an outsider any access to their secrets. It’s obvious they’re hiding things and don’t want him there, and when Rutledge checks himself into the town’s only inn, they are less than forthcoming with information and even threaten him. It takes him some time to even determine that the dead man (the one who confessed) was not in fact the man he claimed to be, and there is still the matter of the confession to deal with. His search leads him to the supposed victim, the man the dead man claimed to be, and the woman they all loved.

Rutledge is determined however, and keeps following any and every lead, driving back and forth to London, uncovering secrets old and new. He must also deal with his own demons, in particular an episode during the recent War that has left him carrying a crippling burden of guilt, not to mention the shame of having been shell-shocked and continuing nightmares. As he meets a deserter, a former Major, and others who were involved, he has to separate out his own feelings from the clues each presents him. What secrets are the villagers hiding, and do they come to bear on the murders?

The Confession is a classic murder mystery—crisp clues, drama and old skeletons to find and more recent secrets to uncover. The characters are well fleshed-out and I thoroughly enjoyed this book. If you like a good mystery, I highly recommend this one, and I’ll be looking for other Inspector Rutledge novels (this is part of a series, but can be read alone).
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Elizabeth thoroughly enjoys a good mystery, especially one that makes her crave a good cup of tea. Read more at her blog Planet Nomad.

The Invisible Ones is told by 2 narrators in 2 times. The novel opens with Ray in hospital in August, but moves back and forth between that time and several months earlier, when the events that put him there come into play. The second narrator is a Romany teen named JJ, and he provides a fresh perspective on life for a British Romany in the late years of the 20th century. He lives with his mum, a single woman, in a trailer, and camps out with his uncle, cousin, great-uncle and grandparents in an extended family group. His part of the narration opens with a trip the family is taking to Lourdes to pray for a miracle healing for his cousin, young Christo Janko, who at 6 is weak and sickly. It becomes apparent early on that Christo’s mother was the missing Rose, and that the family claim she ran off with a gorjio man.

The family Rose married into is pure-blood, “the pure black blood,” as the Romany themselves put it, but that blood seems to carry a disease that kills the young males of the line. Throughout the novel, the theme of blood appears again and again—both in the sense of bloodline and in the physical reality. That the family is hiding something is apparent early on, but the extent of the secret is revealed bit by tantalizing bit. Ray is tireless in his search for the missing Rose, and when human bones are discovered in an old camp-site, he thinks he’s found her. Meanwhile, JJ invites a girl from school over for tea and realizes how shocked she is at his living conditions–it opens his eyes to all sorts of things. He finds hidden things in his Uncle Ivo’s trailer that he can’t explain. And his long-lost great-aunt, who’s left the family in disgust, meets Ray to discuss what she knows of Rose’s disappearance.

The Invisible Ones is a great novel—you won’t be able to put it down. It’s suspenseful, a mystery novel, but what makes it so fascinating is that it’s very character-driven, and introduces the reader to a new culture hidden within a familiar one. I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it.

Elizabeth can understand the call of the open road; she’s even been known to threaten to run away with the Gypsies. Read more at her blog Planet Nomad.

Several of the other books in this series have been reviewed here, including The Bishop and The Knight. In The Queen, we see Patrick dividing his efforts between two cases, one involving a serial killer that is out of prison after only thirteen years due to a judicial mishap, and the other a man who has gone missing while his wife and daughter lay murdered in their home.

Amidst all of this, these cases have taken Patrick right to the doorstep of his brother Sean, with whom he has had a strained and distant relationship for many years, and Sean’s wife Amber. His stepdaughter Tessa is also nearby, having just finished winter session for prospective students at the university.

James’ books have all the hallmarks of great psychological thrillers, including layers of intrigue, conspiracies, and plenty of plot twists and turns along the way. He draws his readers in even further with truly believable characters and the exploration of deeper issues such as love and forgiveness and faith, such as in this dialogue between Patrick and his fellow agent/girlfriend Lien-hua:

Lien-hua: To find out what lies at the core of someone’s personality, you need to know more than what he wants.
Patrick: What he loves?
L: No.
P: Dreams of?
L: Uh-uh.
P: Fears?
She shook her head.
P: Then what?
L: What he regrets. Only when you know what someone most deeply regrets will you know what matters to him most.

And Patrick’s conclusion from this conversation: “We run from the past and it chases us; we dive into urgency but nothing deep is ultimately healed.” Or, as Tessa had put it earlier, “Denial is too cheap a cure.”

If you are a fan of suspenseful yet thoughtful books, The Queen (as well as the rest of the series) is definitely worth the read.

Trish loves a good mystery, even if it keeps her up too late at night! She blogs about books and other things at In So Many Words.

Erica and Beth Calcott have returned to Storton Manor, a house they’ve inherited from their grandmother Meredith, a woman who was cold and unloving. Beth is severely depressed and recovering from a suicide attempt. Erica believes Beth’s depression began when their cousin Henry disappeared when they were children, and is determined to recover the repressed memories from that event. Shortly after arriving at the manor, Erica comes across Dinny, a traveler whose family camps on the edge of the Calcott property. Erica, Beth and Dinny were friends as children, in defiance of Meredith’s attempts to keep them apart.

The Legacy intertwines Erica’s first person account in the present day with the story of her great-grandmother Caroline, a New York socialite who moved to the Oklahoma Territory to be with her rancher husband at the turn of the 20th century. Caroline has trouble adjusting to life in the wide open – she’s afraid of the Indians who live and work on the ranch, suffers with the extreme hot and cold temperatures, and to top it all off, is unable to conceive the child she so desperately desires.

While the two accounts appear to be separate stories set 100 years apart, as Erica determines what happened to Henry, she also comes across some letters written from Meredith to Caroline, and she pieces together her great-grandmother’s past and learns the reason her family has hated Dinny’s family.

I enjoyed The Legacy for a few reasons. I like character-driven novels where the story is told by alternating characters. Some readers feel that this pulls them out of the story, but I especially enjoy this device when the narratives take place in different places and times, as in this novel. I also like books that have a gripping plot that pulls you in and keeps you guessing. What happened to Henry and how Caroline went from a ranch in mid-western US to a manor in a London suburb is slowly unfurled in a painfully wonderful manner.

The Legacy is an entertaining read that would be of interest to anyone who enjoys family secrets and unusual settings.

Nancy sometimes enjoys her boring, if busy, life. She writes about her 2 boys, books and life in Colorado at Life With My Boys and Books.

New reporter Joanne Ross finds herself inextricably involved, as a combination of her job at the Highland Gazette and her friendship with Patricia Ord Mackenzie, the laird’s daughter who is right at the center of the two deaths. Joanne is a single mother of two young girls who has had the gall to leave her abusive husband, although she manages to maintain relatively good relations with her parents-in-law. In small-town Scotland in the 1950s, a woman going into a public bar for a glass of wine with her colleagues is considered immoral, and the traveling “tinkers” can’t assume they will get justice if falsely accused. Joanne knows that if she even spends too much time with her colleagues at the paper, her husband will be able to get full custody of the children. However, this is also a time and place of closely-knit relationships, of innumerable cups of tea shared with neighbors; a time when being a good reporter often meant knowing a place and its people.

A Double Death on the Black Isle has an interesting story line, and the guilty party is not quickly identified, which makes for a good murder mystery. The characters are fully fleshed-out. Especially fascinating is the character of Patricia, unwanted by her mother, good at running the farm, pregnant by someone who wasn’t in her social class and possessed of a mind to do something about it…maybe. The book ends with a twist that leaves you wondering, having to decide for yourself what really happened and who was really guilty. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

A Double Death on the Black Isle is part of a series, although I didn’t realize that initially. It stands alone just fine; however I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the first one, and can’t wait to read the 3rd.

Elizabeth loves murder mysteries and really good, properly-made tea. She feels those two things go together. Learn more at her blog Planet Nomad.