The Overbooked Bibliophile

  My Rating: 3.75⭐ “Nothing in life goes according to plan. Nothing. And the sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be.” Eighty-four-year-old Louise Wilt has a ton of secrets she has kept from her family for decades. A “life-changing” letter from an old friend, has Louise making plans to take a trip, unbeknownst to the rest of her family. When twenty-one-year-old Tanner Quimby took a job as Louise’s live–in caregiver she never thought her job would entail anything beyond driving Louise around and making sure she was safe and in good health. Tanner has had her own share of disappointments and has a lot to figure out about her future. After her college education was halted due to an accident, she was forced to move back home and was living with her parents until recently. Moving out of her home (though not voluntarily) and taking the live-in position with Louise was a means of raising money to go back to school. Never had she imagined herself on a cross-country road trip with ...

My Rating: 3.5⭐ In the third installment in Jane Harper’s Aaron Falk series, we travel with AFP Officer to South Australian wine country, where he is to attend his friend Greg Raco’s son Henry’s christening. Aaron is Henry’s godfather. After his arrival, Aaron finds himself helping Raco investigate the disappearance of a local woman from a year ago. One year ago, thirty-nine-year-old Kim Gillespie, was reported missing, last seen at the Marralee Valley Annual Food and Wine Festival. Her baby daughter was found safe in her stroller. Kim was close to Raco’s family, having previously been in a long-term relationship with Raco’s brother Charlie and was the mother of his now seventeen-year-old daughter Zara. At the time of her disappearance, she was married to Rohan Gillespie. The discovery of her shoe near the local reservoir prompted conjecture that Kim had taken her own life. But her body was never found and her daughter is convinced that Kim would never commit suicide. Aaron finds himse...

My Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “For the first time in all my days on the road, it occurred to me to ask where I should go. The woman didn’t hesitate. She spoke with surprising firmness. “La Esperanza,” she said. The word meant hope.” Our protagonist Irene, heartbroken and lost after an unimaginable tragedy leaves her life in San Francisco, destination unknown. After a period of wandering, she lands up in the town of La Esperanza in Central America and rents a room at La Llorona, a hotel at the edge of a lake close to a looming volcano -  “a place of extraordinary beauty— heartbreaking beauty, you might say. Heartbreaking, because it was falling apart. Wherever I looked there was something magical. And something broken. It was the broken part that allowed me to feel at home in this place.” Little did she know at the time that she would soon assume responsibility for the hotel and make a life for herself in this foreign land surrounded by strangers who will become an integral part of her life. The ...

My Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐ Twenty-year-old Charlotte Richmond, daughter of a high-ranking government official, belongs to an affluent family but now lives on the other side of London, as a boarder (the reasons for which are revealed later in the novel). She mourns the loss of her brother who died on the front. She works as a typist in the Ministry of Information and spends her free time checking up on her friends and colleagues, though doing so is becoming increasingly difficult on account of the restriction imposed as the war rages on. She meets Tom Hawthorne, a young man who she notices daily feeding the birds in the park and befriends him. Tom, unable to serve on the front due to his physical limitations, works with his father in their family’s undertaking business and is waiting to start classes at the University to pursue higher education that he feels will enable him to strike out on his own. The sudden deaths of people close to her raise Charlotte’s suspicions and she feels that she is bein...

My Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐ A young man with a gun walks into a department store and begins shooting. Detective Elise Sutton, a cold case detective, buying towels for her daughters, hears the shots and witnesses the shooter aiming his weapon at a tall man and is compelled to take him down. With several eyewitness accounts corroborating Elise’s role in saving the lives of those present in the store on that day, the police have no doubts that Elise’s actions were justified. Her heroic act earns her accolades and recognition but Elise is consumed by guilt for taking the life of a young man. Traumatized she hopes that the testimony man whose life she saved will help her justify her actions to herself. But he seems to have disappeared without giving testimony. But when Elise finally meets the man, Wade Austin , the meeting does not end as Elise would have expected. The man in question becomes obsessed with Elise, following her every movement, threatening her safety as well as that of her family, leaving...