Book: Hollow Bones

 Book: Hollow Bones

Author: Jodi Piccoult

Pages: 464

This is my 234th read for the year

What Amazon Says:

On September 11, 2001, when Molly Fitzgerald was only 2 months old, her mother went to an appointment at the World Trade Center and never came home.  Her father and the stepmother who raised her couldn't have loved her more, but she still grew up with a healthy dread of disasters.  Now an adult, she runs the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness, mapping out ways to save lives during storms, epidemics and airplane crashes.  She and her husabnd, Jesse - a police polygraph expert with his own history of crisis - have found a love that is a solace in a dangerous world.  But then the unexpected upends their new marriage, leading them both to question everything they thought they knew.  Moving between past and present, this book is an epic story of the lies we tell ourselves as we write the narratives of our lives, the plans we design to protect outselves at the worst moments, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters.

Started out interesting but quickly became too many things.  Very political.

Stars: 2

Book: The Demon Overlord's Retirement Plan

 Book: The Demon Overlord's Retirement Plan

Author: MH Foster

Pages: 223

This is my 234th read for the year

What Amazon Says:

Galornus Prime was the Demon Overlod.  He had defeated the Hero and done everything worth doing - some of it more than once.  His retirement plan was simple: get a goat, farm quietly in the small town of Lower Middleton, and avoid accidentally conquering anything.  The plan didn't include soul-crushing town halls, after-school combat lessons with children, and an undergarment-based warwith the rose-growing widow next door.  When corrupt officials and greedy merchants threaten his infuriatingly loveable neighbrs, Galornus faces a new kind of challenge: saving the village without revealing he is the monster parents invoke to make children eat their vegetables.

I wanted to like this book.  I looked it up on Amazon before I bought it because it looks cute and humerous and thought it would be a fun read.  What I should have done is read the Goodreads reviews.  Once I started to read this book, I could not quite put my finger on the choppy and clunky writing.  Found out that the author used AI to write this.  Ugh - WHY.  So lazy.

Stars: 2

Book: Becoming the Boogeyman

 Book: Becoming The Boogeyman

Author: Richard Chizmar

Pages: 464

This is my 233rd read for the year

What Amazon Says:

Back in the summer of 1988, a young Richard Chizmar was catapulted into the center of a living nightmare as the serial killer Joshua Gallaher - dubbed by the media as "The Boogeyman" stalked his tranquil Maryland town.  A lot has changed in the intervening years.  These days, Chizmar enjoys a certain level of celebrity and notoriety himself, being the only person that an incarcerated Josh Gallagher will speak to on or off the record.  Chizmar likes to believe that he's doing the world a public service by visiting Gallagher in prison, as there are plenty of other nameless victims out there who Gallagher might finally admit to killing and bring closure to grieving loved ones, and a dark rhythm and routine begin to take hold.  But Chizmar eventually finds there's a price to be paid for dancing with the devil, when a masked figure with all the hallmarks of Gallagher's reign of terror from 30 years ago now leaves a horrifying calling card in front of Chizmar's home, and it's clear there's a new player on the board in the ongoing game that the Boogeyman controls.  

This was a great second book in the Boogeyman trilogy.  Well written and a nice follow up ot the first book.  Now years in the future when Richard has a grown family, his relationship with the killer starts to affect him personally.  Even though this story is not based on true events in the author's home town, he does a great job mixing real people with a fictious killer.

Stars: 4 

Book: Something Is Killing The Children Omnibus 2

 Book: Something Is Killing The Children Omnibus 2

Author: James Tynion

Pages: 512

This is my 232nd read for the year

What Amazon Says:

Erica Slaughter has broken ranks with the House of Slaughter- and now she's paying the price. As she travels the backroads of America to hunt terrifying new monsters, she must also stay ahead of the deadly agents sent to eliminate her.  But the further she gets from Archer's Peak, the more her shadowed past begins to catch up with her. 

stars: 4 

Book: Edison's Alley

 Book: Edison's Alley

Author: Neal Shusterman

Pages: 256

This is my 231st read for the year

What Amazon Says:

14 year old Nick has learned that the strange antiques in his attic bedroom were left there by the eccentric Inventor Nikola Tesla.  They are pieces of Tesla's Far Range Energy Emitter, capable of transmitting "free energy" to the globe.  Some components of the contraption are still missing, but the objects themselves seem to be leading Nick and his friends to their current owners.  However, members of the Accelerati, a menacing secret society of physicist, are on the hunt too, and their brazen leader, Dr. Alan Jorgenson, will stop at nothing to foil Nick and steal the objects.  It takes a dangerous build-up of electromagnetic energy in the atmosphere to reverse everyone's fortunes - and lead Nick to his destiny.

This is a second book in the trilogy and it was a pretty good follow up.  These are yound adult books, but I still enjoyed it.  I will be anxious to see how the author wraps it up.

Stars: 4 

Book: Chasing the Boogeyman

 Book: Chasing the Boogeyman

Author: Richard Chizmar

Pages: 336

This is my 230th read for the year

What Amazon Says:

In the summer of 1988, the mutilated bodies of several missing girls begin to turn up in a small Maryland town.  The grisly evidence leads police to the terrifying assumption that a serial killer is on the loose in the quiet suburb.  But soon a rumor begins to spread that the evil stalking local teens is not entirely human.  Law enforcement, as well as members of the FBI, are certain that the killer is a living, breathing madman - and he's playing games with them.  For a once peaceful community trapped in the depths of paranoia and uspicion, it feels like a nightmare that will never end.  Recent college graduate Richard Chizmar returns to his hometown just as a curfew is enacted and a neigborhood watch is formed.  Amid preparing for his wedding and embarking on a writing career, he soon finds himself thrust into a real-life horror story.  Inspired by the terrifying events, Richard writes a personal acocunt of the serial killer's reign of terror, unaware that these events will continue to haunt him for years to come.  A clever, terrifying, and heartrending work of metafiction, this book is the ultimate marriage between horror fiction and true crime.

This was a great read.  I had to actual google that this was a work of fiction because of the way it was written like true crime.  There are some true parts - Richard did go back to his hometown after college and before he got married.  And he did live in Edgewood Maryland.  There was no Boogeyman, BUT there was a guy who would break into people's houses and watch people sleep in the 1980s in that town, and that is where he got the start of his story.  There are 2 more books in this series, and I am going to read those to see where it ends up.

Stars: 4.5

Book: The Address

 Book: The Address

Author: Fiona Davis

Pages: 368

This is my 229th read for the year

What Amazon Says:

When a chance encounter with Theodore Camden, one of the architects of the grand NY apartment house the Dakota, leads to a job offer for Sara Smythe, her world is suddently awash in possibility - n0 mean feat for a servant in 1884.  The opportunity to move to America.  The opportunity to be the female manager of the Dakota.  And the opportunity to see more of Theo, who understands Sara like no one else - and is living in the Dakota with his wife and three young children.  100 years later, Bailey Camden is desperate for new opportunities: Fresh out of rehab, the former interior designer is homeless, jobless, and penniless.  Bailey's grandfather was the ward of famed architect Theodore Camden, yet Bailey won't see a dime of the Camden family's substantial estate; instead, her "cousin" Melinda - Camden's biological great-granddaughter - will inherit almost everything.  So when Melinda offers to let Bailey oversee the renovation of her lavish Dakota apartment, Bailey jumps at the chance, despite her dislike of Melinda's vision.  The renovation will take away all the character of the apartment Theodore Camden himself lived in -and died in, after suffering multiple stab wounds by a former Dakota employee who had previously spent 7 months in an insane asylum -a madwoman named Sara Smythe.  A century apart, Sara and Bailey are both tempted by and struggle against the golden excess of their respective ages - for Sara, the opulence of a world ruled by the Astors and Vanderbilts; for Bailey the nightlife's free-flowing drinks and cocaine - and take refuge in the Upper West Side's gilded fortress.  But a building with a history as rich, and often as tragic, as the Dakota's can't hold its secrets forever, and what Bailey discovers inside could turn everything she thought she knew about Theodore Camden - and the woman who killed him - on its head.

I have read several of Fiona Davis' books and usually deliver it, but this one missed the mark for me.  I didn't really care for many of the characters, and it was easy to figure out the big secret.  I liked the story - she always uses true to life circumstances to build her historical fiction, and I do like the dual time line of her books.  This one just wasn't as good as some of her others.

Stars: 3