Thursday, September 6, 2012

Fall Preview Volume I

I love the Fall. As I get older, I appreciate it more and more. I love the smells and the colors, the crispness in the air and the chance to bring the hoodies out of the closet. And Pumpkin Spice coffee is my addiction. Fall is also the time when a lot of really great books get released. This year I have a lot of pre-orders I can't wait to get my hands on.

Here's the first volume of books I can't wait to snuggle up with this Fall season:

The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

The Secret Keeper I have been in love with Kate Morton's works since first being introduced to The Forgotten Garden as a Book club pick a few years ago. Her writing is beautiful and whimsical, haunting and unforgettable. Her stories are rich in the past and evoke fairy tales. Her books are always favorites and I can't wait to get my hands on her newest. Due out in October.

Synopsis from Goodreads:
1959 England. Laurel Nicolson is sixteen years old, dreaming alone in her childhood tree house during a family celebration at their home, Green Acres Farm. She spies a stranger coming up the long road to the farm and then observes her mother, Dorothy, speaking to him. And then she witnesses a crime.

Fifty years later, Laurel is a successful and well-regarded actress, living in London. She returns to Green Acres for Dorothy’s ninetieth birthday and finds herself overwhelmed by memories and questions she has not thought about for decades. She decides to find out the truth about the events of that summer day and lay to rest her own feelings of guilt. One photograph, of her mother and a woman Laurel has never met, called Vivian, is her first clue.

The Secret Keeper explores longings and dreams, the lengths some people go to fulfill them, and the strange consequences they sometimes have. It is a story of lovers, friends, dreamers and schemers, play-acting and deception told against a backdrop of events that changed the world

Reflected in You by Sylvia Day 
Reflected in You (Crossfire, #2)  Second book in the Crossfire trilogy, Reflected in You continues Eva and Gideon's story of damaged lovers. At first hesitant to pick up Bared to You since I hated Fifty Shades of Grey and not usually an erotic reader, I fell in love with Eva and Gideon and have been waiting for this book since devouring the first book. Beginning of October can't come fast enough.

Synopsis from Goodreads:
The hotly anticipated second book of the Crossfire Trilogy continues the sensual saga of Eva and Gideon that began inBared to You…the New York Times bestselling novel of “EROTIC ROMANCE THAT SHOULD NOT BE MISSED” (Romance Novel News). Gideon Cross. As beautiful and flawless on the outside as he was damaged and tormented on the inside. He was a bright, scorching flame that singed me with the darkest of pleasures. I couldn't stay away. I didn't want to. He was my addiction... my every desire... mine.

My past was as violent as his, and I was just as broken. We’d never work. It was too hard, too painful... except when it was perfect. Those moments when the driving hunger and desperate love were the most exquisite insanity. We were bound by our need. And our passion would take us beyond our limits to the sweetest, sharpest edge of obsession..

Mad River by John Sandford
Mad River I've been a huge fan of John Sandford's since I was a teenager and first discovered his Prey series featuring bad-ass detective Lucas Davenport. A few years ago, Sandford broke out the Virgil Flower's series, featuring, you guessed it, Virgil Flowers. Virgil was a character I loved from the Prey books and his series has been just as good and has the added benefit of me getting my hands on two Sandford books a year with Lucas's book coming out in the spring and Virgil's in the fall. Also due out in October.

Synopsis from Goodreads:
Bonnie and Clyde, they thought. And what’s-his-name, the sidekick. Three teenagers with dead-end lives, and chips on their shoulders, and guns.

The first person they killed was a highway patrolman. The second was a woman during a robbery. Then, hell, why not keep on going? As their crime spree cuts a swath through rural Minnesota, some of it captured on the killers’ cell phones and sent to a local television station, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers joins the growing army of cops trying to run them down. But even he doesn’t realize what’s about to happen next.

The Perfect Hope by Nora Roberts
The Perfect Hope (Inn Boonsboro Trilogy, #3) Third book in the Inn Boonsboro trilogy, The Perfect Hope is my most anticipated in this series. Roberts has been building the story of Hope and Ryder since the first book, The Next Always and I can't wait to read their love story. This series has been really great and as much as I loved the Bridal Quartet, there is just something about the Montgomery boys that makes me love this series a little more. Due out in November.

Synopsis from Goodreads:
The Montgomery brothers and their eccentric mother are breathing new life into the town of Boonsboro, Maryland, by restoring its historic hotel. And they’re finding their own lives revamped by love. This is Ryder’s story... Ryder is the hardest Montgomery brother to figure out — with a tough-as-nails outside and possibly nothing too soft underneath. He’s surly and unsociable, but when he straps on a tool belt, no woman can resist his sexy swagger. Except apparently Hope Beaumont, the innkeeper of his own Inn BoonsBoro. And though the Inn is running smoothly, thanks to Hope’s experience and unerring instincts, her big-city past is about to make an unwelcome — and embarrassing — appearance. Seeing Hope vulnerable stirs up Ryder’s emotions and makes him realize that while Hope may not be perfect, she just might be perfect for him...

Quote of the Day

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” 
― Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Quote of the Day

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” 
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Waiting on Wednesday



Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event hosted here, which spotlights new books we are anticipating.   

I think it's obvious I love Jill Shalvis. Her Lucky Harbor novels are some of my favorite romances. In her Animal series, Shalvis focuses on a small town in Idaho, a veterinary office and the three brothers that run it.
Rescue My Heart is Adam's story and one I am very much looking forward to. Release date is November 6 but luckily Jill Shalvis' books always seem to come out a few weeks early. Keeping my fingers crossed it's the same for Adam's story!

Rescue My Heart (Animal Magnetism, #3)
Synopsis from Goodreads:

After a tragic stint in the National Guards, Adam Connelly returns to Idaho and to Belle Haven, the animal shelter he owns with his brothers. All Adam wants is to be alone. Then he opens the door to the past—the woman whose heart he once broke. Still gorgeous, still tough-as-nails, but this time, unusually vulnerable.

Holly learned the hard way to never depend on a man for anything. Now, of all men, it’s the last one she wants to see, and the only one she needs. Her father has gone missing in the Bitterroot Mountains and she could use someone with tracking skills to help find him.

For Holly and Adam, each with their ghosts, a trek this desperate, this unpredictable, and this intimate, will have its share of risks—including opening their hearts one more time.





Sunday, September 2, 2012

Summer Sundays - The Reckoning

The Reckoning (The Taker, #2)


The Reckoning picks up where The Taker left off. Lanny and Luke are in London for the opening of an exhibit featuring some of Lanore’s possessions she has given away when she feels a sharpness in her head she hasn’t felt for over two hundred years. Instantly she knows Adair is free and does what any one would in her position, she flees London.

Adair is out of his imprisonment after being in the dark for so long and he has spent decades planning what he would do to Lanore when he was free. Now he has to find her and exact his revenge. He finds one of his former companions still living in Boston and begins to learn how to live in the twenty-first century.  Eventually Lanny and Adair are bound to have their reckoning.

I find myself simultaneously repulsed by and enamored of Adair. He is not a simple man to understand, no one has ever come close except Lanore. He has done vile, deplorable things in his long life and yet there is still something about him that pulls at me and I am captivated by him, clinging to the crumbs of his story and constantly wanting more.

Rich and multi-layered are the characters in Katsu’s novel and we are treated to even more depth from Lanore and Adair as well as a few additional characters. Their stories unravel as the reckoning draws nearer and Katsu sets a fast and furious pace.

As with The Taker, I have little feeling for the good guy, Luke. I don’t think he is worth Lanny’s time, I thought he was flat and I was much more interested in the immortals, both their past and present. Luke felt out of place to me and I kept hoping he would go away. Also, he was willing to throw away his whole life for Lanore, I never thought they had the kind of connection that would make that believable. I have always thought Luke was a means to an end, nothing more. Yes, I think Lanny deserves to be happy, I'm just not convinced Luke is the guy for the job.

Katsu builds the tension throughout the novel as the reckoning between Lanny and Adair draws nearer until you start to feel the same tension in your belly you are sure Lanore was suffering as she tries to outrun Adair’s wrath.  I wasn’t surprised at one of the twists leading to Lanore and Adair’s seeing each other again. I do wish there was more story after their showdown but my impatience will just have to wait until next year when the final book in the trilogy comes out.

The end left me distraught, I want to know more. I want to know what happens next. I don’t know how I will make it until next year when the final volume of this mesmerizing trilogy is in my hands.  I loved The Reckoning but if you are thinking of starting this trilogy, pick up The Taker first. 

Quote of the Day

Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. 
                                     ~Henry James

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Quote of the Day


“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”