Shaking Out the Dead, by K. M. Cholewa

The Story Plant, ISBN 9781611881431, June 2014

Paris, Tatum, and Geneva are all struggling with love--what it is, and whether they have it. Tatum and Geneva have complicated personal histories, and it's sort of implied that Paris does too, though we don't learn much about his past.

Tatum, in her mid-thirties, is estranged from her family, which is to say her sister, has found that she always fails at love--there is no doubt in her mind that it's her failure, that she is in some way invincibly unlovable--and has failed at suicide a number of times. Most recently, she has had a failed love affair with Vincent, son of an old friend of Geneva's, and survived breast cancer by means of a mastectomy. She of course did not have reconstructive surgery following the mastectomy. Her sister has just died, and she is about to become responsible for her niece, Rachel.

Recently Received

These are the latest galleys I've received. I'll be reading and reviewing them over the next couple of months.

The Art of Arranging Flowers

Lynne Branard

PENGUIN GROUP Berkley, NAL / Signet Romance, DAW

Berkley Trade

Pub Date   Jun 3 2014

Description

A moving and eloquent novel about love, grief, renewal—and the powerful language of flowers.
 
Ruby Jewell knows flowers. In her twenty years as a florist she has stood behind the counter at the Flower Shoppe with her faithful dog, Clementine, resting at her feet. A customer can walk in, and with just a glance or a few words, Ruby can throw together the perfect arrangement for any occasion.
 
Whether intended to rekindle a romance, mark a celebration, offer sympathy, or heal a broken heart, her expressive floral designs mark the moments and milestones in the lives of her neighbors. It’s as though she knows just what they want to say, just what they need.
 
Yet Ruby’s own heart’s desires have gone ignored since the death of her beloved sister. It will take an invitation from a man who’s flown to the moon, the arrival of a unique little boy, and concern from a charming veterinarian to reawaken her wounded spirit. Any life can be derailed, but the healing power of community can put it right again.


READERS GUIDE INSIDE

Cruise, by Suzanne Vermeer

Open Road Integrated Media, ISBN 9781480443807, May 2014

Heleen and Frank are a middle class Dutch couple who have been married for seventeen years. For this year's honeymoon, Frank has arranged for a Mediterranean cruise.

What the reader knows, but Heleen doesn't, is that Frank is planning to disappear into another life during this cruise.

One night during the idyllic cruise, Frank goes out for a walk around the ship while Heleen turns in for the night. When she wakes the next morning to find that he never returned, she raises the alarm and a search ensues, but he is not found.

Thus begins the most difficult year of Heleen's life. She first slowly adjusts to being a widow, and then begins to discover Frank's disturbing double life.

Recently Received

These are the latest galleys I've received. I'll be reading and reviewing them over the next couple of months.

Cruise

Suzanne Vermeer

Open Road Integrated Media

Pub Date   May 13 2014

Description

A woman learns that her husband has been living a dark secret life she could never have imagined

An anniversary cruise for Frank and Helen is perfect, until the unthinkable happens and Frank disappears. Helen does everything to find her husband, but is distraught to be unable to and returns home.

After spending the next few months searching, Helen hears from someone who has news of her husband. But not the news she hoped for: Helen learns that Frank was leading a double life. It becomes increasingly apparent that the man she married had a dark side Helen never could have imagined. Only Suzanne Vermeer, the best-selling mystery writer on the Netherlands, could spin this story with such suspense.

Million-Dollar Maverick

Christine Rimmer

Harlequin

Harlequin Special Edition

Pub Date   Jun 17 2014

Description

Finding true love: priceless 

RUST CREEK RAMBLINGS 

People say that the odds of finding your perfect partner are rather like the odds of hitting the lottery: slim to none. It's hard to believe, faithful readers, but Nate Crawford may just have accomplished both. We have the scoop on Rust Creek Falls' best-kept secret: our former mayoral candidate is now a very wealthy man! Yet he is going out of his way to make sure no one finds out. The question is, why? 

Insiders whisper that Nate is also keeping another secret from his new girlfriend, nurse Callie Kennedy—a big one—and it could be a game changer. Place your bets, dear readers! What will she do when she learns her "regular guy" boyfriend is really a maverick millionaire?

Paw and Order

A Chet and Bernie Mystery

Spencer Quinn

Atria Books

Atria Books

Pub Date   Aug 5 2014

Description

In the seventh book in the brilliant New York Times bestselling mystery series, canine narrator Chet and P.I. Bernie journey to Washington, DC, and the dog-eat-dog world of our nation’s capital.

Stephen King has called Chet “a canine Sam Spade full of joie de vivre.” Robert B. Parker dubbed Spencer Quinn’s writing “major league prose.” Now the beloved team returns in another suspenseful novel that finds Chet sniffing around the capital city and using his street smarts to uncover a devilish plot.

Chet and Bernie pay a visit to Bernie’s girlfriend, Suzie Sanchez, a crack reporter living in far-off Washington, DC. She’s working on a big story she can’t talk about, but when her source, a mysterious Brit with possible intelligence connections, runs into trouble of the worst kind, Bernie suddenly finds himself under arrest.

Meanwhile Chet gets to know a powerful DC operative who may or may not have the goods on an ambitious politician. Soon Chet and Bernie are sucked into an international conspiracy, battling unfamiliar forces under the blinking red eyes of a strange bird that Chet notices from the get-go but seems to have slipped by everybody else. Most menacing of all is Barnum, a guinea pig with the fate of the nation in his tiny paws.

As Harry Truman famously quipped, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” Too bad he didn’t get to meet Chet!

Inn at Last Chance (Last Chance #7, by Hope Ramsay

Forever (Grand Central Publishing), ISBN 9781455522316, April 2014

Jenny Carpenter has given up on love, left her profession as a high school math teacher, and bought The Jonquil House, on the edge of town, to turn it in to a bed & breakfast. She's in the home stretch now, most of the renovation done and the inn's new furniture about to arrive, when, on a genuinely dark and stormy night, the house's former owner, Gabriel Raintree, pounds on the door looking for a place to stay.

Gabe is a bestselling horror writer who has hit a painful bout of writer's block. It's not random; he's got a very real personal stress going on, the details of which are not fully revealed until much later in the book. He's hoping that in quiet little Last Chance, staying in the old Raintree family home, he can avoid those stresses and get back to writing.

There are just a few problems.

The Siren Depths (The Books of the Raksura #3), by Martha Wells (author), Christopher Kipiniak (narrator)

Audible Frontiers, February 2013

Moon is a Raksura, a type of flying shapeshifter, who has a backstory of surviving on his own and not even knowing he was a Raksura until a line grandfather from the Indigo Cloud court found him and brought him to Indigo Cloud. That backstory is recounted in the previous book(s), which I haven't read yet. At the start of this book, Moon is settling in to Indigo Cloud as consort to Jade, sister queen of the court. He's still not feeling totally secure, and what security he does have gets a major blow when visitors arrive with the news that another court, Opal Night, is claiming him as the lost son of their dominant queen, Malachite, and wants him back immediately.

The Falling Woman, by Pat Murphy

Open Road Integrated Media, ISBN 9781480483149, April 2014 (original publication November 1986)

Elizabeth Butler is an archaeologist working a dig at a Mayan site in the Yucatan. In her mid-fifties now, she has a painful personal history of a failed marriage, a failed suicide attempt, and lost custody of and limited contact with her daughter, Diane.

Diane Butler has lost her father, her boyfriend, and her job over the course of a couple of weeks, and for reasons she doesn't herself entirely understand, seeks out her famous and long-absent mother.

Diane has been having disturbing dreams, in which she is falling from a great height into a dark void.

Barbara has always seen shadows of the past, watched the long-dead inhabitants of the sites she studies going about their daily lives. It has given her a reputation for remarkably accurate and valuable hunches, but also a reputation for being very eccentric. Now one of the shadows, a priestess of the Mayan moon goddess from just before the disappearance of Maya civilization, has started speaking to her.

A Fighting Chance, by Elizabeth Warren

Macmillan Audio, April 2014

Elizabeth Warren reads her own memoir, and as one would expect of most politicians and most professors, she does so in a clear, strong voice that's easy to listen to.

Warren, of course, is not "most politicians," and perhaps not "most professors," either. Her first venture into electoral politics was to challenge incumbent Scott Brown, and she beat him like a drum. Not that she describes it that way; she seems to have been genuinely surprised by her margin of victory.

Warren grew up the youngest of four children, the only one still at home when her  father's heart attack and subsequent impaired ability to work derailed the family's modest financial security. In spare, clear terms, she describes the struggles of the years that followed, including the plain and painful fact that her dream of going to college and becoming a school teacher were apparently killed by the fact that her parents couldn't possibly afford to send her to college. She has to rescue her own dream by finding a scholarship she could win.

And after that, nothing goes the way she expects it. Early marriage, delayed education, the frustrations of being a young mother, an almost accidental entry into teaching law. An interest in bankruptcy law inspired by her parents' struggles, and further twists and turns leading to the determination and the opportunity to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. From there, I suspect anyone who is interested enough to be reading this knows at least the broad outlines of how that led to her decision to run for the Senate from Massachusetts. The details, both professional and her intertwined family life, are fascinating and compelling, though.

(I'm probably revealing nothing by saying that my politics are closer to Warren's than Brown's. However, he didn't help himself with his childish and bizarre attack on Warren's Native American ancestry. I'm another nearly sheet-white, light-eyed American with a proud family history including Native American ancestry. No, Mr. Brown, you can't tell by looking at someone, and no one appointed you arbiter of who gets to talk about their ancestry.)

Warren's accounts of meeting with voters and the stresses and strains of the campaign she never expected to run are particularly compelling.

Recommended.

An excerpt from the audiobook:


I bought this book.

My Dog Skip, by Willie Morris

Vintage, ISBN 9780679767220, January 1996

This is a sweet, gentle memoir of a boy and his dog, growing up in 1940s rural Mississippi. Willie's parents get a fox terrier puppy when Willie is nine, and Willie and Skip quickly become best friends. In an earlier time and in a small town where everyone knows everyone, they're free to roam all day during the summer months, with friends and on their own, having adventures and playing pranks that sixty years later, would not be tolerated.

There is no plot here. There isn't supposed to be a plot. Morris simply reminisces about his dog and his friends, in no particular chronological order. They play football (Skip too!), have chinaberry wars, and make silly bets, such as Willie and Skip spending a night in the cemetery. Kids started driving the family car early, and Willie teaches Skip to sit with his paws on the wheel, so that at opportune moments Willie can duck out of sight and make it look like Skip is driving.

Merle's Door: Lessons From a Free-Thinking Dog, by Ted Kerasote (author), Patrick Lawlor (narrator)

Tantor Audio, June 2007

Ted Kerasote and his friends found a dog on a river boating trip, and Ted, who'd been looking for the right new dog for a while, fell in love.

Merle was perhaps ten months old, a Labrador mix, perhaps born on an Indian reservation. Shy of people at first, he grew to trust Ted in the course of the river trip. He was wary of sticks, and wouldn't fetch. When Ted brought him home to Wyoming, both their lives change.