Heart Like Mine (An Echo Lake Novel), by Maggie McGinnis

St. Martin's Press, ISBN 9781250069085, April 2016

DeLaney Blair is a finance officer at Mercy Hospital in Echo Lake, VT.  Like many small hospitals these days, Mercy is struggling with a very tight budget, and the word has just come down from the board to find significant cuts to make in every department.

DeLaney is assigned the pediatrics department, and has thirty days to find those cuts in a department that's already understaffed. She's not happy about this even before she meets the head of Pediatrics.

Dr. Joshua McKenzie is passionate, dedicated, and drop-dead gorgeous.

This wouldn't be a romance without major obstacles. Passed experience has made Josh a bit gun-shy, and he's determined not to get seriously involved with anyone until he can open his own private pediatric practice and set his own hours. DeLaney is the daughter of a highly respected surgeon who has never really had time for his own family. Number one on her list of attributes of a perfect husband is "not a doctor."

The Railwayman's Wife, by Ashley Hay

Atria Books, ISBN 9781501112171, April 2016

Ani Lachlan is a happily married woman in her thirties, with a young daughter, living in the coastal Australian village of Thirroul. It's far from the Australian plains where she grew up, but it's beautiful, and she and her railwayman husband Mac are happy there, in the years following World War II.

And then Mac is killed in a railway accident.

We get Ani and Mac's story in flashbacks, which frankly are sometimes a bit disjointed, though well-done in themselves. We also get the story of Ani moving forward after Mac's death, as a single mother, and as a woman adjusting to being a widow, working for the first time since her marriage, and getting to know the village she's living in in a new and different way.

Modern Girls, by Jennifer S. Brown

Berkley Publishing Group/NAL, ISBN 9780451477125. April 2016

The Krasinkys are a Russian Jewish family living in New York City in the years leading up to World War II, and this is the story of Rose Krasinsky and her oldest child, her only daughter, Dottie. The Great Depression is still strong, though FDR has begun the New Deal programs that will alleviate it.

Dottie is nineteen, working as a bookkeeper at an insurance company, and engaged to her boyfriend of three years, Abe Rabinowitz. Rose is 42, though husband Ben thinks she's 39, volunteers with relief groups, and cares for her home, husband, and children. The three younger ones are Izzy, at seventeen,  Alfie, just a few years younger, and Eugene, just seven.

Rose and Dottie have each just discovered they are pregnant.

A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss (author), Simon Vance (narrator)

Blackstone Audiobooks, January 2012

This book is on the one hand a delight, and on the other hand a disappointment.

It's a lively and interesting look at current physics--or  at least, physics as of 2011; developments have continued. Krauss gives us a clear, interesting, and compelling account of the current scientific understanding of how our universe came into existence, how matter and energy can come from nothing, and why such exotic concepts as dark matter are fundamental to understanding how this universe works the way it does and why we are even able to exist.

And if my references to "this universe" and "our universe" seem a bit strange, well, Krauss also describes why it's likely there's more than one universe.

The Ones Who Matter Most, by Rachel Herron

Berkley Publishing Group, ISBN 9780451476760, April 2016

Abby is a new widow, with somewhat conflicted feelings. She had recently discovered that after her third miscarriage, Scott had had a vasectomy, while continuing to pretend they were seriously trying for a child. Feeling hurt and betrayed, she had just told him she wanted a divorce.

He walked away, went into the bathroom, and died of an aneurysm.

Fern is a struggling single mother of an eleven-year-old boy. Her husband, Matty's father, left her, simply left without a word, a couple of hours after Matty was born. She works as a bus driver, and scrimps to pay the mortgage on her home. Her ex's father, Wyatt, chose his grandson over his son, and he and his girlfriend Elva live with her and Matty, and pay rent, which helps make ends meet. The checks her ex has been sending also make a significant difference.

Fern's ex was Abby's husband, Scott.

Albatross:About Quantum Physics, Human Beings, and Other Strange Things, by R.A. MacAvoy, and Nancy Palmer

Sanachie Press, ISBN 2940157997915, February 2016

Dr. Rob MacAuley is a brilliant physicist from the Outer Hebrides. He's also on the run, convicted in absentia of terrorism and murder. It's an absurd charge against a gentle and largely apolitical man, but it's a symptom of a Britain grown ever more paranoid, that has split from the EU at a cost its leadership could have calculated but didn't, and where the Scottish Parliament was dissolved eighteen months ago.

Rob is, through no fault of his own, a figurehead, or perhaps mascot would be a better word, of the Scottish Separatist movement.

Oh, and he has this odd thing he does, when startled or alarmed, that he calls "flinching," and that someone else might call moving from one spot to another without crossing the intervening distance.

Thomas Heddiman, American, machine intelligence specialist, anti-human trafficking activist, and karate expert, has a whole different set of problems. He's currently volunteering his services to the Edinburgh police for reasons not apparent to those he's working with.

Their paths are about to cross in a most unexpected way, in a Britain growing increasingly dark.

Thomas is very close-mouthed about what his real purpose is. Rob is sending letters under false names to physicists all over the world, asking questions that he hopes will nudge them toward the same breakthrough he's made. He doesn't want to be the only one who has the ability to publish and share his Unity Theory, so that it at least can't become a weapon for just one power.

This is an engaging and challenging book, with diverse and fascinating characters. The time is just about a quarter century in the future, and it's a recognizable but different world.

Those who fondly remember Tea With the Black Dragon will find some themes in common, but they are very different books. If one insists on placing it in a genre category, it's fantasy.

I should probably admit, in a spirit of full disclosure, that I feel that R.A. MacAvoy hasn't written nearly enough. I'm not previously familiar with Nancy Palmer, but regardless of any other contribution she made, another MacAvoy novel is something to be grateful for.

Go read it; you won't regret it.

I received a free electronic copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Monument to the Dead (A Museum Mystery #4), by Sheila Connolly, (author), Robin Miles (narrator)

Audible Studios, January 2016

Nell Pratt is the president of the Philadelphia Antiquarian Society, an institution which has been having some interesting times lately--this being volume four in a mystery series. But surely thingss have quieted down now. Crises are resolved, Nell is dating FBI Special Agent James Morrison, and the Society has a large stash of possibly stolen documents it is sorting and cataloging for the FBI. And on her train ride in to work one morning, Nell reads the obituary of a former Society board member. It's not an expected death, but the woman was elderly, and there's no suggestion it was anything but natural.

Then as she's working at her desk that morning, James Morrison calls, and tells her he thinks the former board member's death wasn't natural. He thinks he's seeing a pattern of deaths in older members of Philadelphia's cultural world.

A Dangerous Place (Maisie Dobbs #11), by Jacqueline Winspear

Harper, ISBN 9780062220554, March 2015


At the opening of this book, Maisie Dobbs has arrived in Gibraltar, in theory on her way home to England. In reality, she has realized she is not yet ready to face her homeland.

It takes us a bit to learn fully what tragic events have set Maisie adrift.

But as that background unfolds, Maisie is embarking, unintended, on a new investigation--the strange murder of a young photographer. The police immediately conclude that he was killed by a refugee from war-torn Spain, motivated by robbery. They attribute the photographer's camera being left behind to the coincidental arrival of Maisie on a walk.

Mayflower: A Study of Courage, Community, and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick (author), George Guidall (narrator)

Recorded Books, ISBN 9781419390036, 2006

The Pilgrims of Plimoth Plantation are part of the founding mythology of the US. But what most of us know, or at least remember, is Plymouth Rock, Thanksgiving, the Puritans, and then the Revolution. Maybe we remember that King Philip's War is a thing that happened, but we may be a bit hazy on the details. Probably we remember Squanto, the friendly Indian who taught the Pilgrims to grow corn.

Philbrick brings in all marvelously to life.

And in doing so, he restores the richness, complexity, and ambiguity of the real world.

Brownies & Broomsticks (Magical Bakery Mystery #1), by Bailey Cates (author), Johanna Parker (narrator)

Tantor Audio, March 2013 (original publication May 2012)

Katie Lightfoot has had a bad breakup with her fiancé, and needs a big change. So she's taken her pastry school education and her experience working in an Akron bakery to Savannah, Georgia. Her Uncle Ben and Aunt Lucy are starting a bakery there, and she's bringing her business and baking experience to the project.

What she doesn't know is that Aunt Lucy has a family secret to share with her--one her own parents have been keeping from her.

Katie's father and mother, her mother's sister Lucy, and Katie herself are all witches. Specifically hedge witches, gifted in the use of herbs and related matters.