Review: I Found You

I Found You by Lisa Jewell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

East Yorkshire: Single mum Alice Lake finds a man on the beach outside her house. He has no name, no jacket, no idea what he is doing there. Against her better judgement she invites him in to her home.

Surrey: Twenty-one-year-old Lily Monrose has only been married for three weeks. When her new husband fails to come home from work one night she is left stranded in a new country where she knows no one. Then the police tell her that her husband never existed.

Two women, twenty years of secrets and a man who can't remember lie at the heart of Lisa Jewell's brilliant new novel.

Personally I found this book slow moving and sluggish. It was a disappointment and especially since Lisa Jewell is one of my favourites.

Review: A Day Like This

A Day Like This by Kelley McNeil
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

What if everything you’ve ever loved, ever known, ever believed to be true…just disappeared?

Annie Beyers has everything—a beautiful house, a loving husband, and an adorable daughter. It’s a day like any other when she takes Hannah to the pediatrician…until she wakes hours later from a car accident. When she asks for her daughter, confused doctors tell Annie that Hannah never existed. In fact, nothing after waking from the crash is the same as Annie remembers. Five happy years of her life apparently never happened.

Annie’s marriage is coming to an end. Now a successful artist living in Manhattan, she’s no longer home in their beloved upstate farmhouse. Her long-estranged sister is more like a best friend, and her recently deceased dog is alive and well. With each passing day, Annie’s remembered past and unfamiliar present begin to blur. Haunted by visions of Hannah, and with knowledge of things she can’t explain, Annie wonders…is everyone lying to her?

The search for answers leads Annie down an illuminating path far from home, to reconcile the memories with reality and to discover the truth about the life she’s living.

Review: Pop Goes the Weasel

Pop Goes the Weasel by James Patterson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Detective Alex Cross is back-and he's in love. But his happiness is threatened by a series of chilling murders in Washington, D.C., murders with a pattern so twisted they leave investigators reeling. Cross's pursuit of the killer produces a suspect, a British diplomat named Geoffrey Shafer. But proving he's the murderer becomes a potentially deadly task. As Shafer engages in a brilliant series of surprising counter moves, Alex and his fiancee become hopelessly entangled with the most memorable nemesis Cross has ever faced.

Review: The Last Thing He Told Me

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A mystery about a woman searching for the truth around her husband’s disappearance…at any cost.

Before Owen Michaels disappears, he manages to smuggle a note to his beloved wife of one year: Protect her. Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers: Owen’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother.

As Hannah’s increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered; as the FBI arrests Owen’s boss; as a US Marshal and FBI agents arrive at her Sausalito home unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn’t who he said he was. And that Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen’s true identity—and why he really disappeared.

Hannah and Bailey set out to discover the truth, together. But as they start putting together the pieces of Owen’s past, they soon realize they are also building a new future. One neither Hannah nor Bailey could have anticipated.

A good story.

Review: The Dream Daughter

The Dream Daughter by Diane Chamberlain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Caroline (Carly) Sears had been shrouded in grief for the past year, and discovering she was pregnant was a bittersweet moment. When she was just over twenty weeks along it was discovered her unborn baby had a terrifying heart problem and without intervention, she would die upon birth. But it was 1970 and there was absolutely nothing that could be done. Medical science just wasn’t advanced enough to save her baby. Carly was devastated.

Living with her sister Patti, brother-in-law Hunter and their little boy, John Paul, Carly took to walking the shores of the ocean by their cottage. She had no idea what she would do – except go ahead with her pregnancy on the slim chance that the doctors were wrong. It was when Hunter took her aside one day and told her there was something that could be done for her baby; that she just had to trust him and be strong, take her life and the life of her yet-to-be-born baby in her hands and have faith, that Carly felt a sliver of hope.

But could she do it? She knew she would do anything in her power for the health of her child…

Wow! Absolutely brilliant! The Dream Daughter has a most intriguing plot which captivated me from the start and I had trouble putting it down. Author Diane Chamberlain has hit the jackpot with this one in my opinion. Heart wrenching, emotional and breathtaking, The Dream Daughter makes the unbelievable – believable, and the impossible – possible. One that will stay with me for a very long time! Highly recommended.

Love this story. Kept me reading for the first time in ages.

Review: The Hidden Women

The Hidden Women by Kerry Barrett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Berkshire, 1944
When Will Bates offers to take ATA pilot Lilian Miles to the dance, he sends her heart into a flutter. But as their relationship progresses, Lilian can’t help but get cold feet. Deep down she’s always known that the secrets locked in her past would weigh heavily on her future happiness…

London, 2018
Helena Miles loves nothing more than digging into the back stories of celebrity families, making her perfectly suited for her job as a researcher on the hit show Where Did You Come From?. But when handsome superstar Jack Jones sweeps into her life, she unexpectedly finds herself trawling through her own family history.

As she explores her family’s past, she discovers that there are far more secrets hidden there than she ever expected… What really happened to her aunt Lilian during the war, and why can’t she open up about it now?

Excellent read. This book hit an emotional spot and found myself in tears at the end.

Review: The Magnolia Palace

The Magnolia Palace by Fiona Davis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Eight months since losing her mother in the Spanish flu outbreak of 1919, twenty-one-year-old Lillian Carter’s life has completely fallen apart. For the past six years, under the moniker Angelica, Lillian was one of the most sought-after artists’ models in New York City, with statues based on her figure gracing landmarks from the Plaza Hotel to the Brooklyn Bridge. But with her mother gone, a grieving Lillian is rudderless and desperate—the work has dried up and a looming scandal has left her entirely without a safe haven. So when she stumbles upon an employment opportunity at the Frick mansion—a building that, ironically, bears her own visage—Lillian jumps at the chance. But the longer she works as a private secretary to the imperious and demanding Helen Frick, the daughter and heiress of industrialist and art patron Henry Clay Frick, the more deeply her life gets intertwined with that of the family—pulling her into a tangled web of romantic trysts, stolen jewels, and family drama that runs so deep, the stakes just may be life or death.

Nearly fifty years later, mod English model Veronica Weber has her own chance to make her career—and with it, earn the money she needs to support her family back home—within the walls of the former Frick residence, now converted into one of New York City’s most impressive museums. But when she—along with a charming intern/budding art curator named Joshua—is dismissed from the Vogue shoot taking place at the Frick Collection, she chances upon a series of hidden messages in the museum: messages that will lead her and Joshua on a hunt that could not only solve Veronica’s financial woes, but could finally reveal the truth behind a decades-old murder in the infamous Frick family.