I started off November with a trip to my big bedroom shelf and pulled out the book below.
The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart
I first encountered Mary Stewart as a child when I read The Little Broomstick. I found out about her adult, gothic-type novels as a teenager and since then have read several, but this one was new to me. I don’t know how to explain Stewart’s fiction. They are first-person stories told from the POV of a young woman. The characters are all very British. There’s always a great sense of place, and a romance angle. And they are mysteries. That sounds formulaic but the plots and settings are all quite different.
The Lost Heiress: A Novel by Elizabeth Klehfoth
This was a better-than-average Amazon Pime free read. A skeleton is discovered in the present–a young woman who was thought to have run away on the night of her 18th birthday party. The investigation in the present is woven with the story of the past–I love books that do that. The characters were complicated and the ending was far from obvious.
The Last Morning by Camden Baird
This is the story of the abduction of a child told from the points of view of all the suspects. It kept me guessing. There’s a sequel too!
The Fairest by Jenny Milchman
I bought this Kindle book because I had tead the first one for free and really enjoyed the main character, Arles Shepherd, who is a psychollogist with her own baggage who has opened up a group therapy lodge in her family’s isolated estate. This installment involves a missing child and social media influeners, of all things. If the author writes another I will read it.
I will tell you about the rest of these together.
Owned by the Alphas by Jen Cooper
Claimed by the Alphas by Jen Cooper
Marked by the Alphas by Jen Cooper
Saved by the Alphas by Jen Cooper
Owned by the Alphas Short Story Collection by Jen Cooper
The above books, which I read online via Galatea, definitely count as guilty pleasure reading. Why was I reading them? Well, my future daughter-in-law works for the company that owns Galatea, so that explains why I downloaded the app to begin with. Then I was on Facebook and read the first chapter in an ad and got interested. Finally, I was in Rome in November and reading on my phone a lot during downtimes since I did not have any books with me. So that’s how it started, and then I got hooked on the story and had to read them all. They are fantasy novels with werewolves, villagers, witches, and vampires. There’s a lot of worldbuilding and characterization which is decent, and there’s a lot of . . . other stuff that is maybe why a lot of people love them so much.
So nine books for November, largely because I was on airplanes a lot and I always download books to read to pass the time.
