iiiiReader Book Reviews

This is a compelling and suspenseful story with Christian overtones.

I wasn’t sure what to expect as I have read only one or two books by this author in the past. I found myself glued to the novel, waiting for each step to unfold.

An explosion occurs that kills two of three friends who were attending. The one that survived is filled with remorse about not being able to save her friends. It sends her into darker and darker thoughts and all she can figure out to do is to wreck revenge upon the culprit.

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I’ve read most of this series (minus a few of the first ones) and enjoy it. The amateur sleuth is Lucy Richardson, who works and lives at the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library. Now that she’s engaged to mayor, Connor McNeil, they have started looking for a home of their own. Finding one that they can afford is proving troublesome.

At the same time, Lucy’s ex-boyfriend, Richard, from Boston has shown up with his overbearing mother in tow. The mother keeps pushing Lucy and Richard together ignoring the fact that Lucy is in love and engaged to Connor. When Lucy’s mother, from Boston, shows up, she wonders what is going on.

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I had read and enjoyed a Georgian romance novel by Ms. Bailey, so I was looking forward to a period mystery series by the same author. To say the book did not meet my expectations is putting it mildly.

While the historical period is portrayed nicely as is the language (for the most part), the book became quickly tedious as it was overly long and I solved the whodunnit within very few pages.

It felt, to me, that a lot of the story was filler. The intrepid widowed companion turned sleuth, Mrs. Ottila Draycott could not do anything spontaneous. She would think of something, then think about it again, spending pages in doing so. She would then do the thing she had thought about and then think about it. Then she would tell someone, generally Lord Francis Fanshawe, about what she had done. Then they would discuss it. Next, they would tell someone else. Then another discussion would ensue.

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I’ve read all of the books in this series and this is a pivotal one. There is a lot of change going on but I won’t be telling.

Bailey King is the power behind the recent surge of success of Sweetsmen Sweets, an Amish candy shop in Harvest, Ohio. She is not Amish but her grandmother and cousin are. She works with both of them as well as Emily Esh.

Emily married against the wishes of her brother and sister, both of whom treated her poorly. Emily is about to give birth and the town wants to give her a baby shower to show how much they appreciate her.

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I’ve read all of the books in this series. I really enjoyed the book even though my favorite character, Miriam fford Croft was more of a peripheral one than usual.

Daniel is asked to identify a murder victim’s body and receives a jolt when he believes it is his friend and colleague, Toby Kitteridge. It turns out to be a senior partner in their law chamber. However, the death sends reverberations through the chamber and may mean the end of the practice. That is, unless they are able to find the murderer and clear the reputation of the chamber.

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Though this is the second book in this series, it is the first book that I have read. I enjoyed it and will go back and read the first book as well. It is a cozy mystery and is set, primarily in a beauty salon named Ooh La La, in a small town in England.

The proprietor of the salon and amateur sleuth is Daisy Thorne. Daisy has been studying Forensics Psychology with an eye to becoming a profiler for the police one day. When a regular customer is found murdered outside her salon, Daisy comes under suspicion.

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I started reading Sarah Graves books with her follow-on series to this one. It has many of the same characters but what surprised me was how much she had changed the background story of the main character. Then again, I noticed she did something similar with another character between books in her new series. It seems she simply changes the background to fit her current story.

That said, it took me a bit to wrap my head around the changes. I finally just told myself that I had to treat this series as a new one with characters of the same names and locale. Once I did that, I could enjoy the story on its own.

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I started this series further along and am now going back and reading the earlier books.

First of all, I highly suggest you read this story as number 2 in the series as that is the time period in which it is set. I read the next two books before going back and reading this one once I realized where I had gone wrong.

The story is set in a period of time that is included in the first book and follows Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes through an adventure in the Holy Land.

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