North of Here by Laurel Saville

The sounds of unexpected tragedies—a roll of thunder, the crash of metal on metal—leave Miranda in shock amid the ruins of her broken family.

As she searches for new meaning in her life, Miranda finds quiet refuge with her family’s handyman, Dix, in his cabin in the dark forests of the Adirondack Mountains. Dix is kind, dependable, and good with an ax—the right man to help the sheltered Miranda heal—but ultimately, her sadness creates a void even Dix can’t fill.

When a man from her distant past turns up, the handsome idealist now known as Darius, he offers Miranda a chance to do meaningful work at The Source, a secluded property filled with his nature worshipers. Miranda feels this charismatic guru is the key to remaking her life, but her grief and desire for love also create an opportunity for his deception. And in her desperate quest to find herself after losing almost everything, Miranda and Dix could pay a higher price than they ever imagined.

REVIEW: North of Here by Laurel Saville is an entrancing but unpredictable mystery and suspense thriller set in the enigmatic and perplexing mountains of the Adirondack Park and its environs in upstate New York, which is roughly more than six million acres. Indeed, this stunning beauty of 10,000 lakes, 30,000 miles of rivers, huge tracts of dark forests, countless wetlands, mysterious wildlife, struggling farms, dramatic weather and 46 mountains over 4000 feet is an ideal setting for a story that explores the intertwined lives of four different people from diverse backgrounds who are examining their lives in their quest for meaning, family and love.

Miranda is an immature, self-indulgent young woman from a wealthy Connecticut family with a summer home in the mountains. When her brother and father met with an untimely death, her world turned upside down. Her cup of grief runneth over when her mother died of stroke, leaving her forlorn and broken. She sought refuge in the arms of Dix, who is a dependable local handy-man. Dix encountered problems he was unprepared for. Then there is the self-styled guru, Darius, who runs The Source and who seemingly have finally found his true calling when everything else failed. Miranda is irresistibly drawn to him. The social worker Sally also plays a pivotal role as others are entangled in a web of lies and deceit.

North of Here by Laurel Saville is a captivating story of people searching for healing and redemption in their own different ways. The main characters are well-conceived, and readers will easily empathize these characters who are full of flaws. The central character Miranda’s woes never seemed to end. In her desperation to fill the void in her life Miranda has placed herself in an unenviable situation. I love Dix! Kind and understanding, he was willing to be there for Miranda when she needed him most although he knew her needs were much deeper. In the end, he falls for her, hard and truly. Author Laurel Saville’s story of the fragility and emptiness of life without purpose and meaning, and how people are not quite what they seem, will stay with readers long after the book is shelved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laurel Saville is the award-winning author of "Henry and Rachel," the memoir "Unraveling Anne" and several other books, as well as numerous articles, essays, and short stories, which have appeared in The Bark, The Bennington Review, House Beautiful, the LA Times Magazine, NYTimes.com, Room and many other publications. Laurel has an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College.

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We Never Asked for Wings by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

“It wasn’t too late to turn back. Driving through the fog at a quarter past midnight, Letty waited for the exit signs that appeared without warning, willing herself to swerve off the freeway and return the way she’d come. But at each split-second opportunity she wavered just a moment too long. The exits came and went, and she was left with nothing but a wall of fog and the tequila in her water bottle, pushing her forward - past San Jose and Los Banos and Coalinga and through the sour cloud of Harris Ranch, accelerating until even the short length of yellow line she’d been following for over two hundred miles transformed into a rush of white.”

It’s a grim beginning to We Never Asked for Wings by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, the author who brought to us the heart-warming, uplifting and delightful bestselling novel, The Language of Flowers, a book translated into forty languages worldwide, and which explores the nature of relationship through the story of a young girl who grew up through the foster care system.

In We Never Asked for Wings, Vanessa Diffenbaugh explores various human issues through the story of Letty Espinosa, 33, and her two children Alex, who is 15 and Luna, 6, and their grandparents Maria Elena and Enrique. Through the back story we are told how Letty had been a “teenage mother, despondent and suffering from a heartbreak she tried hard to drink away.” For fifteen long years Maria Elena and Enrique raised the two kids while Letty worked through three jobs. Things began to unravel when Enrique went to visit his ailing mother, and a worried Maria Elena went looking for him. This prompted Letty to leave behind her children and help her mother bring Enrique back. It set off a chain of events keeping one in suspense as to how the story will move forward.

We Never Asked for Wings is a worthy follow-up to The Language of Flowers. It has matched Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s debut novel in almost all departments. Though the premise is quite simple, Vanessa’s rich imagination turned it into an intricate and beautiful story, and was exquisitely complemented by her wonderful prose. One has little to complain about the characters as they are all finely developed, each playing a pivotal role in the whole scheme of things. Letty may seem irresponsible at one stage but her transformation is simply remarkable, and there’s no way you won’t root for her.

We Never Asked for Wings by Vanessa Diffenbaugh is a story that will capture your imagination and stay with you long after you turned the last page. As the book draws to a close, like the characters in the story, you will feel at home. “Like birds in flight, they were here, and they were home.”

#This review is from an uncorrected proof advance reader's copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.


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Finders Keepers by Stephen King

After last year’s taut thriller Mr. Mercedes, Stephen King returns with its sequel as the unlikely team of ex-policeman Bill Hodges, Jerome Robinson and Holly Gibney tried to make sense of the City Center Massacre and also save the life of Pete Saubers from the clutches of a near-deranged Morris Bellamy. While the main thread of the story revolves around Pete and Bellamy, it also delves deep into the plot of Mr. Mercedes and the massacre which took the lives of eight innocent people, maimed three, seriously injured twelve and caused minor injuries to seventeen others.

Finders Keepers by Stephen King begins in the year 1978 with the murder of a novelist at his New Hampshire cabin by a die-hard admirer. The cloistered eighty-year-old novelist John Rothstein found himself awake when the privacy of his cabin was invaded by an obsessed fan Morris Bellamy and two accomplices. Not content with the cash available, Bellamy wants to make sure if the rumoured sell-out of his favorite character Jimmy Gold in the next Rothstein novel is true, and the ensuing melee proved disastrous.

Bellamy’s plans unravelled when he was arrested and sent to prison for thirty-five years, but not before he stashed the loot away. A high school student Pete Saubers, whose father Thomas Saubers was seriously injured in Mr. Mercedes, found the buried treasure and sent the money to his parents concealing his real identity while keeping the drafts of Rothstein’s novels. All hell break loose when Bellamy is released on parole in 2014 and discovered his treasures missing. It is upto King’s likeable trio - Bill Hodges, Jerome Robinson and Holly Gibney, to keep Pete from harm’s way and protect his family.

Finders Keepers by Stephen King is an ambitious and well-crafted hard-boiled thriller which can be read as a stand-alone though it is the middle book of a trilogy. Its masterful pacing and riveting plotting makes it a heart thumping read, intensely thrilling and absolutely gripping. Author Stephen King as is his wont, delivers a novel that has stunned me by its shrewdness and ability to sustain interest. 

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Flesh and Blood by Patricia Cornwell

It's Thursday, June 12, 2014 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr Kay Scarpetta is physically still at home though her mind has already left for the Florida vacation she had planned along with her FBI profiler husband, Benton Wesley. She's in a celebratory mood as it's her birthday and didn't quickly notice the bright copper coins that flashes like shards of aventurine glass on top of the old brick wall behind their house. Dr Scarpetta feels a chill at the edge of her thoughts. Is it someone merely playing a game with pennies or is there more intent to it than meets the eye? Why would someone leave seven shiny Lincoln pennies, all heads up and all dated 1981? Instantly, she realizes that her birthday plans are about to go off beam.

When a deranged sniper is on the loose, Detective Pete Marino of the Cambridge Police insists Scarpetta to examine the scene of a shooting close to her home, not willing to settle for any of her medical examiners or her deputy chief Luke Zenner. The sniper's victim is identified as a high school music teacher, Jamal Nari, who recently shot into the limelight when he was inadvertently placed on a terrorist watch list.

What is baffling about Jamal's death is the tweet announcing it. It came about 45 minutes before he was actually shot. To add to this weirdness is the admission made by one student to the crime, though no one is willing to believe it. Did Leo Grantz really kill Jamal? What is the motive? As Scarpetta and Marino delved deeper into the case they unearthed startling evidences that established connection between a series of deaths in New Jersey and the killing of Jamal Nari in Cambridge. And it is up to Scarpetta and Marino to find out the killer and bring the case to its logical conclusion.

Flesh and Blood by Patricia Cornwell is the twenty-second book in the long-running Kay Scarpetta series. This installment is a notch better than the twenty-first book, Dust (A Scarpetta Novel), though it is nowhere near the readability of the earlier books in the series. While the plot in itself is engaging and the author's fine writing style keeps one going, there are a lot of unnecessary details forcing me to skip pages and paragraphs at regular intervals. If Flesh and Blood were trimmed down to about three hundred pages or less instead of its present staggering 384, I honestly believe that it would have been one of the best Kay Scarpetta novels Patricia Cornwell has written. Sadly, in her bid to write a heavy tome of a book she has added details that are annoying and frustrating for a reader like me.

Stephen King's Revival Will Rock You to Your Bones

This period piece set in the mid-20th century about faith and addiction is so petrifying that author Stephen King was quoted as saying, "It's too scary. I don't even want to think about that book anymore. It's a nasty, dark piece of work. That's all I can tell you." For fans who have missed his trademark spine-chilling harrowing tales with the sedate Mr. Mercedes: A Novel which was more in the mold of a thriller than a horror novel, Revival marks a triumphant return to a genre which is almost synonymous with his name.

Revival by Stephen King is the story of Jamie Morton and Reverend Charles Jacobs, whose lives disturbingly interlock, with serious consequences, for fifty long years. Jamie was only six years old when the Reverend Charles Jacobs with his beautiful wife Patsy and infant baby first set foot in the sleepy hamlet. Like most people in the small Methodist congregation, Jamie quickly bonds with the Minister and his family. Jamie and Jacobs share a lot of things in common, but electronics was their abiding passion. Things seem to be going great for everyone.

Though the Reverend Jacobs is an affable man: well-loved and adored, everything he stands for crumbles under the weight of grief and fury, transforming even his very own life. A gruesome car accident claimed the lives of his wife Patsy and their child, leaving Jacobs devastated. The horror of the accident left an indelible mark on Jacobs. He begins to question his faith and the very purpose of his existence, and buries himself in the pursuit of his hobby - electrical experimentation to tap into the secrets of the universe which is "one of God's doorways to the infinite." Physically and emotionally exhausted, Jacobs's harsh experience drained him of all his faith and belief in God prompting him to give a fiery sermon which would have made an atheist hang his head in shame. He was sacked and asked to leave town.

At the other end, Jamie grows up to be a rhythm guitarist but in a whirlpool of drugs, sex and rock `n' roll, traveling and performing all over. He's no longer the devoted Methodist youth that he once was. He has matured over the years and has become a skeptic. A chance reunion with Jacobs at his electricity-based carnival act sparks off a chain of events which take both Jamie and Jacobs to the edge. Jacobs too is no longer the amiable minister that he once was. He has been transformed almost beyond recognition - a frenzied man intent on unearthing secrets which are beyond the realms of humanity. Jacobs heals people with the electrical inventions he has made but Jamie discovers that there are more to it than meets the eye.

In Revival, horror master Stephen King crafted a tale of two men brought together by faith, separated by tragedy and reunited by their obstinate passion for the extraordinary. It is an unsettling story of a man driven by an unquenchable passion and a scientific curiosity that borders on madness. It is a spellbinding supernatural thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat with the frightening portrayal of its main characters and the suspenseful plot which will leave even long-time fans gasping for breath. Revival by Stephen King is designed to rock you to your bones.

The Escape (John Puller series) by David Baldacci

Bestselling author David Baldacci returns with a thrilling new suspenseful, action-packed story full of mystery with military CID investigator John Puller. Just the third book in the John Puller series following Zero Day (John Puller Series) and The Forgotten (John Puller Series), The Escape is a book that will entertain and enthrall readers from cover to cover, with John Puller heading an eclectic cast of characters. The Escape follows the trail of a war hero and top US army investigator extraordinaire Puller and his partner US intelligence officer, Capt. Veronica Knox, as they are hot in pursuit of an escapee from the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

But for Puller, the assignment is fraught with professional and personal dilemmas. The escaped convict is none other than his brother Robert Puller who is a major in the US Air Force. Robert has been convicted of treason and national security crimes. As John digs deep into the case, he realizes that there are many others pursuing his brother, and will resort to any means to either bring him to justice or silent him permanently. John races against time to find Robert and unearth the truth behind his brother's conviction where nothing is what it seems to be.

And finding a man who doesn't want to be found is a tough proposition. As Puller pieces together the jigsaw puzzle, Robert is also determined to clear his name and hacks into the national database. To throw off his pursuers, he has also changed his appearance, but for how long? Will John find his brother before the others? David Baldacci masterfully weaves an interesting an interesting story full of suspense and surprises. Puller's character has gone from strength to strength, and is likely to become one of the most fascinating fictional characters in recent years. But while the story is enjoyable as whole, it lacks depth and heart, and is burdened with excessive details, and many readers are unlikely to revisit the story again.

Gray Mountain by John Grisham

In nineteen ninety-three, John Grisham delivers a stunning and suspenseful novel, The Pelican Brief: A Novel, which revolves around the assassination of two Supreme Court justices, and the female protagonist Darby Shaw undeterred by the threats to her life uncovered a deep-rooted presidential conspiracy. Twenty-one years later, Grisham returns with a female protagonist for only the second time in his illustrious career as he crafted another stupefying legal thriller, this time not targeting the highest echelons of government but the deepest pits of the dark and perilous world of coal mining.

Set against the backdrop of the Great Recession of 2008, Gray Mountain by bestselling author John Grisham follows a 29-year-old female Manhattan associate attorney who gets downsized and is forced to leave her Wall Street law firm two weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers to work a year in the small-town of Brady, Virginia. Samantha Kofer's journey from New York's largest law firm to a small legal aid clinic in the heart of Appalachia with a population of 2200 as an unpaid intern borders on the ludicrous. Yet, that is the only possible route back to her job in the future.

When Samantha meets Mattie Wyatt, her new boss and the head of the Mountain Legal Aid Clinic, she realizes there's much to learn and that Mattie has a lot to teach her on how to assist people who face genuine problems. It enables her to work on things she had never done during her three-year stay at New York's Scully & Pershing. Apart from actually preparing a lawsuit, Samantha also gets to work her way around courtrooms, topping it with a tongue-lashing from a judge. Samantha's work forces her to get deeper into the problems of her clients Taking up cudgels on their behalf, she begins her own investigation to get to the bottom of their stories without ever realizing that in coal country searching for the truth and standing up for it means putting your life on the line. She also stumbles upon secrets that should have remained buried deep in the mountains forever, and the connection between small-town politics and Big Coal. But Samantha is not discouraged by the numerous threats that she received and is taking the fight into the enemy's camp.

Author John Grisham paints a dark picture of the coal mining industry, the danger it posed to environment and the lives of people. He is scathing in his portrayal of the people involved and how far they are willing to go to have their way, even to the extent of murdering and poisoning streams and wells. Though a dazzling legal thriller, full of suspense and action with its plot twists and surprises, Gray Mountain is primarily an issued-based novel that takes up the cause of defenseless people and the environmental hazard coal mining has brought about by ripping off the tops of hundreds of mountains in Appalachia. It has not only poisoned the ecosystem but is instrumental in the rapidly vanishing wildlife and threatens the very survival of human beings living around coal mining areas. Grisham is brilliant as ever but the central premise of the story may not appeal to some readers.

The Burning Room by Michael Connelly

The maverick Los Angeles Police Department homicide Detective Harry Bosch has come a long way since he first made his appearance in the 1992 detective mystery thriller, The Black Echo. In that premier book of the series a man found in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam was just another statistic for the police department. But when Harry Bosch stepped in it became personal because the murdered man was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who had fought side by side with him in a hellish underground war.

Twenty-two years later in his nineteenth avatar in Edgar-winner Michael Connelly’s superbly crafted The Burning Room, Harry Bosch and his new partner, rookie Detective Lucia Soto, are tasked with an unenviable job of solving a very old case with a lot of twists and impediments. It concerns a case which begins almost ten years earlier with the drive-by shooting of Orlando Merced as he played with his band in Los Angeles's Mariachi Plaza. The bullet that struck him in the spine caused grievous damage leaving him paralyzed.

When Bosch and Lucy get to work they are confronted with lack of evidence which make the investigation all the more difficult. They got a vital lead when an anonymous tipster informed Detective Lucia Soto that the shooting of Orlando Merced is connected to the 1993 devastating fire which took place at the Bonnie Brae apartments that killed nine victims, mostly children. Incidentally, Soto could have been one of the children consumed by that raging fire twenty years ago but survived while some of his friends didn’t. The mariachi musician was a victim of a conspiracy to bury the truth behind the arson as he was believed to have known the people involved. Bosch and Lucy also unearthed connections between the two incidents with the robbery of an EZ Bank.

With powerful people coming into the picture, master storyteller Michael Connelly skillfully maneuvered this compelling police procedural with a lot of unexpected twists and turns. Juggling between suspense, crime and mystery, there is no dull moment as Harry Bosch just simply refused to fade into oblivion and reinvented himself through the deft handling of his character by Connelly. Beautifully written and wonderfully paced, The Burning Room is not only for die-hard fans of the series but also for new readers who want to explore the world of Harry Bosch.