In an effort to make some kind of dent in my to-be-read pile, I joined in with the challenge set by Lisa at Owl Be Sat Reading and this is how I got on in February…
BOOK 11: PETER SWANSON- EVERY VOW YOU BREAK
🌟🌟🌟 A diverting thriller with a Hitchcock vibe…
After a whirlwind, fairytale romance, Abigail Baskin marries freshly-minted Silicon Valley millionaire Bruce Lamb. For their honeymoon, he whisks her away to an exclusive retreat at a friend’s resort off the Maine coast on Heart Pond Island. But once there, Abigail’s perfect new life threatens to crash down around her as she recognises one of their fellow guests as the good looking, charismatic stranger who weeks earlier had seduced her at her own Bachelorette party…
BOOK 12: GUY GUNARATNE- IN OUR MAD AND FURIOUS CITY
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Deeply moving and alive with the cadence of language of these troubled youths. Just beautiful…
For Selvon, Ardan and Yusuf, growing up under the towers of Stones Estate, summer means what it does anywhere: football, music and freedom. But now, after the killing of a British soldier, riots are spreading across the city, and nowhere is safe. While the fury swirls around them, Selvon and Ardan remain focused on their own obsessions, girls and grime. Their friend Yusuf is caught up in a different tide, a wave of radicalism surging through his local mosque, threatening to carry his troubled brother, Irfan, with it.
BOOK 13: DAPHNE DU MAURIER- JAMAICA INN
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 To my shame I’d not read this book, despite reading many Du Mauriers over the years. An atmospheric and dark tale, fully deserving of the word classic…
After the untimely death of her mother, Mary Yellan travels across the untamed and desolate Cornish moors in search of her only living relative. A resolute and inspirational heroine, 23-year-old Mary finds her aunt, Patience Merlyn, in a desolate and irksome Inn on Bodmin Moor. Realising that the stark and forbidding Jamaica Inn is tainted with corruption, Mary is resolved to help her aunt survive and escape from the clutches of her abusive husband, Joss Merlyn, and the ominous and illicit trade that he conducts there.
BOOK 14: DANIEL MAGARIEL- ONE OF THE BOYS
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A disturbing but brilliantly written tale of family trauma and patriarchal dominance, which packs so much into such a slim tale…
A father and his boys have won ‘the war’: the father’s term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave Kansas and drive through the night to their new apartment in Albuquerque. Settled in new schools, the brothers join basketball teams, make friends. Meanwhile their father works from home, smoking cheap cigars to hide another smell. Soon his missteps – the dead-eyed absentmindedness, the late-night noises, the comings and goings of increasingly odd characters – become sinister, and the boys find themselves watching him transform into someone they no longer recognize.
BOOK 15: HENNING MANKELL- THE ROCK BLASTER
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 So cleverly structured with shifts in tense and use of stream of consciousness. I so miss Mankell…
Though crippled, Oskar finds the strength to go on living and working. The Rock Blaster charts his long professional life – his hopes and dreams, sorrows and joys. His relationship with the woman whose love saved him, with the labour movement that gave him a cause to believe in, and with his children, who do not share his ideals.
Raven Crime Reads 
Ah, I think Jamaica Inn is a classic! So happy to see it here, and good to know you rated it as highly as you did. Hope you’re keeping well and being kind to yourself in these times…
Muddling through as always Margot 😂 Hope all is good with you xx
Ah, I really liked In Our Mad and Furious City too! Full of grit and life!
I can’t believe it took me so long to get round to reading it! You’ve nailed the description too of grit and life. It really made a big impression on me…