review: wild within by melissa hart

After splitting from her husband, Melissa Hart starts taking her dogs to a dog park in Eugene, OR. That’s where she meets a man who works at a raptor rehabilitation center. Although Hart is a bit apprehensive around the owls and birds of prey housed at the center, she volunteers. Soon her entire life is consumed by Jonathan and the rehab center. In Wild Within, Hart documents their time together and how they eventually came to adopt a daughter. Hart spent an inordinate amount of time lamenting the long adoption process and the obsession the couple had with adopting a girl who would be just like Jonathan’s adopted niece. Although the couple experienced growth over the course of Wild Within, the initial obsession made them seem naïve and selfish which was a turn off.
2/5
Review copy provided by BookSparks PR.

review: tuesday's gone by nicci french

The second in Nicci French’s Frieda Klein series has Frieda looking for the identity of a decomposing corpse found in the apartment of a mentally ill woman. Although the woman is initially a suspect, it soon becomes clear she brought the dead man back to her apartment in a misguided attempt to help him. It’s a fascinating plot, but the writing is a little clunky. The constant change in perspective and multitude of characters disrupted the action too frequently. Intriguingly, Tuesday’s Gone also brings in an underlying plot involving the happenings of Blue Monday—perhaps that first case isn’t yet over.
4/5
Review copy provided by the publisher, Penguin.

review: dead float by warren c. easley

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Cal Claxton is a lawyer who works on the side as a fishing guide for his friend’s company. Although he left the Los Angeles district attorney office for a small Oregon town, Cal still finds himself in the middle of all the action. This time around he’s the guide when someone on the trip is murdered. When the cops suspect Cal is the killer (he, whoopsie, once had an affair with the dead man’s wife), Cal and his friends set about proving Cal’s innocence and finding the real killer in what turns out to be a high stakes operation.

With a few chapters of set-up, Warren C. Easley establishes the story for those who haven’t read the first book in the series then gets right to the discovery of the body. From there the drama dies down a bit, but ramps back up for a big ending. Although Dead Float is not action-packed, it’s still a gripping mystery with excellent descriptions (particularly of the Deschutes River and surrounding area). Cal’s attachment to his dog and daughter (who has quite the tale as well in a subplot that throws off the pacing) makes the intelligent lawyer quickly relatable while his dalliance with a married woman becomes forgivable.
4/5
Review copy provided by the publicist, MM Book Publicity.

review: follow me by joanna scott

After becoming pregnant by her cousin, the parents of teenaged Sally Werner try to make her marry him. Sally instead leaves her son with her parents and takes off for parts unknown. On her journey she’s spotted by two brothers who bring her back to their family who start calling her Sally Angel. Sally adopts the name and tries to make a life with these new people, but it’s long before she takes off again. She has another child and makes another name change all the while acting quite selfishly so that her daughter eventually decides to live with her father. Years later that daughter has a daughter named after Sally. It is that Sally who sets the narrative of Follow Me in motion—she wants to know the truth about her father, who has just gotten in contact after many years, and her grandmother’s secret past which is tied into the story of the younger Sally’s father. It took Joanna Scott a long time to finally reach that pay-off so that much of Follow Me is the story of the elder Sally’s troubled life. While parts of Follow Me are interesting, too much of it is Sally making herself out to be a wholly unsympathetic woman.
3/5
Review copy provided by the publisher, Back Bay Books.

review: the curse of van gogh by paul hoppe

One of the blurbs for Paul Hoppe’s The Curse of Van Gogh says that the story features “a more credible character” than that of other stories featuring art theft. While this may be true, it also means the book is excruciatingly boring. Hoppe wastes more than 100 pages having Tyler simply meet with people. Sure, one of them vaguely implies a threat to Tyler’s family, but nothing happens in the first half of the book; it’s all setup.
1/5
Review copy provided by BookSparks PR.

review: my last kiss by bethany neal

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While celebrating her seventeenth birthday, Cassidy has a bit too much to drink. As a result, her ghost self can’t remember how she died. Her death has been ruled a suicide, but some don’t think Cassidy would’ve jumped from the bridge.

Although Cassidy seems to be in ghost form so she can solve the mystery of her own death, she doesn’t seem terribly concerned about actually doing that. Cassidy comes across as vapid as her main concerns are about boys and her friends rather than figuring out who she was on the bridge with and why. When she discovers that her boyfriend can hear her, they first discuss her being a ghost before she bothers to ask about the night she died. It’s a conversation that lasts six short sentences before the subject goes back to Cassidy haunting Ethan. Cassidy does so little to figure out how she died that My Last Kiss is less of a mystery than a trite story about underage drinking and bad freinds.
2/5
Review copy provided by BookSparks PR.

review: all fall down by jennifer weiner

Allison looks to have it all together--a big house in the Philadelphia suburbs and a daughter in private school--but she's barely hanging on as her husband's job doesn't pay what it once did (he's a newspaper reporter), her daughter is "difficult," and her father's in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. She takes pills to cope. Allison constantly tries to justify her addiction, which she doesn't admit is an addiction, but her family eventually intervenes.

Allison is incredibly selfish and wholly unlikable. Throughout All Fall Down I found myself wanting to strangle her. She became even worse in rehab. It's possible no other fictional character has ever been so haughty and self-righteous. The plot also feels unrealistic as Jennifer Weiner herself seems to acknowledge when Allison shares her addiction timeline and story in rehab. She went from hardly ever even drinking to full-blown pill addict (albeit one who suffered no consequences other than having her daughter’s teacher stop her from driving until she drank some coffee) after being prescribed a painkiller for back pain. And then after spending so much time with Allison lamenting her life and refusing to believe she’s an addict, Weiner tacks on a pat ending where nothing has been dealt with.

About the audiobook: Since I started reviewing audiobooks, I've discovered that nothing makes me hate a book more than a whiny child character narrated in a grating whine throughout. Although I hated Allison, I sometimes felt sympathy for her when Ellie would screech. Jennifer Weiner’s All Fall Down is narrated by Tracee Chimo (who plays Neri Feldman on Orange is the New Black). It runs 12 hours 45 minutes and was published by Simon & Schuster Audio in 2014.
2/5
Review copy provided by Audiobook Jukebox.