"The Winter People" by Jennifer McMahon~Scary Story!

 

 

SUMMARY :

 

The New York Times bestselling author of Promise Not to Tell returns with a simmering literary thriller about ghostly secrets, dark choices, and the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters . . . sometimes too unbreakable.

 

West Hall, Vermont, has always been a town of strange disappearances and old legends. The most mysterious is that of Sara Harrison Shea, who, in 1908, was found dead in the field behind her house just months after the tragic death of her daughter, Gertie. Now, in present day, nineteen-year-old Ruthie lives in Sara's farmhouse with her mother, Alice, and her younger sister, Fawn. Alice has always insisted that they live off the grid, a decision that suddenly proves perilous when Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that Alice has vanished without a trace. Searching for clues, she is startled to find a copy of Sara Harrison Shea's diary hidden beneath the floorboards of her mother's bedroom. As Ruthie gets sucked deeper into the mystery of Sara's fate, she discovers that she's not the only person who's desperately looking for someone that they've lost. But she may be the only one who can stop history from repeating itself.

ABOUT THE BOOK :

Published by:  Knopf Doubleday
Pages:  336
Genre:  Fiction/Gothic/Mystery
Author:  Jennifer McMahon
Find this book:  Amazon  and  Barnes & Noble
Website:  http://jennifer-mcmahon.com


ABOUT THE AUTHOR :

I was born in 1968 and grew up in my grandmother’s house in suburban Connecticut, where I was convinced a ghost named Virgil lived in the attic. I wrote my first short story in third grade. I graduated with a BA from Goddard College in 1991 and then studied poetry for a year in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College. A poem turned into a story, which turned into a novel, and I decided to take some time to think about whether I wanted to write poetry or fiction. After bouncing around the country, I wound up back in Vermont, living in a cabin with no electricity, running water, or phone with my partner, Drea, while we built our own house. Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness — I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full time. In 2004, I gave birth to our daughter, Zella. These days, we’re living in an old Victorian in Montpelier, Vermont. Some neighbors think it looks like the Addams family house, which brings me immense pleasure.



 

 

 

 

THE BOOKISH DAME REVIEWS :

 

It's been a while since I've read a really good scary story.  Jennifer McMahon writes that kind you'd hope to hear around a fireplace on a wintry evening in Vermont...fitting since that's her personal surrounding.  It's the perfect novel if you want a gothic mystery that's a page turner when you're alone some night or weekend.  It simply draws you in and makes you feel as if you know the creaky floors of the old Victorian farmhouse you're walking about in, you can see the dense, craggy woods beyond the farmland, and you sense the presence of ghostly beings.

 

I've lived in the North Country of New Hampshire and Vermont and know very well the type of landscape, snow, rock formations and lonely old farmhouses Ms McMahon writes about, but even if you haven't, or aren't a native of that area, you can't help falling into the pace of this book.  It's an old-fashioned gothic with a mystery that runs the gamut of several generations.  It's creepier than a modern witch story because it seems more set in reality.

 

The characters are well drawn and vivid.  The women in particular leap from the pages.  Neurotic, deeply loving mothers, risk-takers, committed wives, these women are tough and tender at the same time.  It's difficult not to identify with them and their heart-felt run for saving their children at all costs.  The men characters are crafted more shadowy.  While their emotions are told, they are not as strong as the women involved in the story.

 

If there's anything to complain about, it would be that I found it difficult to follow all the different voices and timeframes bouncing back and forth in the novel since I read it in ebook format.  I find I loose the context when I read from ebooks.  I don't think the same thing would have happened had I had the actual book in hand.

 

This is a great book with the perfect timing of a gothic, ghostly mystery.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and strongly recommend it.  Unlike anything else I've read this year.  It's a book that kept my attention firmly in place to the end.

 

4.5 stars                       Deborah/TheBookishDame

 

 

"The Book of James" by Ellen J. Green~A Stunning Read!

A terrible car crash sets things in motion for 31 year old Mackenzie when her critically injured husband, Nick, whispers warnings that someone from his past may attempt to harm or kill her after his passing. He urges her to travel to Philadelphia to his childhood home. Find James, he insists. It's the only way out.

His last words are pushed to the side in the aftermath of his death, as Mackenzie is consumed with grief. Until the things he had spoken of start to come true.

Mackenzie's search brings her to the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, to the 19th century mansion where her husband was raised, and face to face with a mother-in-law she didn't know existed. The two women each have an agenda. Cora, a recluse, worries that her son revealed devastating childhood secrets to his wife. Mackenzie is concerned that unless she uncovers those secrets and finds the elusive James, she may not survive. The two women circle around one another, hunter and prey. But which is which?

As the plot unfolds Mackenzie becomes more driven and takes increasingly dangerous risks while Cora’s precarious mental state rapidly deteriorates forcing her to relive a past she has worked so hard to keep buried.

A gallery of photographs in the bowels of the house holds clues to generations of abuse, treachery and possibly murder. Messages hidden in Nick’s childhood Bible within the Epistle of James have Mackenzie racing against time to put the pieces together, unearth the reasons her husband chose to vanish when he was sixteen years old, and locate the person mentioned in Nick’s dying breath.

When James is finally found, the results are more horrifying than Mackenzie could have ever imagined.


Particulars of the Book:

Publisher: BookBaby

Publication date: 5/26/2012

Sold by: Barnes & Noble

Format: eBook

Pages: 470

The Dame's Review :
"The Book of James" is a startling and absorbing read.  I started reading it weeks ago just before I changed computers, and then lost it in the shuffle!  It was like a punch to the solar plexis because I loved the book and couldn't get to the ending....like watching "Rosemary's Baby" and not being able to find out what happened!  Not that I'm comparing this book to that one...just the idea of a fabulous gothic suspense/mystery that rivets you and won't let you sleep at night until you get to the final answer.  That's the stuff of this book.  It's just a page turner from the start.  PS:  I did get another copy of the book and was able to finish it!  LOL

While the gothic and mysterious is a huge draw of this book, one of the central keys to making this a top shelf novel is Ms Green's writing skills, absolutely, stand alone.  She is brilliant in creating suspense and dialog.  Her story starts with a crashing bang from the get-go and it doesn't let up.  Characters are illusive and beautiful and her ability to manipulate them to create atmosphere and mystery are indicative of a gifted writer.  I was thinking of strong writers such as Patricia Cornwell and Lisa Jackson and others while I was reading this book.  Although, Ms Green has a wonderful style of  her own that is edgy and gothic which is a delight to my heart, personally, to add to the mix.

The central character, Mackenzie, is the woman we all know we'd be in the similar situation.  She's feisty and strong-minded.  I loved her bravery and brains from the beginning of the tragedy of losing her husband to her eventual discovery of all his secrets.  The opening scenes of losing her husband were stellar and rang clear to me as a widow who nearly lost my husband in the blink of an eye.  Ellen Green knows shock and grief and many more of the emotions Mackenzie and others of  her characters experience throughout this book.  She not only knows them, but she can translate them to words and make you feel them which is also the sign of a gifted writer.

I can only highly recommend "The Book of James" to you as one of the finest gothic suspense novels of this year.  It's a book that should be jumping off the book shelves if it were in paperback.  For now, you can find it in ebook format.  I think we're sure to be hearing more from and about Ellen J. Green in the future.  I'm one of her biggest fans!!  Go get a copy of this one for a night this weekend.  You'll be up all night reading....  :]

5 stars                  Deborah/TheBookishDame



About the Author :

Website:  Ellen J. Green

I was born and raised in upstate NY and moved to the Philadelphia area to go to college. I graduated with degrees in psychology. Although writing has always been my first love I somehow took a left turn in life and ended up as a therapist in a maximum security correctional facility.---for the past 7 years. (plenty of fodder for writing there, I can tell you).

I have been published three times in various magazines, (True Confessions, Woman's World) The Book of James is my first novel. I am starting a Masters degree program in creative writing in the fall.

Please visit SupraGurl Tours for more information and to visit more tours of "The Book of James" featuring giveaways, guest posts and interviews of Ms Green

Purchase this book on:  Amazon or Barnes & Noble

where it's getting nothing but 5 star reviews!!

A Gothic Mystery! "A Darkly Hidden Truth"~ by Donna Fletcher Crow

Book Summary: "Felicity can’t possibly help Father Antony find the valuable missing icon. She’s off to become a nun. Then her impossible mother turns up unexpectedly. And a good friend turns up murdered…   Breathtaking chase scenes, mystical worship services, dashes through remote waterlogged landscapes keep the pages turning. Felicity learns the wisdom of holy women from today and ages past and Antony explores the arcane rites of the Knights Hospitaller. But what good will any of that do them if Felicity can’t save Antony’s life?"    I love a good gothic novel with mystery and paranormal enchantment.  This book has it all!  Don't fail to find it on Amazon...links below.


You must watch this amazing book trailer!

A Bit About Ms Crow:
Donna Fletcher Crow is the author of 38 books, mostly novels dealing with British history. The award-winning Glastonbury, an Arthurian grail search epic covering 15 centuries of English history, is her best-known work. Donna and her husband live in Boise, Idaho. They have 4 adult children and 11 grandchildren. She is an enthusiastic gardener.
Her newest release is A Darkly Hidden Truth, book 2 in her clerical mystery series The Monastery Murders. She also writes the Lord Danvers series of Victorian true-crime novels and the romantic suspense series The Elizabeth & Richard Mysteries. To read more about these books and to see book videos for A Darkly Hidden Truth and for A Very Private Grave, Monastery Murders 1, as well as pictures from Donna’s garden and research trips go to:
http://donnafletchercrow.com

Please find Ms Crows links here:

To purchase her book~

                                                                        Amazon     and  Barnes and Noble

Again, her beautiful website:  http://donnafletchercrow.com will give you such a wonderful tour of her books and very prolific writing life.

An Short Guest Post With Ms Crow Regarding Her Reading Life :   (Taken from her blog...)
People always ask me, "did you always want to write?" No, I always wanted to read, although I did "write" my first novels in the sixth grade: an adventure series starring me, complete with illustrations. I think each book was about five pages long. I also sat in our back garden under a huge cottonwood tree and wrote embarrassingly bad poetry, complete with illustrations. My poetry is still embarrassingly bad, but that doesn't stop me writing it.
I had an ideal childhood for a reader. I was an only child, living on a farm. I would take a book out to the middle of the alfalfa field in front of our house, lay down flat and revel in the fact that God was the only person in the whole universe who knew where I was.
In the tenth grade my Charlie Chaplain look-alike English teacher Mr. Hodgson, of blessed memory, told me the only book report he would accept from me was Wuthering Heights. I still think that's a strange choice for a 15-year-old, and as many times as I have read the novel and seen the movie (and even visited Howarth) I still don't understand it. But it "took". From that moment I was hooked on the English classics and to this day I read very little other than English authors. Jane Austen, of course, is my lifelong literary love.

I naturally majored in English and became a starry-eyed English teacher, aspiring to inspire my students to a love of great literature before I retired to become a full time mother.
My reading life has always gone by passions, finding a writer I loved, reading everything he or she (usually she) wrote, then feeling absolutely bereft when I came to the end. Much the same feeling as having a child leave for college, I later learned. My passions have included Norah Lofts, D. E. Stevenson, Mary Stewart, Rumer Godden, Elizabeth Goudge and Elswyth Thane with whom I carried on a delightful correspondence just before she died and I began writing professionally.
The writer that really catapulted me into writing, however, was Gerogette Heyer. Her Venetia became the springboard for my first novel Brandley's Search, reissued later as Where Love Begins, although my book was set in 1824, so can't be strictly called a Regency. That book grew into the six-book Cambridge Chronicles series.


The Bookish Dame's Review :

I hardly know what to tell you except there's little that brings me back to my young adult years like a gothic mystery.  I love a gothic novel!  Shades of Norah Lofts and Mary Stewart--only more umph and a little better, I have to say!  I could hardly wait to receive a copy of Ms Crows book to review.  I particularly was anxious to read one set in a monastery with a proper, would-be novice nun,  a situation and setting which has always been a curiosity of mine.  That this book had a paranormal twist just made it all the more a draw for me, and once I visited Donna Fletcher Crow's website, I was sunk!  This is a book for a stormy night, everyone!  And, you'll be reading it when you're supposed to be doing lots of other things...I was.

Donna Fletcher Crow is a natural born writer with skills that make reading such a joy.  I identified immediately with her young protagonist Felicity, who is the aspiring nun cum sweetheart of not-sure-he-wants-to-be priest, Antony.  They, as sleuths, are familiar to those who have read Ms Crow's previous book, "A Very Private Grave;" which you don't have to have read, by the way, to enjoy this second book in the Monastery Series.  The couple is irrepressible!  I adore them and their bantering, their bravery and their push-pull of relationship throughout this mystery novel.  I'm dying to read more about them.

In having read the book, I would say that Ms Crow's influences by other authors are apparent, but subtle.  She has a wonderful sense of herself and it comes across brilliantly.  This is a novel in the vein of a Carolyn Hart's Annie Darling series with her husband and mother-in-law, but so much a superior quality.  Any of you who love a mystery with a moral and a twist will love this one, as well.  For me,  historical and art references were a plus.  Particularly those about the Templars.

I'm now going to be reading the 1st book in this series, and I look forward to her new book coming soon featuring the wonderful Felicity and Antony team called "An Unholy Communion."  I truly think I've found my latest favorite author in this gothic, set mystery genre.  Hopefully, you'll try this book, too, and join me as an on-going fan.

Please let Donna and me know if you decide to read...and if you've gone to Amazon or Barnes & Noble to check out her book!

5 stars for my newest find!!!

Deborah/TheBookishDame