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June Recap

June Recap:

2 Books

866 pages

Average Rating 5.0

Chasing Evil 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Dark Places 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Another 2 book month but I’m not upset. It looks worse then it actually was. I was reading 2 more books in June but one I finished on 7/3 so technically that will count for July and I am half way through IT. It is just a beast of a book, I am listening to the audio version and it is 45 hours long! I know a lot of you can blaze right through that but I am not there yet! 😂 I have a full time job and 10 animals to care for (2 dogs, 6 tortoises, and 2 bearded dragons). I used to have a commute where it would have taken no time at all to get through but with the Rona I now work at home. Not complaining about that, it is the best thing to come out of this pandemic.

June was packed full of family visits though so not a whole lot of time was spent reading. I keep telling myself not to worry that I will catch up during my vacation but my vacation keeps getting cancelled and rescheduled.😭 Originally booked in April, then moved to September, now currently set for November but if we can’t get this pandemic under control I feel it will not be happening at all this year. Then I will reach the end of the year and be no where near my 50 book goal.😫

The books this month were awesome picks however! Both Thrillers that I really enjoyed. Be sure to check out my reviews page!

Book Review – What Doesn’t Kill You

What Doesn’t Kill You by Iris Johansen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Romantic Thriller

“I merely encountered Lucifer, and he thinks I can bring him out of hell and give him back paradise.”
“I avoid Lucifer if I can. I understand his ambition and recognize it in myself. It’s just another name for power, and it can be a heady brew.”

Catherine has just returned from a job in Peru when she gets a call from Venable, the deputy director of the CIA and her boss. He needs her in Hong Kong now. There is a situation that only she can help with, Hu Chang. A mysterious Chinese medicine potion maker, he is also a master poison maker and assassin but he is the closest thing to a father that Catherine knows. He took her in when she was young, alone, and on the streets.
“Hu Chang stopped being innocent a long, long time ago. He’s capable of doing anything that he chooses. But he doesn’t usually choose anything that would get him into this kind of trouble. What’s he done?” “I think he’s concocted some potion or drug that’s fairly world-shaking.”

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J is for ….

J is for …. Jurassic Park

I have read both of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and The Lost World. They are good and very entertaining. But Steven Spielberg took these to the next level! “Hold onto your butts.” It’s pretty rare when I love a movie over it’s book, but Jurassic Park is one. It is actually one of my favorite movies of all time, I torture my husband because we watch it so much. I just never get bored with it. My love of dinosaurs first came about after I read Dinotopia when I was a child. Love it!

Another classic novel, that should be required reading in my opinion, is The Jungle. The book was written to showcase the horrible treatment that immigrants faced at the turn of the century. “It describes the terrible working conditions in meatpacking plants, the squalid housing, the ruthlessness of employers, the sexual harassment, the lure of alcoholism and prostitution, the political corruption, the misery of life in jail. It depicts a world where honest, descent people are transformed into cogs in a huge industrial machine.”

What it ended up doing was bringing a spot light to the meatpacking industry and the completely appalling and unsanitary conditions of them. At the time the book published, Theodore Roosevelt was president and he loved to read books. He read The Jungle and felt that much of what was descibed was accurate. He ordered several investigations into the meatpacking industry and ultimately passed the Pure Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Industry Inspection Act.

Book 17: Kentucky

Book 2 in the Catherine Ling series. This is a spin off of the Eve Duncan series, which I am obsessed with! The first book which was #12 in the Eve series, Eve meets Catherine and helps her get her son back from a murderous Russian mafia head. I am looking forward to finding out if I like Catherine Ling as much as I like Eve Duncan. Only time will tell.

“It’s the deadliest poison known to man. He’s the only one who knows its true power. She’s the only one who can stop the evil.

The chase is on. . . .

Catherine Ling was abandoned on the streets of Hong Kong at age four. Schooled in the art of survival, she traded in the only commodity she had: information. As a teenager, she came under the tutelage of a mysterious man known only as Hu Chang—a skilled assassin and master poisoner. As a young woman, she was recruited by the CIA and now she is known as one of their most effective operatives. When her old friend Hu Chang creates a formula that’s not only deadly but completely untraceable, the race begins to be the first to get it. Catherine finds herself up against a group so villainous and a man so evil that she may not survive in her quest to protect those she cares about: Hu Chang and Luke—the son who was stolen from Catherine and only recently brought home safe. Using all of her formidable skills, Catherine Ling proves the age-old belief that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Book Review – Dark Places

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thriller

“The Devil lurked nearby in our Kansas town, an evil that was as natural and physical as a hillside.”

“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. It’s the Day blood. Something’s wrong with it.”

In January 1985 the Day family was murdered in the home, all but two were killed, Libby- 7 and Ben- 15. Libby testified that it was her brother Ben that killed her mom and two sisters that night. The Kinnakee Kansas Farmhouse Massacre they called it. But had she lied.

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Book 16: Kansas

Book 16: Kansas

“Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice” of Kinnakee, Kansas.” She survived—and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, the Kill Club—a secret secret society obsessed with notorious crimes—locates Libby and pumps her for details. They hope to discover proof that may free Ben. Libby hopes to turn a profit off her tragic history: She’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club—for a fee. As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer.”

I am half way through and thoroughly enjoying this book. I have already seen the movie, so I already know what the twisted ending is but it is still a great read.

Book Review – Chasing Evil

Chasing Evil by Kylie Brant

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thriller, Romance

“Backdropped against clumps of rich black Iowa topsoil was an unmistakably human hand.”

Women’s murdered bodies are discovered concealed in the graves of the recently buried throughout Iowa. DCI investigator Cam Prescott is assigned lead on the case and they have called in several specialists to consult on it. One of those specialists is Forensic Psychologist Dr. Sophia Channing, brought in to assist by providing a profile on the suspect.
“She’d spent the better part of graduate school interning with Louis Frein, renowned profiler at Quantico’s Behavioral Science Unit. In the last decade and a half, she’d interviewed the most notorious serial killers in captivity. There was more, much more to the woman than her appearance.”

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May Recap

2 Books

611 pages

Average Rating 2.5

Wolf 🌟🌟🌟🌟

The Prom Night Murders 🌟

Well unfortunately May was the worst reading month I have had all year. 😢

I got shanghaied by the The Prom Night Murders and it pretty much wrecked it for me. There were several times where I told myself to just stop reading it and move on but I just couldn’t. I must finish it, I have never not finished a book in my life.

June however has started well and I look forward to great comeback.

I is for….

I is for …. IT! 🎈🤡

Stephen King is my #1 and always has been. Surprisingly, I have never read IT but it is on my TBR this year, coming up soon in fact. The size of the book was just so intimidating that I have put it off. Until now! I absolutely LOVE the new movies Chapter 1 and 2. Good and creepy scary just like I like them.

🎈

Clearly I like Irish books as well. I am definitely a sucker for an Ireland setting, I have always been drawn to them. I recently did a DNA test and discovered that I am majority Irish heritage, so it makes sense why I have an affinity towards them.

🎈

I recently watched a documentary about John Grisham’s The Innocent Man and I can’t wait to read the book now. This is his first nonfiction work.

“If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you.”

Book 15: Iowa

“There’s nothing strange about bodies buried in cemeteries—unless they don’t belong there. And when six murdered women are discovered in other people’s graves, the hunt for a sadistic serial killer begins before he can claim a seventh victim.

Agent Cam Prescott of Iowa’s Division of Criminal Investigation is leading the search alongside forensic psychologist Sophia Channing, who knows the minds of psychopaths inside and out. And after a brief but passionate affair, she knows Cam almost as well. What she doesn’t know is that her high-profile involvement in the case has caught the twisted predator’s eye—and sparked his fury.

When Sophia suddenly vanishes, Cam and his team shift into overdrive to keep horrific history from repeating itself. But for Sophia, being trapped in the same isolated lair where so much innocent blood has been spilled may get her inside her vicious captor’s head—and may offer her the only chance she has to escape an agonizing and lethal fate.”