When 13-year-old Patch sees a girl being abducted he acts without thinking and rushes the kidnapper. The girl escapes, but what follows changes Patch’s life and is the foundation for Chris Whitaker’s new novel All the Colors of the Dark. Patch and everyone he knows is changed by his heroic act in this opus saturated with the feeling of a writer who is leaving it all on the ... Read More...
The River We Remember
Summer is just beginning in the small town of Jewel, Minnesota when the body of Jimmy Quinn, one of the town’s wealthiest citizens, is discovered in the nearby river. Given that he was also one of the most disliked there are plenty of people in William Kent Krueger’s The River We Remember who wanted him dead and little enthusiasm on the part of Sheriff Brody Dern to find the ... Read More...
Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club
J. Ryan Stradal’s new novel, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club, employs his familiar template of families, food and drink, but once again he uses it to create a fresh canvas for two families in northern Minnesota. Each runs a restaurant, but the similarities stop there. Betty and Floyd run the Lakeside, a traditional supper club with a bar, dance floor, and musical ... Read More...
Marrying the Ketchups
After my frank opinions in the May recap let’s start June off with some breezy family drama, shall we? Marrying the Ketchups by Jennifer Close is the story of the Sullivans, a restaurant-owning family in Chicago’s Oak Park neighborhood. The novel is cemented in place at the volatile end of 2016, when the Cubs win their first World Series in 100 years and America’s political ... Read More...
The Talented Miss Farwell
Sometimes, despite being gifted, life doesn’t work out the way you want. For Rebecca Farwell her father’s ineptitude in business and later, a stroke, mean that despite her talent with numbers college is not an option. Instead, she keeps their farm equipment company in Pierson, Illinois solvent and even pays off the farm when her father dies. All this before she turns 18. But ... Read More...
The Reckless Oath We Made
Zee’s life has never been easy (to begin with, her full name is Zhorzha), but now it’s coming completely unraveled. She left her last worthless boyfriend after she crashed his motorcycle and broke her hip, she traffics marijuana because she lost her job after the accident, and she’s living with her sister LaReigne and her young son, Marcus. Her mother is morbidly obese and a ... Read More...
