fall reading list

Only five this quarter, busy chopping vines and streaming video.

The Hidden One by Linda Castillo – Another in the Kate Burkholder, chief of police in Painter's Mill, series. Kate grew up Amish but left the community as some do when they realize that the Amish life is not for them but her upbringing gives her insight into the Amish community when crime happens that involves them. When the skeletal remains of a bishop gone missing almost 20 years ago are discovered, the evidence points to Kate's first love, Josh Bowman, as the killer. Josh and his family now live in a different community in a different state but she is visited by their Diener (bishop, deacon, minister) who ask for Kate's help in the case to prove Josh innocent. Kate reluctantly agrees as she does not want to drag up the past and how their relationship ended. Nevertheless, she travels to the Kishacoquillas Valley to see what she can do. Kate gets no help, basically shut out by the local authorities, but she is determined to solve the case and discovers that the bishop was not who he claimed to be. The more information Kate digs up, the more someone doesn't want her to succeed. I like these books, she's a good storyteller, and I don't know why I don't seek out more of them. This one was supposed to be on the hold shelf instead of the new arrivals shelf as there are two people on a waiting list for it but the librarian let me check it out anyway.

The Big Dark Sky by Dean Koontz – Rustling Willows Ranch in the vast emptiness of Montana was a perfect place for Joanna Chase to grow up at least until her mother drowned and her father was killed by a bear and she was taken away to live with her aunt when she was seven. Now years later Joanna is 34 and she starts receiving phone calls from her dead mother telling her to come home and save her, her cars start by themselves as does the TV. Meanwhile the current owners of the ranch have enlisted the help of a private investigator to explain the strange and frightening things that caused them to flee. Something evil lurks in the lake at Rustling Willows. As Joanna heads to the ranch, there is a madman with his own agenda living in a ghost town not far from the ranch who is intent on wiping out the human race and two of his intended victims have escaped. A scientist in charge of a government organization tasked to discover where a hidden entity is hiding that has shown it can take over even the most secret weapons is also headed to the ranch along with two other individuals caught up when her house explodes. Typical Koontz, different characters and their story lines all converge for the showdown. It was good but not gripping. The very last line though made me laugh.

Touch by Claire North – This is the third book by her that I've read on the kindle. There are some people who when they are dying a violent death and reach out to ward off the aggressor or to a person there to render aid find that when they touch bare skin they have jumped into that other body as the one they were born into dies and so they live by jumping from body to body, sometimes for moments, sometimes for whole lifetimes, the original inhabitant is there but not conscious. When these 'ghosts' leave a body, depending on how long they wore it, the real person either thinks they spaced out for a few minutes or totally loses it with no idea how or why they are a young soul finding themselves in an aged or diseased body. The ghost Kepler worked for a time as an estate agent, a ghost who finds clean bodies for long term use for other ghosts. When Kepler learned what Galileo, a cruel and murderous ghost, had done to a body he provided he tried to kill Galileo and failed. Coyle, a ghost hunter who tracks ghosts through reports of amnesia, kills Kepler's current host as Kepler jumps to a new body and is set on a path to learn who these hunters are. He discovers the organization, Aquarius, whose goal it is to kill every living ghost and yet it is Galileo at the heart, Galileo who is killing ghosts as vengeance against Kepler. Kepler and Coyle form an uneasy alliance in their quest to finally end Galileo's life. As with her other two books she explores other ways of being though this particular story is about love I think, the human need and desire to love and be loved.

The Sudden Appearance Of Hope by Claire North – the 4^th and last book of hers on the kindle. “The world began to forget me when I was 16 years old.” It took about a year for Hope to become completely forgotten, to be a complete stranger every time someone laid eyes on her; her parents, her friends, her teachers, everyone she had had daily encounters with her whole life. The day Hope came home to find her parents had moved her stuff out of her room and were changing the wallpaper, startled to see a stranger in the house, Hope gathered as much as she could and left for the last time. She learned to steal to survive, living each day as 'now', no past, no future, out of sight, out of mind. Any recognition by others lasted only as long as she was in their sight. Hope became a jewel thief, easy when no one remembers that she even exists. When she steals a diamond necklace from a princess at a big event it sets her on a path to destroy an app called Perfection, a marketing tool that guides people to 'perfect' themselves through rewards for buying recommend products, services, and 'treatments' which eventually steals their humanity. Hope teams up with Byron, who has to leave copious notes to herself in order to remember that the stranger in her room in the morning is not a stranger. When Hope understands that Byron plans to destroy Perfection by causing a massacre, she sets out to prevent it. I've mentioned before that North's novels are very cerebral, what's going on in the minds of her main character (though there is plenty of interaction with others), but also because some thought or phrase sends me off on my own cogitation so it generally takes me longer than usual to read her books.

Girl, Forgotten by Karin Slaughter – Emily is part of 'the clique', a group of five friends together since grade school (Clay, Nardo, Blake and his twin sister Ricky, and Emily) and now in their senior year of high school. At one of their clique parties, they take acid and that's the last thing Emily remembers until she woke up on the floor of her grandmother's room at home. She discovers 6 weeks later she is pregnant and when the news gets out her friends turn on her viciously, her parents take her out of school to keep her out of sight. When she is 7 months along and still doesn't know who raped her, she is determined to go to her prom and is brutally murdered but before she dies from her injuries they deliver her baby. Forty years later Andrea, whose father is Clay, a psychopath currently in jail and up for parole, is a newly graduated US Marshal sent to partner with Bible to protect a judge, Emily's mother, and her granddaughter, Judith, that have been receiving death threats. Andrea wonders if she and Judith are half sisters and conducts her own private investigation to see if she can learn who Judith's father is and who killed Emily. At the same time Bible and Andrea are drawn into an investigation of the suicide of a young emaciated girl, a 'volunteer' at the Farm, a cult of abuse and sex run by Nardo and Wexler, an ex-teacher from the high school.