Thriller
Nick is a British lawyer that moves to Russia for some excitement. He finds it in sisters Masha and Katya. The three have a lot of fun together and Nick starts to think he's falling in love. He meets the girl's aunt and starts to help them draft contracts to move the aunt out to the country. Nick knows in the back of his mind something isn't right but he's having too much fun to ask any important questions.
You can tell that the author lived in Russia for a while, as there are some very interesting insights in to life there from a foreigner's perspective. I think this is what I enjoyed most about the book. The story itself moved a bit slowly at the beginning but you could feel the tension build in the middle and I wondered what was going to happen to Nick. At the end, it didn't feel to be anything major which was a bit of a let down.
First Line: "I smelled it before I saw it"
Rating:
(3/5)
Chris meets Jenny while he's working a party, after she runs away from some guys because they found out she crashed the party. It's love at first sight for Chris and Jenny agrees to meet him again. The two get closer, though Chris loses touch when Jenny's home is raided for drugs and she can't return. At the same time, Chris' boss is having Chris help him fix up a remote cabin. The reason he gives is that there's a bad guy looking for him after he helped put his brother behind bars. Chris isn't sure if it's true but helps him out anyways.
Grant Wiggins left his small Cajun community as a young man to attend university, though he returned to his hometown to teach the other children of the community. When Jefferson, a young black man, is convicted for killing a liquor store attendant when he really was only in the wrong place at the wrong time, Grant is asked to help. Jefferson's godmother and Grant's aunt persuade him to try to make Jefferson see that he is a man. Grant doesn't want to confront Jefferson because there are a lot of hidden feelings he has about having to return to his hometown rather than becoming a successful black man in the world.
Dr. Amin Jaafari has worked hard to get where he is. As an Arab living in Israel, he had to put up with a lot of racism and work very hard to become a surgeon in Tel Aviv. He has a very long day ahead of him when a suicide bomber blows up a restaurant. Dr. Jaafari performs multiple surgeries and goes home in a daze, ready to collapse from exhaustion. In the middle of the morning, he's called back to the hospital. The police are there, asking him to identify his wife, whom they believe was the suicide bomber. Dr. Jaafari can't believe this until he gets a note in the mail from his wife, dated a few days before the bombing, apologizing. Dr. Jaafari sets on a quest to determine who turned his wife and how he missed the signs, not worrying about any danger he might be putting himself in.
The second book in the Maze Runner series sees Thomas and his buddies in a safe-haven, having just escaped the maze. Thomas wakes up to screaming and Teresa in his head, saying that something is wrong. Then he can't hear Teresa anymore, her voice replaced with screams of Cranks trying to enter the building. The boys run from the windows, into a room filled with bodies of the people that saved them. Going around the bodies to Teresa's room, they instead find a single boy, who was a member of a different maze trial but with girls. Soon, a man appears telling them they are about to embark on the next phase, the scorch trials, where they have to travel 100 miles north. It is said to be even more difficult than the maze trial and the boys can only imagine what that means.
Michael Gates Gill had it all: a great job as a director of an ad agency, four kids, a nice house, and a wife. Then his life started to fall apart. He was laid off from his job because he was too old, he had an affair and another child and got divorced where he lost his house too, and he developed a tumor at the base of his brain that impeded his hearing. After 10 years of being a consultant and consistently losing clients, 60-something year old Gill is in a Starbucks when a young lady comes up to him and asks him if he would like a job. On a whim, Gill says yes and starts a new journey in his life working at Starbucks.
Friday is an orca slowly dying at a facility in Columbia due to inadequate food and poor living conditions. The Max L. Beidelman Zoo decides to save him and transport him to their newly created pool at the zoo. The whole team is worried that Friday may not survive the trip but he does and then the real work begins. Executive director of the zoo Truman hires a marine mammal rehabilitator Gabriel to slowly help Friday become a healthy whale. Truman's girlfriend Neva and aunt Ivy also help with training and the financials. There's also animal communicator Libertine who hears Friday when he first moves to the zoo and comes to see if he needs help or wants to communicate more.
This is the fourth book in the Outlander series, where Jaime and Claire are now in the USA and settling down their homestead. They meet Jaime's aunt who owns a plantation. Claire has to wrestle with the fact that she also owns slaves. Something has been left in the future though, which is Jaime and Claire's daughter Brianna. When Brianna finds a notice stating that her parents will die in a fire at their home, she is determined to go to the past to try and save them. When her boyfriend, Roger, finds out she's gone he isn't impressed and follows her through the stones.
Henry Oates is pulled over for driving suspiciously when the police find a body of a young woman in the back of his car. He's brought in to the station where he is questioned and admits to two additional murders. DCI Mike Lewis takes over the investigation, though when DCS Langton learns that one of the suspected victims is a young girl that he investigated the disappearance of, he also assigns DCI Anna Travis to the case. Oates recants his admission, stating it was just a joke to get their attention. Lewis and Travis start digging through the files to figure out if they can trap Oates in a lie and determined what really happened to the missing girls.
Spoilers from the first two books in the series
Detective of Department Q, Carl Mørck, is back in this second book of the series, in attempts to solve previously unsolved murders. When a file winds up on his desk of a mystery that has a suspect charged, Mørck is confused. Why would this file be on his desk if the murder was already solved? Not to let anything slide past him, Mørck sets out to investigate with his assistant Assad and his new, and annoying, office manager Rose.
Carl Mørck is a troublemaker on his Danish homicide squad. When the government decides that it needs to create a new department to solve high profile cold cases, Mørck's bosses decide this is the perfect way to be rid of him. After he returns from leave because he was shot while investigating a murder, they set him up in the basement of the building and give him one assistant, Assad. We aren't too sure where Assad is from (though he says Syria) or what he has done in his past, but he proves quite useful in memorizing files, getting things done, and finding facts.