Body Double, by Tess Gerritsen ****

Pregnant women play key roles in this bone-chilling fourth novel in Gerritsen's edgy, suspenseful series of thrillers featuring Boston Medical Examiner Maura Isles and Homicide Detective Jane Rizzoli. Both of the usually gritty crime fighters are uncharacteristically vulnerable. Rizzoli is carrying her first child, and Isles—divorced and alone at age 40 and suddenly, unsettlingly aware of her biological clock—is experiencing decidedly unspiritual feelings for her priest. As the novel begins, Isles—an adopted child who never knew the identity of her birth parents—is confronted by the corpse of a murdered woman who is apparently her identical twin. Another detective, Rick Ballard, comes forward to say that he knew the victim and is certain her killer is a powerful pharmaceutical baron known to have stalked her. Isles falls for the handsome Ballard, but she isn't convinced by his theory, and she launches an investigation into her sister's past, following the trail to a state correctional facility and a schizophrenic inmate who may be her mother. This opens the cobwebbed pages of a nightmarish family album and leads Isles to a remote cabin in Maine where the long-dead body of a pregnant woman is discovered buried in the woods. The killer, Isles discovers, has been murdering pregnant women for decades, making periodic sweeps of the country. Meanwhile, brief scenes chronicle the diabolical kidnapping of an affluent pregnant housewife who is kept buried in a crude coffin. An electric series of startling twists, the revelation of ghoulishly practical motives and a nail-biting finale make this Gerritsen's best to date. 

I'm reading this series out of order, but that doesn't seem to hurt the main story lines.  

Like the others that I've ready by Tess Gerritsen, this was another straight forward mysteries.  They aren't incredibly deep, and I suspect that anybody who tried very hard could probably solve the mystery without too much trouble before it's spelled out for them.  They work for me, though.  I like to read for an hour or two each evening as a means to relax and let all the thoughts from the day go.  This series as fit the bill for that almost perfectly.

I will say that this one was maybe my least favourite of the series so far, in that so much has been happening to Maura and/or Jane (the two main characters in the series) that I'm already having to suspend some serious disbelief while reading them.  However, I do enjoy them.  I whipped through this one in a couple of evenings.

The Sinner, by Tess Gerritsen ****

I feel like I've started and stopped reading a number of books lately, and if I don't get past the first chapter, I haven't been writing about them here.  (It might be my mood that's the problem, not the books.)  Regardless, I was happy when I found a bunch of Tess Gerritsen books for $5 a pop.  I  knew they'd hold my attention, so I snapped them all up.    I just realized that I'm almost finished the third in the pile and haven't written anything about them here, so here goes:

Tess Gerritsen's The Sinner:

A grisly murder at a convent baffles Medical Examiner Maura Isles and Det. Jane Rizzoli at the start of this assured, richly shaded seventh novel from bestseller Gerritsen (The Apprentice; The Surgeon, etc.). The popular duo are called to Boston's Graystones Abbey when two nuns are discovered in an abandoned chapel, one dead and the other near death, both brutally bludgeoned. Red herrings are everywhere: Isles's discovery that one of the murdered nuns had recently given birth (followed shortly by the discovery of the baby's body in a pond near the convent); the murder of a homeless derelict with her face and extremities removed by her killer; and the lurking menace of a multinational chemical company. Complicating matters further is the sudden arrival of Isles's ex-husband, Victor, a celebrity humanitarian with his own suspicious connection to the case, and Rizzoli's old flame, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, who's responsible for the baby now growing in Rizzoli's belly. The investigation is rather low-key, but Gerritsen gives atmospheric depth to her tale with descriptions of snowbound Boston and an exotic past tragedy. Isles's pleasantly bitchy coldness ("Go ahead and pass me, idiots. I've met too many drivers like you on my slab") gives a welcome edge to the proceedings, and the struggles of both Isles and Rizzoli to balance their tough professional acts with romantic drama are satisfyingly gritty.

Good Book.  It was nothing heavy, but an entertaining, quick read.

Smokin' Seventeen, by Janet Evanovich ***

Dead bodies are showing up in shallow graves on the empty construction lot of Vincent Plum Bail Bonds. No one is sure who the killer is, or why the victims have been offed, but what is clear is that Stephanie’s name is on the killer’s list. Short on time to find the murderer, Stephanie is also under pressure from family and friends to choose between her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Trenton cop Joe Morelli, and the bad boy in her life, security expert Ranger. Stephanie’s mom wants her to dump them both for a former high school football star who’s just returned to town. Stephanie’s sidekick, Lula, suggests a red-hot boudoir “bake-off.” And Joe’s old-world grandmother gives Stephanie “the eye,” which may mean that it’s time to get out of town.
With a cold-blooded killer after her, a handful of hot men, and a capture list that includes a dancing bear and a senior citizen vampire, Stephanie’s life looks like it’s about to go up in smoke

Let's call these books what they are:  The 'By the Numbers' series by Janet Evanovich is purely bubble gum escapism.  There's little to no substance to the books, but they're fun to read.  This one was exactly what I expected after reading the others - a little bit of male fantasy (Will she pick with Joe or Ranger?  Would I pick Joe or Ranger?) and a fair bit of funny.

The Reversal, by Michael Connelly ****

Longtime defense attorney Mickey Haller is recruited to change stripes and prosecute the high-profile retrial of a brutal child murder. After 24 years in prison, convicted killer Jason Jessup has been exonerated by new DNA evidence. Haller is convinced Jessup is guilty, and he takes the case on the condition that he gets to choose his investigator, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch. Together, Bosch and Haller set off on a case fraught with political and personal danger. 

Opposing them is Jessup, now out on bail, a defense attorney who excels at manipulating the media, and a runaway eyewitness reluctant to testify after so many years. With the odds and the evidence against them, Bosch and Haller must nail a sadistic killer once and for all. If Bosch is sure of anything, it is that Jason Jessup plans to kill again.

I think I've got a new author on my list of favourites.  I've known about Michael Connelly for some time, but hadn't read his books until this year.  While I enjoyed 'The Lincoln Lawyer', I think The Reversal was even better.

It's a mystery and a legal thriller, all wrapped into one. It was maybe a little bit procedural, but I think court stories have to be by nature.  I thought it was a highly entertaining, easy read, and I'm definitely going to go looking for the next in the series.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer **

Book Description:

Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb's "charring effect." It's more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist's voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters' constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty. 

I decided to throw in the towel on this book last night, after a second failed attempt to get through it. The dialogue was hard to follow - whole converstations would occur in one paragraph, and I'd have to jump back and forth to try to figure out who was saying what.  And, I found the characters to be weird... if I encountered them on the street, I'd probably cross the road.  It's too bad, because I thought this one had potential.

The Next Accident, by Lisa Gardner ***

This thriller has just the right mix of suspense, intrigue, and murder, topped off with a little romance to make it sizzle. Pierce Quincy, hard-boiled FBI agent, and Rainie Conner, ex-cop turned P.I., team up to catch the perpetrator of several ingenious murders. The psychopath staged the death of Quincy's daughter Amanda, then his ex-wife, and is now going after Quincy's remaining daughter, Kimberly.

I picked up this book because I'd read a few from Gardner's Det. DD Warren series and liked them. This one wasn't part of that series, but it was pretty good - it was an original storyline, I thought. I don't think the mystery was a great shock when it was solved, but the story kept me interested.

The one complaint that I have was the references to a dream that the one character (Raine) was having about a baby elephant... I can't tell you specifics because I flipped past it, but suffice to say that the baby suffered. I don't think that it added anything to the storyline, and I wish it had been left out.

The Surgeon, by Tess Gerritsen ****

A serial killer is on the loose in Boston. The victims are killed in a particularly nasty way: cut with a scalpel on the stomach, the intestines and uterus removed, and then the throat slashed. The killer obviously has medical knowledge and has been dubbed "the Surgeon" by the media. Detective Thomas Moore and his partner Rizzoli of the Boston Homicide Unit have discovered something that makes this case even more chilling. Years ago in Savannah a serial killer murdered in exactly the same way. He was finally stopped by his last victim who shot him as he tried to cut her. That last victim is Dr Catherine Cordell, who now works as a cardiac surgeon at one of Boston's prestigious hospitals. As the murders continue, it becomes obvious that the killer is drawing closer and closer to Dr Cordell, who is becoming so frightened that she is virtually unable to function. But she is the only person who can help the police catch this copycat killer. Or is it a copycat? To complicate matters even further, Detective Moore, often referred to as Saint Thomas as he continues to mourn the loss of his wife, is getting emotionally involved with the doctor.

This book has languished at the back of my closet, unread for months.  I thought that it was a mystery-romance, heavier on the romance, so I was in no rush to read it.  The reason why I picked it up is because I just saw the show "Rizzolli and Isles" for the first time and quite liked it - and apparently the show is based on the series of books that started with this one.

This was a good, somewhat procedural, mystery novel.  I whipped through it in a couple of hours.  There were no big surprises, and I felt almost no connection to the main characters.  However, it was an easy, entertaining read.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield ***

Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril. Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter, has written an obscure biography that suggests deep understanding of siblings. She is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman's tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. With the aid of colorful Aurelius Love, Margaret puzzles out generations of Angelfield: destructive Uncle Charlie; his elusive sister, Isabelle; their unhappy parents; Isabelle's twin daughters, Adeline and Emmeline; and the children's caretakers. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield's sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance. And like Jane, she's a real reader and makes a terrific narrator. That's where the comparisons end, but Setterfield, who lives in Yorkshire, offers graceful storytelling that has its own pleasures.

The above description, which I had to do some searching for, is neither the one I read before I bought this book, nor the one on the back of the book.  It is, however, an accurate description of the story.  Maybe it was because I was expecting something else, but wasn't as impressed by it as I expected to be.  The Thirteenth Tale is a fairly good book, but I found it to be very dark and somewhat depressing.  

More than one person told me that they read it in a sitting, because they couldn't put it down.  While I didn't dislike it, it didn't hold my attention for very long.  I rarely read more than 20-30 pages before my mind started to wander, which is why it took me over two weeks to complete.  It wasn't a bad book, just not as good as I'd hoped.

Book of Negros, by Lawrence Hill ****

This novel is published as Someone Knows My Name in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and appears in Canada as The Book of Negroes in Canada.

Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle - a string of slaves - Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic "Book of Negroes". This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own. Aminata's eventual return to Sierra Leone - passing ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America - is an engrossing account of an obscure but important chapter in history that saw 1,200 former slaves embark on a harrowing back-to-Africa odyssey.

This one took me a couple of weeks to work through.  It was a good story, though, telling the life story of a woman (girl) who is stolen from her African village at 11 and taken to the States to be a slave.  It held my attention throughout  - at time disturbing, but never too graphic.  The first half reminded me quite a bit of the book "Sacajawea" by A Waldo, which I read many, many years ago.

Secret Daughter, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda****

On the eve of the monsoons, in a remote Indian village, Kavita gives birth to Asha. But in a culture that favours sons, the only way for Kavita to save her newborn daughter's life is to give her away. It is a decision that will haunt her and her husband for the rest of their lives, even after the arrival of their cherished son. Halfway around the globe, Somer, an American doctor, decides to adopt a child after making the wrenching discovery that she will never have one of her own. When she and her husband Krishnan see a photo of baby Asha from a Mumbai orphanage, they are overwhelmed with emotion for her. Somer knows life will change with the adoption, but is convinced that the love they already feel will overcome all obstacles. Interweaving the stories of Kavita, Somer, and Asha, "Secret Daughter" poignantly explores issues of culture and belonging. Moving between two worlds and two families, one struggling to survive in the fetid slums of Mumbai, the other grappling to forge a cohesive family despite their diverging cultural identities, this powerful debut novel marks the arrival of a fresh talent poised for great success.

Secret Daughter is a story that mostly revolves around three women - an Indian woman who has to give up her daughter, an American Woman who adopts her daughter from India and the baby who is born in India, raised in America and goes back to get to know her family and the culture.  (Her father immigrated from India to America before she was born.)  This was not a gripping story that I struggled to put down, but I thought it was a good solid book.  I liked the descriptions of India and its culture, and I thought the author did a good job of describing the difficulties between mother and child... or really, the difficulties for anybody trying to keep their family together. I enjoyed it.

Born to Die - Lisa Jackson **

The resemblance between Dr. Kacey Lambert and B-movie actress Shelly Bonaventure is a standing joke in the town of Grizzly Falls, Montana. So much so, that Kacey is momentarily shocked to read about the fading starlet’s death. Still, it’s not as if there was any real connection between them. And when a fatally injured jogger who also bears a striking similarity to Kacey is rushed into the ER days later, Kacey is ready to rule it another sad, strange accident. Detective Selena Alvarez suspects otherwise. An autopsy confirms that the jogger had traces of poison in her blood at the time of her death. Selena and her partner, Regan Pescoli, can find no motive for the murder. But Kacey has started to notice ties between the dead women’s lives and her own—all close in age, born within miles of each other—and all with ties to the man Kacey has just begun seeing, single father Trace O’Halleran. Now, with more look-alikes dying, Kacey must question her judgment, her safety—and everything she’s ever believed about her past. The deeper Kacey digs, the more reason she has to fear. The body count is rising, the killer is getting bolder and more brutal. And Kacey knows it’s only a matter of time before hers is the next name on a list of those who were born to die…

I think the only way this book could be described would be far fetched.  Lisa Jackson writes good mysteries, but she seemed to have been digging through the dregs to come up with this plot.  A bunch of women, the biological results of artificial insemination, start dying.  The clinic where they came from is long gone, but somehow somebody has tracked down babies who resulted in sperm donations from the same man 30 years ago and is killing them.  Most of them don't even know that they came from artificial insemination, and yet he somehow tracks them down... and they're all pretty much in the same city.

Jackson writes engaging stories.  Her main characters still drew me in, but the plot and the supporting characters were too unbelievable for me to really get into the story.  Finally, the ending was laughable, it was so unlikely.  I'm normally a Lisa Jackson fan, but this one was a bomb.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards ***

This stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins.
His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. For motives he tells himself are good, he makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child as her own. Compulsively readable and deeply moving, The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a brilliantly crafted story of parallel lives, familial secrets, and the redemptive power of love.

My first mistake with the novel was to watch the movie before reading the book. I don't generally like reading books after I've seen the movie based off of them because the differences stand out too much to me. I think it distracts from the story when you're expecting one thing and read something else.

Starting out, having seen the movie (which wasn't very good)I had trouble getting into this book. It was slow reading, but I would say that I started enjoying it more at about the half way point, when it started to vary significantly from the story line in the movie. It was good for a little while, and then the end was really slow. Truth is, I felt like the story was over about 40 pages before the end of the book. Eventually, I ended up quitting about 10 pages before the last page. I don't think it was a bad story, just not great. And I really think my impression of it was hampered by the less than stellar movie.

Old Dogs Are the Best Dogs, by Gene Weingarten and Michael S. Williamson *****

This book is not a novel. It's a cross between a picture book and a collection of (very) short stories. I ordered it a few weeks ago, while feeling sentimental and kind of sad that my own pup is becoming an old man.

Each page has a black and white shot of an old dog, opposite of a description, tidbit, antic or memory from when they were younger.  Some make you laugh, others make you cry.

After my basement flooded last night, it was exactly what I needed. I was too stressed to sleep, so I whipped through it in the night. It's an easy - if emotional - read that any dog lover will want to read over and over. Loved it. Friends be forewarned: I will be giving it as gifts.

Rainwater, by Sandra Brown ****

Ella Barron is determined that even the ravages of the Dust Bowl will not affect the well-ordered life she has built for herself and her special child, Solly, who lives in a world of his own that even she can’t enter. Aware that he evokes pity and distrust, Ella holds herself aloof from her small community, but her new boarder, David Rainwater, comes into her life— and changes it forever. As economic desperation creates bitter social unrest in the town and surrounding farms, Ella finds herself relying on Mr. Rainwater’s soft-spoken advice and the steely resolve of his convictions. But tensions escalate in the summer heat, until one violent night everything they believe in will be put to the ultimate test.

This was not your typical Sandra Brown novel. The focus was about the difficulties of the times, not the romance between the two main characters. Actually, I was still wondering if she'd have them get together well into the book. I found it reminiscent of Bridges of Madison County, or a Nicholas Sparks novel... not what you'd call great literature, but a quick easy read. I liked it. It was a welcome change, and I hope she writes more like this.

The Lincoln Lawyer, by Michael Connelly ****

Veteran bestseller Connelly enters the crowded legal thriller field with flash and panache. Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller regularly represents lowlifes, but he's no slickster trolling for loopholes in the ethics laws. He's haunted by how he mishandled the case of (probably innocent) Jesus Menendez, and, though twice divorced, he's on good terms with his ex-wives; one of them manages his office, and the other, an ambitious assistant DA, occasionally tumbles back into bed with him. When Mickey signs on to defend young real estate agent Louis Roulet against charges of assault, he can't help seeing dollar signs: Roulet's imperious mother will spend any amount to prove her beloved son's innocence. But probing the details of the case, Mickey and private investigator Raul Levin dig up a far darker picture of Roulet's personality and his past. Levin's murder and a new connection to the Menendez case make Mickey wonder if he's in over his head, and his defense of Roulet becomes a question of morality as well as a test of his own survival. After Connelly spends the book's first half involving the reader in Mickey's complex world, he thrusts his hero in the middle of two high-stakes duels, against the state and his own client, for heart-stopping twists and topflight storytelling.

This was one of the best mysteries that I've read yet.  It had all sorts of twists and turns, and took me off guard numerous times.  Very well written.

The Girl She Used to Be, by David Cristofano ***

When Melody Grace McCartney was six years old, she and her parents witnessed an act of violence so brutal that it changed their lives forever. The federal government lured them into the Witness Protection Program with the promise of safety, and they went gratefully. But the program took Melody's name, her home, her innocence, and, ultimately, her family. She's been May Adams, Karen Smith, Anne Johnson, and countless others--everyone but the one person she longs to be: herself. So when the feds spirit her off to begin yet another new life in another town, she's stunned when a man confronts her and calls her by her real name. Jonathan Bovaro, the mafioso sent to hunt her down, knows her, the real her, and it's a dangerous thrill that Melody can't resist. He's insistent that she's just a pawn in the government's war against the Bovaro family. But can she trust her life and her identity to this vicious stranger whose acts of violence are legendary?

I think that maybe I missed reading the last three sentences in that description.   I certainly didn't read the description on the back of the book until after I was a good 100 pages in.  If I'd read either, I don't think I'd have started it.

I thought, going in, that this book was going to be how difficult it's been to have to change identities and be uprooted throughout her life, and how the heroine deals with it.  The story does touch on that, but the focus is more about the push and the pull between Jonathan and Melody.  The description on the back cover implies that there is romance between the two.  There is, in a way, but not in the bodice-ripper, harlequin romance sort of way.  (Which is good, because lately I have been very much not in the mood for that sort of romantic story.)

The first 100 pages or so were pretty good.  Right about the time that Jonathan was introduced, I read the back cover and my perception of the whole story changed.  I almost didn't finish it.   I kept pushing on, though, and while I'm hesitant to say that it was a pleasant surprise, I will say that it wasn't the disappointment that I was sure it was going to be.  It was fluff.  It wasn't even believable fluff.  The heroine was unsympathetic and made incredibly bad choices.  The men that she encountered and waffled between were caricatures of stereotypes, and neither was engaging.  But, the story was somewhat entertaining for a while.  It was a quick, easy read.   I think it's probably a good thing that it was under 250 pages, because I probably would have required more substance to read anything longer.

Love Me to Death, by Allison Brennan **

Six years ago, Lucy Kincaid was attacked and nearly killed by an online predator. She survived. Her attacker did not. Now Lucy’s goal is to join the FBI and fight cyber-crime, but in the meantime, she’s volunteering with a victim’s rights group, surfing the Web undercover to lure sex offenders into the hands of the law. But when the predators she hunts start turning up as murder victims, the FBI takes a whole new interest in Lucy.

With her future and possibly even her freedom suddenly in jeopardy, Lucy discovers she’s a pawn in someone’s twisted plot to mete out vigilante justice. She joins forces with security expert and daredevil Sean Rogan, and together they track their elusive quarry from anonymous online chat rooms onto the mean streets of Washington, D.C. But someone else is shadowing them: A merciless stalker has his savage eye on Lucy. The only way for her to escape his brutality may be another fight to the death.

You know a <500 page book isn't good when it takes me more than two weeks to read it.

I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, despite the name.  At first, it seemed as though it would rise above and make its way to  become an acceptable mystery, but it started to lose my interest by page 100.  The first half introduced a plot that could have had potential - a former victim of assault working with a volunteer group to keep parolees in  jail suddenly discovers that the criminals that she comes into contact with are being murdered.  Unfortunately, it wasn't presented in a manner that kept my attention.  I found my mind wandering, and more often than not, I had to reread pages because I'd been going over my grocery list or thinking about work.  

As if that's not bad enough, eventually the main character meets up with the man of her dreams and then everything goes down hill from there.  I'm not against a good romance, in fact I quite enjoy them; but this was not good.  In fact, there were times that the book made me uncomfortable.  It made me think of the middle age, over the top couples who are all about Public Displays of Affection and really need to get a room.  There's only so much hugging, kissing and cuddling that a murder mystery can take, and this one went too far. It made the female lead - who is supposedly an FBI applicant - seem weak and helpless when a kiss from her  beloved hero could make everything seem all better.

This is my first foray in to Allison Brennan.  From the recommendations that I'd gotten, I had hoped to have found a new source of easy to read but entertaining mysteries.  Unfortunately, I did not.

Mocking Jay, by Suzanne Collins *****

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she's made it out of the bloody arena alive, she's still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what's worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss's family, not her friends, not the people of District 12. Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins's groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year.

This is the last book in the Hunger Games series, which I read back to back. I loved it. Admittedly, there were a few brief chapters near the beginning that were a little slower than the rest of the series. Just when I started to think that maybe the third book wouldn't measure up to the others, the story kicked in and it was great.

I'm a little surprised that a YA book contained so much death, but it wasn't overly detailed about the violence. I would suppose that most kids are exposed to more violence and gore by watching TV or playing video games.

Excellent, well written book, and I've told a tonne or people to read the whole series.

Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins *****

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the annual Hunger Games with fellow district tribute Peeta Mellark. But it was a victory won by defiance of the Capitol and their harsh rules. Katniss and Peeta should be happy. After all, they have just won for themselves and their families a life of safety and plenty. But there are rumors of rebellion among the subjects, and Katniss and Peeta, to their horror, are the faces of that rebellion. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge.
Suzanne Collins continues the amazing story of Katniss Everdeen in this second novel of the phenomenal Hunger Games trilogy.

Loved this book, and am about to start the next one. I highly recommend this series... it keeps getting better and better as it goes on.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins *****

Honestly, I think this is a book that you should read, not knowing anything about it. Having read a few descriptions, I started it with preconceived notions and it took a few chapters before I could set them aside and simply enjoy the story. So, if you trust me, don't bother reading the rest of this review until after you're done the first book. Just pick it up and read. I haven't heard anybody say anything bad about it, so I feel confident is suggesting this.

If you're the kind of person who needs a bit of an idea about what they're getting into, carry on.

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the other districts in line by forcing them to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight-to-the-death on live TV.

One boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and sixteen are selected by lottery to play. The winner brings riches and favor to his or her district. But that is nothing compared to what the Capitol wins: one more year of fearful compliance with its rule. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her impoverished district in the Games.

But Katniss has been close to dead before — and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.

Acclaimed writer Suzanne Collins, author of the New York Times bestselling Underland Chronicles, delivers equal parts suspense and philosophy, adventure and romance, in this stunning novel set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present.

This is not my usual genre of books. I read it because my 11 year old nephew demanded that I do so. We don't usually have the same reading interests, but since I've been pressuring him (and and getting my way) to read the Harry Potter series, I was leaning towards reading his suggestion. When a friend who does generally read the same sorts of books that I do said she'd read and loved the series, I thought I'd give it a chance.

I really liked it, which surprised me. It's along the lines of but not really just about everything that I dislike in stories. It's futuristic, but the author doesn't make wild assumptions or predictions about society or the technology. It's fantasy, but not weird. It's a story about a girl who is put into an arena and forced to fight to the death, but it's not gory or horrendous. It was a good story about a girl who struggles to survive before and after she's forced into the arena. It's full of suspense - a few times, I was tempted to put it down because I was so disturbed about the potential of what could happen next. But then I remembered it was a young adult (children's) book, so the events that I imagined and dreaded were highly unlikely to happen. Just the fact that I had to remind myself that, though, goes to show you how well the book was written.

Loved this one. Loved the twists and turns.
The next book that I pick up will be the next book in this series.