Tuesday Book Review on Wednesday

 

Five-star review of Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen

On the surface this is a story about time travel, but it’s really more about the travelers. Kin Stewart travels for the Temporal Corruption Bureau (TCB) as a field agent and is stranded in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1990s after a malfunction. He’s built a life for himself, and the metabolizers that agents use to allow safe time travel cause him to forget that he’s actually from the mid-22^nd century. He marries and settles down with his wife Heather and their daughter Miranda until ‘rescuers’ come for him eighteen years too late. They return him to 2042 – and his fiancée Penny – where he’s been gone only weeks, but he can’t forget Heather and Miranda. The novel is well-written and each of the characters is developed.

Tuesday Book Review on Wednesday

 

Four-star review of A Lingering Shadow : An Arabella Stewart Historical Mystery (Arabella Stewart Historical Mysteries Book 2) by D. S. Lang

Arabella, recently returned from France where she was a telephone operator for the Signal Corps in the Great War, is working to revive business at the golf resort start by her grandfather and his partner Mac, but the murder of a guest puts her plans on hold. She and her childhood friend Jax, now the town constable, must find the murderer if the resort and their small Ohio town can survive. The tension between Arabella and Jax is the same as in the first book, since Jax is still hesitant to reveal his part in her brother’s death during the war and she’s fighting the feelings she has for him. A few characters from the first book play a smaller part in this one, and I would have liked to see more of them, but the focus is on the two of them, as it should be, and on the motivation for the murder.  

Tuesday Book Review on Wednesday

 

Four-star Review of Hoot by Carl Hiaasen

As a departure from his usual mystery novels, this YA book still retains the humor and Florida setting. Roy Eberhardt recently moved to a small town there after many years in Montana. He’s homesick and being bullied by a middle-school bully on the school bus, but he becomes fascinated by a barefoot boy who runs past the bus and doesn’t seem to go to the school. Meanwhile, a pancake conglomerate wants to build a new pancake house in an empty lot in the town, and barefoot boy has been sabotaging their plans for what turns out to be a legitimate reason. Although I’m not a member of the target group for the book, I did enjoy reading it.