So last week I wrote that I was struggling through The Stranger You Seek the first of the Keye Street novels from Amanda Kyle Williams. Tonight I went to the library to get book 2 in the series Stranger in the Room! It’s easy to explain the reason , stealing and editing a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail “It Got Better!!
A couple of Saturday’s ago, I was browsing through the books at Barnes & Noble and I came across The Last Dead Girl, Book # 3 in the David Loogan series written by Harry Dolan. On the dust jacket of the book I read that Stephen King called Dolan’s book Bad Things Happen “a “great f***ing book“! When I came home, I went to my local libraries website and requested the book. I was captivated by the book from the opening sentence, the pages flew by and it quickly became Book 29 of 2014, and I agree with Mr King in is a great f***king book!
The other day I got to do one of my favorite things, go to a used book sale at the library. The visit was made even better because I 
got to do it on the first day of the sale, when there were still a lot of books there! Typically, I’m there on the last day and sometimes during the last hour or so of the sale. When I went into the sale I decided that I was going to look, not for the typical mysteries that I usually go for, but for a few books that may be a more on the literature side.
Those Who Wish Me Dead are the sadistic and evil Blackwell brothers, who Jace Wilson saw murder a man in a quarry in 
Indiana. Their quest to hunt down and kill Jace leads the Blackwell brothers to the mountains of Montana , where Ethan and Allison Serbin run a summer survival training program for troubled youths. Jace was placed in the program by Jamie Bennett ,who was a former student of Serbin’s, Arriving in a snowstorm, Bennett asks Ethan’s help in getting Jace “off the grid” to protect him, something Bennett does not think she can do by herself. Although both Allison and Ethan have doubts about Bennett, they agree to help for the sake of the boy. Soon the Blackwell brothers arrive, bringing their evil to the mountains. Can Ethan and Allison keep their promise to keep Connor safe? The task becomes more difficult when Jace, sets out to escape from the brothers, alone! While the brother’s bring evil and a devastating fire to the mountains, Jace encounters an ex-elite firefighter Hannah Faber, who joins the fight to keep Jace safe. So begins Michael Kortya’s latest book Those Who Wish Me Dead about which Harlan Coben says…..
In Kathleen Mallory, author Carol O’Connell has created one of the most distinctive characters in the mystery and thriller
genre. Mallory is
…. described by her creator as a sociopath. Emotionally scarred as a 6-year-old after she witnessed the murder of her mother in a small Louisiana town, Mallory flees to New York City, where she lives as a street child. She is caught trying to steal by police officer Louis Markowitz, who takes her home and becomes her foster father.
The first Linwood Barclay books I read were his Zack Walker mystery books, and I loved them! After I fnished the third book and was ready to move on, I discovered that Mr. Barclay had left that series, and moved on to write stand alone thrillers. The first one was No Time to Say Goodbye and it was great! Since then I have read and enjoyed all of his books. The latest is No Safe House. In No Safe House, Barclay treats his readers to further adventures of the Archer family, the main characters in No Time to Say Goodbye!
The first Karin Slaughter book that I read was Kisscut, which is book #2 in Karin’s Grant County series. After finishing the book; I immediately went out and found Book #1 Blindsighted and read it probably faster than Kisscut. Since then I have read every book she has written which includes both the Grant County and the Will Trent series, which are now intertwined! Cop Town is Karin’s first stand alone novel and for her first book she went back 40 years and recreated wonderfully the feel of a changing Atlanta in 1974. My wife and I lived in Athens, Georgia from 1975 to 1979 and I remember Maynard Ferguson and Reginald Evans quite well!
Little did I know when I sat down to read Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi, that the story of Fuzzy’s story had been told before by H 
Beam Piper,in a very success trilogy starting with Little Fuzzy, and continuing in Fuzzy Sapiens and Fuzzies And Other People. (You can read more about H Beam Piper and his books at the H Beam Piper Memorial Website.). Even if I knew that the story was an update of these books, I don’t think that it would have hurt Scalzi’s marvelous re-imagining of their tale!
