REVIEW Ours is a Tale of Murder by Nora Murphy

 

I picked up this book after reading a memoir - I wanted something quick, fresh and intriguing and I wasn't disappointed.  This novel takes place in a quiet suburban town in Maryland. It's a town that feels familiar with all of us, but there's an undercurrent of tension that raises the hair on the back of your neck but you're not sure why. In one home is Klara and Troy.  There's something off about Troy and Klara never wanted the white picket fence that she has.  Mary lives across the street and is preparing her home to be sold as she can't stand to live in the home that has bad memories of her son and mistakes. Henry lives with his parents and watches people way too closely for comfort.

What I really enjoyed was the unique way that Murphy structures her novel. I didn't expect it to circle back on itself the way that it did but I ended up really loving it. The novel explores relationships, it's true, but specifically it focuses on mothers and motherhood. It asks the question: what influence do mothers have on the people that their boys eventually become? Can they truly change or significantly influence them? The mothers in this novel are constantly present, some would say overbearing or enabling, while the fathers are absent either physically or emotionally. The pacing of the novel is brilliant and is best described as a slow burn.  It is anything but boring, however. I also really enjoyed how things eventually came together - it was a satisfying conclusion. 

Definitely worth the read. 

REVIEW Truce Crime, a Memoir by Patricia Cornwell

 

Patricia Cornwell is best known, perhaps, for her mystery series featuring Kay Scarpetta, a gritty, forensic medical examiner who also solves crimes. This is a candid and forthright memoir about the author of those novels, starting with her seemingly Southern Gothic childhood and moving through childhood, college and her eventual success as an author.

I was very surprised about how much trauma she had suffered.  Her childhood involved trauma related to, among other things, her parents' acrimonious divorce (including a kidnapping by her father), sexual abuse at the hands of a local police officer and her mother's mental health.  In her adolescence, she suffered from depression and a severe eating disorder.  In detailing these events, Cornwell's prose is sparse and unsentimental. Her sentences seemed particularly short and detached (although I imagine it was because she was writing about and consciously bringing up some awful, awful things). Cornwell was tremendously and remarkably resilient and had a big supporter in, of all people, Ruth Graham (the wife of evangelist Billy Graham). 

Cornwell details her writing process, which involves a tremendous about of hands on research (such as going to a morgue or learning how to shoot a particular gun).  I enjoyed gaining insight into this author, but the writing and detail were no where like Margaret Atwood's memoir, Book of Lives.  

Links I love

 

Last week (the week before this one) was particularly rough for me. I was admitted to the hospital overnight for observation and all this other stuff due to a severe allergic reaction to the pneumonia vaccine. NEVER AGAIN will I get that vaccine.

This is a big holiday for our country!  Happy Fourth!

• I used to walk this easement all the time. 
• The most anticipated books by women of color being released this fall. 
• The New Yorker has an email newsletter: What We're Reading. 
• Archaeologists discover a wooden model of Stonehenge that seems to line up with the summer solstice.
• The must read biographies and memoirs of summer 2026. I'm always down for a good memoir. 
• Some Australian memoirs that look good.
• 5 classics that are also good beach reads. 
• The Star Wars movies, ranked. 
• Why does the country Turkey have a different spelling at the World Cup?
• The best American novels according to Barnes and Noble.
• The shortlist for the Ursula K. LeGuin Prize
• Inside the wild world of Roman Romance Novels. 
• 5 things that Princess Diana loved that might surprise you (may she rest in peace).
• 7 books that blur the line between reality and fiction.
• Margaret Atwood novels in order. 
• A new study shows that your brain prefers to read on paper.  Mine certainly does. 
• The US ghost town that occasionally rises out of a lake.
• 20 great US History books.
• The missing piece of the menopause discussion. 
• 7 common misconceptions about the Fourth of July. And some misconceptions about the Founding Fathers. 
• The Star Spangled Banner had four verses, actually.

Please do not forget to visit my Pangobooks store! I hope everyone has a good week!

REVIEW This is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman

 

I had listened to Isola, which was also by this author, and when I read the description of this novel, I thought I would give it a try.  I'm always drawn to stories about families and relationships and this book falls squarely in that genre.

This is the story of an extended Jewish-American family, headed by three matriarchs that are sisters.  The book begins with the death of the youngest of the three sisters. The remaining two sisters become split not only by her death but also by a feud about, of all things, a cake (hence the cover) and which threatens to extend until the both of them die. Goodman tells the story from different viewpoints as each chapter focuses on a member of the extended family as they are navigating their own personal dramas. The power in this novel is in the small moments - the conversations between the characters, the setup - as opposed to the overarching novel (which I guess is what makes it literary fiction). She did a magnificent job of getting us into the weeds in their relationships and made her characters believable, although not always likeable. 

I DID, however, find myself often trying to remember who was who and what their intricate relationships were.  It was often confusing and disjointed in transitions, but once I got a page or so into each chapter it quickly smoothed out.  There were so many characters it was almost too hard to keep track. In spite of this, Goodman does a masterful job in capturing messy and intricate relationships. Definitely worth the read~!

REVIEW London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

 

Go out and get this book. Now.  This book is a meticulously researched non-fiction book that reads like a novel. It is, in a nutshell, about the grim, seedy, scary Russian oligarch world of London and the 19 year old that gets sucked into it, ultimately perishing. 

Zac Brettler was 19 when he died. His parents were grieving and didn't understand why or how he died - he wasn't suicidal although everyone chalked this up to a suicide.  But then they learned that he was posing as the son of a Russian oligarch who meets these really sketchy guys that now want something from him (but what, question his parents) and why haven't the police truly, deeply and carefully investigated his death?  This book is Keefe's attempt to assist the parents try to figure all this out.

I loved this book. It's obviously meticulous in its research and the pacing is perfect, especially given the scope of what it is trying to cover. It drew me in so quickly that I read it at any moment that I could - waiting to pick my kid up, at lunch, waiting at the doctor's office - because I simply had to know what happened. A lot of the book has us in the seedy underbelly of London's financial world, and yet, I didn't shy away from it.  This made the book and the story all the more compelling to me. I had no idea such a world existed. And of course there is Zac's parents, who are absolutely, and rightfully, devastated by the loss of their son. It was hard to not feel terribly for them. They carried themselves with dignity and were treated the same way by the author.  

Such a good read. I look forward to reading Say Nothing.

Links I love

 

Things have been interesting around here.  Two Mondays ago, I got the pneumonia vaccine and it's been wreaking havoc on me ever since. In addition to the normal side effects where I felt achy for about 36 hours,  I have been dealing with a nasty site injection reaction that will not quit.  I actually was admitted to the hospital Wednesday into Thursday and was diagnosed as having a severe allergic reaction that has resulted in neuropathy in the arm that I got the shot in. Lucky me. I now will likely have to do PT to make sure that I don't lose all my strength and be sure to get to an ER if I can't use  my arms, or have severe pain or severe tingling or numbness. 

• Smells that defined summers in the 90's.
• Four family fueds that rival the Targaryens.
• Are elder millennial women ok?
• The non-fiction books that NPR staffers have enjoyed this year, so far.  And their favorite fiction books.
• The books that colleges are choosing for common reads in 2026.
• Gaslighting and self doubt - books that cause us to question the ones closest to us.
• How the Manson murders and Dominique Dunne changed LA True Crime.
• 40 Great new books you may have missed. 
• 15 great lakes for your summer getaway.
• Songs that were written by Prince that you didn't know about. 

REVIEW The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by

 

This book has been on many, many lists this year and so I thought I would give it a try.  I'm not sure what I thought it would be but it certainly wasn't a horror/vampire novel taking place in the early 1900's.

In the year 2012, the diary of Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran minister is found stuffed into the wall of a building that is being demolished. It chronicles a series of massacres, a transformation, battles and violence between the white settlers and the Blackfeet nation, whose culture is also very much a character in this book. Arthur becomes know as "Three Men" and he is the confessor to Good Stab who discloses many, many things.

If anything this is historical horror. The writing was perfectly fine and the characters very interesting. I found that I could easily picture things everything as they were occurring and in the area that it was happening in. However, I just simply couldn't get behind this novel. It wasn't very interesting to me overall, although the parts about the Blackfeet were very interesting. I enjoyed learning about them very much. The novel goes back and forth between Three Men, who is writing in his diary, and Good Stab who is narrating his confession, which was very effective - the premise is that Arthur is writing down the confession verbatim in his diary - but either one could have carried the story on their own. While I did not particularly rave about this book, I completely respect Jones' historical research into this.  He obviously worked very hard to gather a lot of details that he could put into his book and that is highly admirable and appreciated by me as a history major. 

While I did not particularly care for this novel, I'm glad that I gave it a shot!