This is a quick read that deserves the title "Rapid Reads."  It's length doesn't detract from the pleasure of reading it, however, you just get the enjoyment in a quick little bite.  

This is the second book from this line that I've gotten so I looked at the publisher's website and it says this line was developed for adult ESL students, reluctant readers and adults who struggle with literacy.  I really like that!  I think this is the perfect kind of book to get an adult with literacy issues interested in reading.  While the language may not be challenging, the plot line and characterizations would not be insulting to adult learners.  I think there's a real place in the book world for this idea. Anything that gets more adults reading is a good idea to me.

Frank Ryan, a piano tuner by day and a jazz pianist by night, is working for one of his favorite elderly clients when instead of paying him in cash she pays him with an old manuscript.  It's not what he wants but there seems to be no choice so he takes and it and, surprise!  It's Beethoven's lost Tenth Symphony.  Obviously other people are going to want this thing and come after Frank with a vengeance.  This world of crime and violence is not what he's use to but he manages it pretty well and I found it pretty entertaining. Frank is a really fun character with an interesting personality, fun and engaging.  I would have given it 4 stars but the ending was a bit predictable for me so I gave it 3 1/2.

This would take about an hour to read if you were uninterrupted and my first thought, before I knew why this line was written this way,  was "Why would I want to read such a short book?"  I like books I can lose myself in for hours and days.  But I've decided what a really good use for this type of book would be.  I'm going to put it on the night stand in my guest room.  All my guests are readers and they all love a good mystery.  This would be the perfect thing to read if you found yourself somewhere and forgotten to bring a book or had finished what you brought.  It's light, it's quick, it's entertaining and I would be quite willing to read more about Frank Ryan.

I received this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program in exchange for an honest review.

I got hooked on mysteries with Agatha Christie and Dick Francis who are undoubtedly two of the best ever.  Lately I've been reading lots of cozies and while there are some excellent writers in that genre, I've been cooling on them a bit lately.  I've decided to go back to the roots of my mystery love and work my way through the winners of the major mystery awards.  To me that is the Edgars, the Anthonys, the Agathas and the Golden Daggers.  I've started a thread about it here.  I realize that while I have read a number of them, there are so many that I haven't read and I'm really excited to read some classic authors and some that are new to me. This will take a while but it should be really fun!

I love reading about how the other half lives and this book has that in spades! High stakes auto racing, private jets, aristocratic characters and loads of money. Racing Justice is a look into the life of the upper crust and a really good legal caper to boot.

I’m always trying to categorize the books I read. This would probably be called a legal thriller but legal caper describes it better to me. It centers around the 24 Hours at Le Mans car race that attracts the most elite of the world’s jet set. There are people here who will do anything to win including kidnapping the other team’s drivers. Needless to say, this doesn’t go down well with the team who’s driver was kidnapped or with the ex-boyfriend of the driver, who happened to be female. This ex-boyfriend, Simon Aron, is a very rich and smart young lawyer. He and his friends set out to punish the offender and I find the twists and turns enormously engaging. It takes the reader all over the world and throws around money like water. If rich people offend you, don’t read this. I personally loved it.

There are a couple of small flaws that keep it from getting 5 stars. There are way too many characters. A person almost needs to keep a roster to remember who is who. The other flaw was that the author seems to assume that we are all more familiar with the racing world than most of us probably are. This was true especially at the beginning of the book where I was a little baffled at times but as the book continued we actually learn a lot about how it all function so that was interesting.

I actually see this as a book that I might pull out and read again.

The author provided this book in exchange for an honest review.

I've just started playing around with lists here and I created one with just one book on it to see how it works.  Can I add books to that?  I can't seem to figure out how.  Should I just delete that and start over?  Can I delete a list I made?  Help.

Tiny homes fascinate me. I see those articles on Yahoo about people living in 100 sq ft or something like that and I’m hooked. I have to read it and look at the pictures of how they fit their whole lives into a space smaller than my bedroom. I don’t live in a tiny house. I live in a big old rambling Victorian and wouldn’t give it up for the world but the idea of these tiny houses is just fascinating. If I did want a compact house for some reason, I would start with this book.

Compact Homes is a great introduction to these homes. Some the houses in this book are not that tiny. Many are several hundred feet, up to 1400 but they are still small by the standards of a lot of us and they are meant to be small and efficient. I really enjoy seeing how smart the utilization of space is. I love seeing all the ways the authors find to create storage spaces in homes.

This book has quite a few floorplans, about 50 I think. I get a kick out of looking these over. But this book goes far beyond just floorplans. There are chapters on each room in the house and how to get maximum use out of a few feet. It brings Japanese design into a lot of their idea because the Japanese use their floor spaced so efficiently. It talks about space saving appliances and even talks about the sink-toilet combo which grosses me out just from the name of it. There is a discussion of Usonion design¸ a word I had never heard before. It’s really interesting and explains how the neighborhoods a lot of Americans grew up in came about.

There are plenty of suggestions on how to get the proper furniture for such small spaces and how to make the furniture multi-functional. There are plenty of illustrations of their ideas. Some are quite remarkable. Again, this is all just fascinating to me because it looks like someone living in miniature.

There are good sections on trying to be sustainable and energy-efficient. Heating and cooling methods are discussed and how to customize a small home for yourself or renovate an already built small home to make it more efficient and comfortable.

I really enjoyed going through this book. I’ll never be able to live this way. My husband and my son are 6’4” and not super-skinny. (They are not fat, just normal size for 6’4” guys.) They would feel like giants in the houses this book shows. We have kids and grandkids and family and friends that come regularly and we throw pretty big parties so we can never live this way and I’m quite claustrophobic so there’s that also. It still is fascinating and intriguing for me to imagine what life in a compact house is like. This book gives a great feel for it.

Provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

If you don’t know what Ex Parte is, neither do I and it’s not explained but I assume from the context that it’s a meeting held without all the participants in a lawsuit. In this case, the judge just wanted to meet with Attorney Sabre Brown, not inviting any of the other lawyers on the case she was arguing before his court. She refused on ethical grounds and the next day the judge is dead.

Sabre is an attorney for children. She takes cases where children have been removed from the home or situations like that and represents the rights of the child. It’s an interesting side of the law. She is a very ethical attorney and wants the best for her clients. A likeable character.

With a fellow attorney and her investigator they begin sifting through Sabre’s cases to find out who would have wanted the judge dead. In this process, we get to know several of her cases very closely. I actually like the format a lot. It provided lots of red herrings and dead ends.

This is the fifth book in a series but the first on I had read. While this was a self-contained story, there were many references to previous events. There was no problem understanding any of this plotline but I think I would have understood the characters better if I had read the others first.

The writing seemed a bit awkward in style, almost verging on amateurish in parts and almost verging on preachy at times. As I kept reading, I really forgot all about that. I really did get caught up in the story and the characters. I don’t know how else to say it but by the end, I was really comfortable with this book. It felt like a friend.

I think with a little spit and polish this could be a wonderful legal series. It’s already quite enjoyable with its few flaws.

I was provided this book by the author.

I love a good spy vs spy novel and I’ve been a huge fan of writers such as Robert Ludlum. Night Heron is in this same vein. I found it quite enjoyable.

It begins with a Chinese political prisoner, Peanut, breaking out of the work camp where he’s been confined for 20 years and heading to Beijing. He was an informant for the British government back in the day and he would like to resume that relationship. It’s Peanut versus the Chinese intelligence community.

As Peanut tries to reconstruct his life after being imprisoned for so long, he sets in motion events that get the intelligence agencies in Britain, the United States and China in an uproar. I love this part of espionage novels. I don’t know if what is portrayed is at all realistic but it’s fun to see the behind the scenes running of an operation.

This definitely has a Robert Ludlum-esque feel, the difference being the setting. The cold war era novels of Ludlum felt more familiar because they were set in Europe. This has a more exotic feel, being set in China. Peanut is moving in the really low parts of society so it feels grungy and gritty. It has a lot of atmosphere.

I didn’t have any emotional attachment to Peanut. I didn’t care whether he got caught or not but I did have an emotional attachment to the British journalist he was working with and the journalist’s friends so that was kind of interesting to realize. Peanut just wasn’t a sympathetic character but others in the story were.

I listened to the audiobook version of this and the narrator did a good job with the Chinese dialects.

I received this book in the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program in return for an honest review.

What fun! Three of the most clever and entertaining cozy mystery writers working today have teamed up to put together 3 stories, each using their signature sleuth, set in the same setting but not overlapping. The cozy reader’s dream.

All three stories are set in the Heartache Motel in Memphis, TN at Christmas time. In Diners Keepers, Loser’s Weepers the crew from Diner Impossible by Terri L. Austin gets in the middle of an Elvis impersonator contest complete with dead bodies. In Quick Sketch by Larissa Reinhart, Cherry Tucker and her boyfriend Todd try to help Todd’s cousin with an illegal poker game and, of course, that’s sure to turn out well! In Dateline Memphis, Richmond Telegraph reporter Nichelle Clarke gets a lot more than she bargained for when she takes a tour of Graceland to get a souvenir for her mom. This last one is my personal favorite. I really love the Nichelle Clarke series.

All three of these are fun, smart and well-written. If you are a fan of any of these authors or a fan of cozies that are just slightly on the sharper edge of cozy, I can definitely recommend this.

Provided by Netgalley for an honest review.

I wanted to read this book because my son is a military history nut.  He can talk to me all day about the types of weapons that were used in different wars and I thought maybe I could learn something from this book so I could have an intelligent discussion with him.  I was right.  This book is not only lavishly illustrated but has very interesting military facts from WWI.  It seems that we spend more time in classes on WWII and WWI gets a little lost so I enjoyed this a lot.

Bayonets are a very specialized field of weaponry and like any specialized field, when you really delve into it, there is so much to know!  It's more info than some people will want but it was great with a military-history nut like my son.  This book isn't for everyone but for fans of military history, it's a hit!

This book was provided by Netgalley and I appreciated the opportunity to read and review it.

Sigh. I am really enjoying this series but this one, book 4, definitely made me dial back my enthusiasm a bit.

Nichelle is one the trail of a murderer who committed what seems to be a ritualistic killing of a homeless woman. Her contact at the police station is giving her exclusive information in return for some of the help she can provide but it’s not just her rival, Charlie, at the TV station that is challenging her for scoops. There is a blogger reporting on crime in Richmond that seems to have some type of inside track. She’s feeling like every minute is a deadline these days.

Her investigation leads to her to a televangelist’s organization and that can be a pretty tough nut to crack. She shows her usual flair for following a story and in the course of it, learns a huge amount about her family history. We get to know her mom better and Nichelle become a more fully-rounded character.

If you’ve not read the other books in the series, you can read this as a stand-alone but I think you will enjoy it more if you read the series in order.

So here are the problems.

1. There is a lot of talk about the church hiding donations from the IRS. The problem is, churches aren’t required to report their donations to the IRS. Some do, some don’t. The vast majority don’t. Income made from a bookstore or coffee shop has to be reported but donations absolutely do not. I know exactly what I’m talking about with this. This isn’t even a little bit in question. This is such a glaring issue that my enjoyment of the book was interrupted as I kept checking this on different websites to see if something had changed that I didn’t know about. It hadn’t.
3. The love triangle has taken exactly the turn we didn’t want it to. The two guys have become open rivals and it needs to stop now. This could really tank the series for me if it’s not ended really quickly.

I really love this series and these problems won’t stop me from reading more but it did dial back my enthusiasm a bit. I’ll actually be eagerly awaiting book 5 to see how this progresses.

This book was provided by Netgalley and I appreciated the opportunity to read and review it.

I’m sold on LynDee Walker and Nichelle Clarke. This series is the real thing. It’s fun and entertaining while being a very solid mystery. A new favorite series worth my time and money! I just ordered the first book in the series because it was the only one I didn’t have and I can’t wait to see how this all started. But, time to stop gushing and start reviewing.

Nichelle, the crime and court reporter for the Richmond Telegraph, is a little out of her regular beat when the sports columnist asks her to cover the death of his friend’s son which is presumed to be a suicide. The friend just happens to be one the most famous football players in the country and he doesn’t think his son committed suicide. Neither does Nichelle.

This story takes Nichelle out of Richmond to a small town on an island so the suspect pool is pretty small. Unfortunately, this also means it’s a tight-knit group that really don’t want strangers poking around in their business. High school sporting ambitions, locally made moonshine and a closed-mouth sheriff all contribute to Nichelle’s suspicions. As with the last book, it’s a clever mystery that isn’t immediately apparent but clues are scattered throughout the book if you can find them.

Joey and Kyle are both still in the story and her relationship with each heats up quite a bit in this book but not enough to offend anyone’s sensibilities. I do need the author to wrap up this triangle pretty soon. They both contribute to Nichelle’s investigations, however, and are integral to the plot.

The newsroom politics at the newspaper get dicier. Her nemesis, Shelby, is in rare form. I enjoy these parts of the story that are about the day-to-day work of a newspaper reporter. We also find out some of Nichelle’s backstory with her mom which gives more depth to her character.

If you haven’t read the other books in this series, you can read this as a stand-alone and you will enjoy it. It will most likely want you to get the rest of the series. It’s a fairly quick read but in that good way that makes you wish there was more because you don’t want to leave these people.

I received this book from Netgalley and appreciated the opportunity to read and review it.

The picture on the cover of this book was enough to get my interest.  I happen to love shoes.  The story inside lived up to the fun of the cover.  It kept my interest from the very beginning.

Nichelle Clark is a reporter in Richmond VA on the crime and courthouse beats.  She will do anything for a story and would like to move up to covering politics for the Washington Post.  She's smart and funny and clever.  She is one of the more likeable heroines I've met in a while.  She hears about a dead body found in the woods over her police scanner late one night and goes to investigate.  The stiff turns out to be a lawyer and lobbyist for the tobacco industry.  As she doggedly pursues this case, it keeps getting deeper and deeper.  She soon finds herself being warned off and that's enough to get any reporter's juices going.

The mystery in this story is a complex one and I enjoyed it.  No simple solutions here.  It's a pleasure to follow Nichelle's investigation as she sifts through the evidence using her own investigative skills and her arsenal of law enforcement contacts.  I love watching a good detective at work.  Her law enforcement contacts feel professional and competent. I love that she doesn't seem condescending toward the people around her.  I really don't enjoy female detective that seem to think they are above normal life.  Nichelle feels like someone you would be friends with. 

This is more of a traditional mystery to me than a cozy though it has elements of a cozy.  It's not set in a small town and the heroine doesn't have some weird hobby or shop that plays into the mystery like so many cozies.    Nichelle actually has a legitimate reason to be pursuing this case and does it as a professional, it just happens to be a professional journalist rather than a professional detective.  It's a quick read, it's not graphic with violence or sex and it's fun but it's not quite as soft as a cozy generally is.

There is a love triangle but for some reason it isn't as obnoxious as I usually find them though I do need it to resolve soon.  Like most readers, writing love triangles is one of the most annoying things that writers do.  They never feel realistic to me because so few men would put up with them.

It felt to me that there was one small continuity error when she was warned away from investigating one of her suspects.  I didn't think that she had even mentioned to anyone else yet that she was following that path so I'm not sure why she would be warned away from it but that was minor.  Maybe I had just missed something.

I can recommend this book for lovers of traditional or cozy mysteries. It should have great appeal to lovers of either genre and you don't have to have read the first in the series to enjoy this one. This is the first one I have read. 

This book was provided by Netgalley and I appreciated the opportunity to read and review it.

This was one of our books for Brit Lit and I'm so glad I was introduced to it.  Sir Gawain is an interesting character that really adds to the King Arthur universe.  It was originally written in Middle English so modern readers are reading it in translation but this is a particularly good one.  It's very understandable and easy to read.  The dialect it was written in originally did not become the standard English dialect so I imagine only scholars read it in the original language.

Sir Gawain is at King Arthur's Christmas festivities when the Green Knight enters the building and proposes a game.  He'll trade axe blow for axe blow with any knight in the room.  When none volunteer and it appears that King Arthur himself will have to take up the challenge, Sir Gawain, the most celebrated knight in the court, jumps in to do it.  If you don't know what happens when they play their little game, you've missed a fun story and I won't spoil it for you.  The rest of the book is Sir Gawain's quest to find the Green Knight again and all his adventures.  It's great stuff!

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has a lot to say about the chivalric code, heroism, bravery and integrity.  In the end, we find out who was behind the whole game (Arthur's evil half-sister Morgana la Faye) and Sir Gawain learns that he might not be everything he thinks he is.  We end up with a humbled and chastened Sir Gawain who is proving the author's point about thinking more highly of yourself than you ought.

Lovers of Arthurian legends probably shouldn't miss this.  You can also see the beginnings of all the sword-play type fantasies that are being written.  It's just a fun and clever piece of classic English writing.  Don't let the fact that it came from the 14th century scare you off.  You won't have any trouble with this translation.