The 2nd season of Reacher on Prime launched yesterday – Dec. 14, 2023.

This book is an early story of Jack Reacher, when he was still military police. Second chronologically of the books.

Having read them all, I’d call this one average. That still puts it into one of my top 10 novels of the year.

And this is the 4th and last Reacher book where the original author, Lee Child, will still have his name attached. From here on his younger brother Andrew Child takes over 100%.

A string of mysterious deaths. A long-classified mission. ….

1992. All across the United States respectable, upstanding citizens are showing up dead. These deaths could be accidents, and they don’t appear to be connected—until a fatal fall from a high-floor window attracts some unexpected attention.
 
That attention comes from the secretary of defense. All of a sudden he wants an interagency task force to investigate. And he wants Jack Reacher as the army’s representative. If Reacher gets a result, great. If not, he’s a convenient fall guy.
 
But office politics isn’t Reacher’s thing. Three questions quickly emerge: Who’s with him, who’s against him, and will the justice he dispenses be the official kind . . . or his own kind?

Amazon (2023)

Susan Juby, Nanaimo, B.C., teaches creative writing at Vancouver Island University.

Her book set on a Canadian gulf island.

In this comedic (murder) mystery, Helen Thorpe is a former Buddhist nun who is fresh out of butler school. 

When a suspicious death takes place in an upscale spiritual retreat, suspicions turn to a quartet of suspects with a motive for murder. …

Susan Juby’s novel Mindful of Murder is a murder mystery full of humour and compassion

I many times laughed out loud. Though Judy is a Buddhist and clearly sympathetic to all things west coast, she pokes fun at hippies, flower arrangement, spiritual dance, and all things bohemian. 😀

She loves butlers. I wanted to go to butler school myself by the end of the story.

The book is told from the perspective of a number of interesting characters. My favourite was a stoner, slacker local teen brought in last minute as a general dogsbody.

Having spent time in Buddhist and Hindu ashrams myself, I could relate to the mixed feelings of the … inmates. 😀

Though a light read, there is quite a bit of philosophy, as well. I enjoyed reading about the Death Club. And their views on assisted suicide. The conflicts between Buddhist philosophy and the real world.

There will be two more books about Helen Thorpe, the butler who didn’t do it.  Planned for 2024 and 2025.

I made it through 41% of this romance novel — intrigued by the concept of a 5-STAR WEEKEND.

Organizing a get-together with 4 close friends from 4 different eras of your life: High School, College, motherhood, and … today.

Super popular as it is, this is not my kind of book.

I’m turned off by the 6 women constantly complaining about … everything

Actually, one I did like is Dru-Ann, a high level sport agent.

After a tragedy, a food blogger named Hollis Shaw brings four friends from different times in her life to spend a weekend in Nantucket. …

Chronicling the entire weekend is Hollis’s daughter Caroline who is interning with a famous documentary filmmaker.

During this trip, the women rediscover the meaning of friendship and overcome their personal struggles. Secrets are also revealed.

The Five-Star Weekend (2023) by Elin Hilderbrand

Sequoia Nagamatsu is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor.

Much of How High We Go in the Dark (2022) was written before Covid.

This book is a series of short stories. Some better than others.

This pandemic — the Arctic Plague — starts in 2030 when a prehistoric female came to light having melted out of a glacier in Siberia.

A previously unidentified pathogen from the past was reactivated — and quickly spreads around the world.

How High We Go in the Dark is made up of more than a dozen discrete episodes, separate beads along the narrative timeline from the discovery and release of the virus, through the worst years of the pandemic, on into its lingering aftermath.

The book then leaps 6,000 years ahead, revealing how decisions taken now might lead to radically divergent futures. …

Guardian Review

The virus disproportionately kills children.

The first story is of an amusement park — City of Laughter —where children infected can enjoy one last, fun-filled day before riding a roller coaster designed to kill them.

The second story is excellent. A pig used in plague research learns how to talk.

After that … none of the other short stories jumped out for me. I skipped some.

I really have to quit this book series.

The suicide of Christian Habersaat, a recently retired police sergeant from Bornholm, Denmark, kicks off Jussi Adler-Olson’s underwhelming sixth Department Q novel …

Det. Insp. Carl Mørcks looks into an unsolved case from 17 years earlier that consumed Habersaat’s life—the hit-and-run death of high school student Alberte Goldschmid. …

The story becomes more complicated when Habersaat’s grown son, Bjarke, kills himself and young women start disappearing from the Nature Absorption Academy, a sun cult.

The female characters are gratingly one-note: nearly all their narratives revolve around stealing men or getting revenge on the women who stole their men. …

Publisher’s Weekly Review

Intense. Violent. … I can’t recall a novel with so much distress.

The Sandman (2012) has a really, really good BAD GUY.

“If Jurek Walter reminds you of Hannibal Lecter, with his ability to impel people to act against their own impulse, you’ll be forgiven… As with Jurek Walter’s powers of persuasion, I felt impelled by Lars Kepler to finish The Sandman. The characters got into my head and I couldn’t rest until the mystery was revealed.” – Jonathan Elderfield, Associated Press

As the novel opens, a young man — ill, malnourished and near death — is found on a snowy railroad bridge near Stockholm.

Mikael Kohler-Frost had been missing for 13 years and declared legally dead. Likewise his younger sister, Felicia.

The official police verdict was that the children of popular author Reidar Frost had accidentally drowned near their home.

… he and Felicia had been held captive in a cold, tomblike room he calls “the capsule” and that he managed to escape without ever having set eyes on his captor. The police must find Felicia before she dies or is killed, and so the chase is on. …

Oh, the horror! Why it’s hard to look away, even when a book is full of gore.

Lars Kepler is the pseudonym of husband and wife team Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril (born 1966) and Alexander Ahndoril (born 1967), the most popular novelists in Sweden.