5th book in the excellent Sean Duffy series.

Best so far, I’d say.

Duffy is less self-destructive. AND gets a cat. AND might become a father.

Reader Gerard Doyle does an excellent job in the audio book.

Duffy is a Catholic cop in 1980s Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

When journalist Lily Bigelow is found dead in the courtyard of Carrickfergus castle, it looks like a suicide. But there are just a few things that bother Duffy enough to keep the case file open.

Which is how he finds out that she was working on a devastating investigation of corruption and abuse at the highest levels of power in the UK and beyond.

And so Duffy has two impossible problems on his desk: who killed Lily Bigelow? And what were they trying to hide?

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I really liked The Great Alone, Kristin Hannah’s coming-of-age story about a girl, Leni Allbright, who moves with her parents, Ernt and Cora, to a log cabin in the wilds of Alaska.

Her 2021 book — The Four Winds — is good, as well.

Also historical fiction.

Another coming-of-age story. Loreda lives through the Dust Bowl in Texas. The family fleeing to California in the “Okie” migration — to semi-slavery picking cotton.

The Okies had replaced Mexican migrant workers.

Though started 3-years prior to the pandemic, many of the issues are important to Americans today. Trying to reduce the gap between richest and poorest, for example.

I recommend this book.

Texas, 1934.

Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with a vengeance.

In this uncertain and dangerous time, Elsa Martinelli—like so many of her neighbors—must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or go west, to California, in search of a better life. 

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Sarah Pinborough has published about 20 books, so far, but is most famous for Behind Her Eyes (2017).

It was adapted into a Netflix TV series also called Behind Her Eyes.

Cross Her Heart (2018) is similar. Another psychological thriller.

Female friendships, mothers and daughters, teenage girls. Workplace drama.

It’s good. An interesting plot.

But I liked Behind Her Eyes better.

This one feels too long. Could have used a more severe editor.