Heidi Slowinski

Another week, another ambitious reading list. I’m making excellent progress on my reading goals and finally making progress on my ‘Want to Read’ list. So far, I’ve crossed twenty-five titles off my list putting me one third of the way to my goal of seventy-five books for 2022. My ‘Want to Read’ list has gone from eighty-five titles to sixty-five.

Last week, I managed to add on an additional title, The Editor by Steven Rowley. I have to confess, I was completely ignorant of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ career as an editor. Another remarkable, intelligent woman remembered by history because she was pretty. Steven Rowley’s book is wonderfully entertaining. I laughed; I cried. It is everything a novel should be.

This week, I’m looking forward to Wolf Catcher by Anne Montgomery. This

A reporter seeks information on an eleventh century magician and discovers that black market sales of antiquities can lead to murder.

In 1939, archaeologists uncovered a tomb at the Northern Arizona site called Ridge Ruin. The man, bedecked in fine turquoise jewelry and intricate beadwork, was surrounded by wooden swords with handles carved into animal hooves and human hands. The Hopi workers stepped back from the grave, knowing what the Moochiwimi sticks meant. This man, buried nine-hundred years earlier, was a magician.

Einstein and the Rabbi is an inspiring and deeply affecting book for people of all faiths, Rabbi Naomi Levy sets off on a three-year exploration of the mystery behind a moving and mystical letter that Albert Einstein wrote to a grieving father about the unity that underlies all existence. In the letter Einstein perfectly captures what Rabbi Levy has come to believe about the human condition: that we are intimately connected and that we are blind to this truth. Wondering what had elicited such spiritual wisdom from a man of science, Levy leads us on a breathtaking journey full of wisdom, empathy, and humor, all the while helping us to reclaim our souls and glimpse the oneness that has been eluding us, live up to our gifts, and understand why we are here.

My mom would never leave me.
This has been Mariah Dunning’s motto. Her compass. Her belief. So when she glimpses her mother–who’s been missing for the past year–on the other side of a crowded food court, Mariah’s conviction becomes stronger than ever. Or is she losing her mind?

An unlikely coincidence?
When Beth Dunning disappeared without a trace, suspicion for her murder-despite the lack of a body or any physical evidence-immediately fell upon Mariah’s father. Until Mariah stumbles upon two other recent disappearances from Lakehaven. And all three women had the same name: Beth.

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book for review, please visit Contact Me and complete the form. I’ll review your request and respond within 48 hours. I’m also happy to work with authors on interviews. To set up an interview, please use the same form.

Winter lasts most of the year at the edge of the Russian wilderness, and in the long nights, Vasilisa and her siblings love to gather by the fire to listen to their nurse’s fairy tales. Above all, Vasya loves the story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon. Wise Russians fear him, for he claims unwary souls, and they honor the spirits that protect their homes from evil.

Then Vasya’s widowed father brings home a new wife from Moscow. Fiercely devout, Vasya’s stepmother forbids her family from honoring their household spirits, but Vasya fears what this may bring. And indeed, misfortune begins to stalk the village.

There is a place in Minnesota with hundreds of miles of glacial lakes and untouched forests called the Boundary Waters. Ten years ago, a man and his son trekked into this wilderness and never returned.

Search teams found their campsite ravaged by what looked like a bear. They were presumed dead until a decade later…the son reappears. Discovered while ransacking an outfitter store, he is violent and uncommunicative and is sent to a psychiatric facility. Maya Stark, the assistant language therapist, is charged with making a connection with the high-profile patient. No matter how hard she tries, he refuses to answer questions about his father or the last ten years of his life.

His code name was “The Needle.” He was a German aristocrat of extraordinary intelligence—a master spy with a legacy of violence in his blood, and the object of the most desperate manhunt in history. . . . 
 
But his fate lay in the hands of a young and vulnerable English woman, whose loyalty, if swayed, would assure his freedom—and win the war for the Nazis. . . . 

A feminist critique of Judaism as a patriarchal tradition and an exploration of the increasing involvement of women in naming and shaping Jewish tradition.

This week’s reading list includes an exciting new release by Roni Robbins, Hands of Gold. A story of overcoming to terms with past traumas and seeking silver lines.

Also on my list this week are four audiobooks. The first is a rom-com, The Unhoneymooners. This is an unusual choice for me. I prefer historical fiction, mystery, suspense, and thrillers. But change is a good thing from time to time.

My other three audiobook choices are more typical choices for me. The Winemaker’s Wife is a duel timeline work of historical fiction set in France and the United States. The Perfect Family and In Her Bones are thriller stories. I like the plot twists and suspense of these books. I also find it fun to try to predict the ending as I read.

Will Sam purge his guilty conscience before it’s too late? Will he atone for his offenses and find solace in the final countdown?

Sam Fox spent his whole life running against the hands of time. He is now racing to set the record straight about secrets he and Hannah, his wife of 65 years, have been harboring from their children and each other.

Hands of Gold, loosely based on real events, follows Sam on a journey that takes him from war-torn Europe at the turn of the 20th century, through the Great Depression and labor union reforms in America. Determined to

For two sworn enemies, anything can happen during the Hawaiian trip of a lifetime—maybe even love—in this romantic comedy from the New York Times bestselling authors of Roomies.

Olive Torres is used to being the unlucky twin: from inexplicable mishaps to a recent layoff, her life seems to be almost comically jinxed. By contrast, her sister Ami is an eternal champion…she even managed to finance her entire wedding by winning a slew of contests. Unfortunately for Olive, the only thing worse than constant bad luck is having to spend the wedding day with the best man (and her nemesis), Ethan Thomas.

‘Mummy, she’s gone…’

Gemma Ballantine is getting ready for work one morning when her eldest child comes running down the stairs, saying the words every mother dreads.

The front door is open. And her six-year-old daughter has disappeared. Frantic with fear, Gemma starts a nail-biting search for her little girl.

After what feels like forever, her mother-in-law Diane finds Katie wandering lost a few streets away. Relieved to have her youngest child back in her arms, breathing in the sweet scent of her hair, Gemma thinks the nightmare is over.

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book for review, please visit Contact Me and complete the form. I’ll review your request and respond within 48 hours. I’m also happy to work with authors on interviews. To set up an interview, please use the same form.

Fifteen years ago, Lilith Wade was arrested for the brutal murder of six women. After a death row conviction, media frenzy, and the release of an unauthorized biography, her 30-year-old daughter Edie Beckett is just trying to survive out of the spotlight. She’s a recovering alcoholic with a dead-end city job and an unhealthy codependent relationship with her brother. 

Edie also has a disturbing secret: a growing obsession with the families of Lilith’s victims. She’s desperate to see how they’ve managed – or failed – to move on. While her escalating fixation is a problem, she’s careful to keep her distance. That is, until she crosses a line and a man is found murdered. 

Champagne, 1940: Inès has just married Michel, the owner of storied champagne house Maison Chauveau, when the Germans invade. As the danger mounts, Michel turns his back on his marriage to begin hiding munitions for the Résistance. Inès fears they’ll be exposed, but for Céline, the French-Jewish wife of Chauveau’s chef de cave, the risk is even greater—rumors abound of Jews being shipped east to an unspeakable fate.

When Céline recklessly follows her heart in one desperate bid for happiness, and Inès makes a dangerous mistake with a Nazi collaborator, they risk the lives of those they love—and the vineyard that ties them together.

I chose an incredibly ambitious reading list this week but there were just too many good choices! The first book on my list was submitted for review by the author, Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets. Judy Bolton-Fasman details her quest to uncover secrets long hidden by her father. Next on my list is a book I discovered when reading People Love Dead Jews. The book is called From the Heart of Hell by Zalmen Gradowski. Gradowski (may his memory be a blessing) was a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. With the help of fellow prisoners, he kept detailed records of the atrocities being carried out in the infamous camp. I’ve toured the camp twice but had not heard of this manuscript before. The English translation is available on Amazon and ships from the Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum in Poland.

Hisdadukh, blessed to be beautiful and learned, is the youngest child of Talmudic sage Rav Hisda. The world around her is full of conflict. Rome, fast becoming Christian, battles Zoroastrian Persia for dominance while Rav Hisda and his colleagues struggle to establish new Jewish traditions after the destruction of Jerusalem’s Holy Temple. Against this backdrop Hisdadukh embarks on the tortuous path to become an enchantress in the very land where the word ‘magic’ originated.

But the conflict affecting Hisdadukh most intimately arises when her father brings his two best students before her, a mere child, and asks her which one she will marry.

One of the most powerful practitioner of these mysterious arts is Rav Hisda’s daughter, whose innate awareness allows her to possess the skills men lack. With her husband, Rava—whose arcane knowledge of the secret Torah enables him to create a “man” out of earth and to resurrect another rabbi from death—the two brave an evil sorceress, Ashmedai the Demon King, and even the Angel of Death in their quest to safeguard their people, even while putting their romance at risk.

A shattering first hand testimony from the very heart of the Holocaust. In December 1942 Zalmen Gradowski, a young man with literary talent, was deported by the Germans from the Grodno ghetto to Auschwitz, along with his whole family. His closest relatives, including his parents and wife, perished in the gas chambers immediately after arrival at the camp. He himself was sent to the very heart of hell – to the Sonderkommando, a special group of prisoners forced to burn the bodies of those murdered in Auschwitz. Wanting to preserve the memory of his nearest relatives, and to inform the world about the extermination, the young man made notes in Auschwitz. Those texts turned out to be an extraordinarily shocking literary record of the tragedy that befell the Jewish people during Second World War. They are written in highly emotional, at times thoroughly poetical, language.

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book for review, please visit Contact Me and complete the form. I’ll review your request and respond within 48 hours. I’m also happy to work with authors on interviews. To set up an interview, please use the same form.

How much do we really know about the lives of our parents and the secrets lodged in their past? Judy Bolton-Fasman’s fascinating saga, “Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets,” recounts the search for answers to the mysteries embedded in the lives of her Cuban-born mother, Matilde Alboukrek Bolton and her elusive, Yale-educated father, K. Harold Bolton. In the prefatory chapter, “Burn This,” Judy receives a thick letter from her father and conjectures that the contents will reveal the long hidden explanations, confessions, and secrets that will unlock her father’s cryptic past. Just as she is about to open the portal to her father’s “transtiendas,” his dark hidden secrets, Harold Bolton phones Judy and instructs her to burn the still unopened letter.

When investigative journalist Gina Kane receives an email from a “CRyan” describing her “terrible experience” while working at REL, a high-profile television news network, Gina knows she has to pursue the story. But when Ryan goes silent, Gina is shocked to discover the young woman has died tragically in a jet ski accident while on holiday.

Meanwhile, REL counsel Michael Carter finds himself in a tricky spot as several more female employees have come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct. Carter approaches the CEO, offering to

An urgent cry for help brings Poirot to France. But he arrives too late to save his client, whose brutally stabbed body now lies face downwards in a shallow grave on a golf course.

But why is the dead man wearing his son’s overcoat? And who was the impassioned love letter in the pocket for? Before Poirot can answer these questions, the case is turned upside down by the discovery of a second, identically murdered corpse . . .

With twists and turns until the final, satisfying conclusion, The Murder on the Links once again does not disappoint the legion of Agatha Christie fans.

When a number of leading scientists disappear without a trace, concern grows within the international intelligence community. And the one woman who appears to hold the key to the mystery is dying from injuries sustained in a plane crash.

Meanwhile, in a Casablanca hotel room, Hilary Craven prepares to take her own life. But her suicide attempt is about to be interrupted by a man who will offer her an altogether more thrilling way to die. . . .

It’s only the second week of January and I’ve already completed five of my seventy-five books of 2022! I was delighted to get some new requests for reviews from several authors this week and have added their books to my reading list. The first book on my list this week was submitted by Elan Barnehama, entitled Escape Route. This one isn’t scheduled for release until May. One of the coolest things about book blogging is getting advanced reader copies and getting to read new releases early.

I’m also looking forward to four audiobooks this week. The first is The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson. Set in rural Kentucky, a young woman gets a job delivery books, magazines, and other library materials via mule in the hills. Next is The Restaurant by Pamela M. Kelley, focuses on three friends who grew up together

Escape Route is set in New York City during the tumultuous late 1960s. Told by teenager Zach, a first-generation son of Holocaust survivors and NY Mets fan, who becomes obsessed with the Vietnam War and with finding an escape route for his family for when he believes the US will round up and incarcerate its Jews. Zach meets Samm, a seventh-generation Manhattanite whose brother has returned from Vietnam with PTSD. Together they explore protest, friendship, music, faith, and love during a time littered with hope and upheaval around the globe.

The hardscrabble folks of Troublesome Creek have to scrap for everything—everything except books, that is. Thanks to Roosevelt’s Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, Troublesome’s got its very own traveling librarian, Cussy Mary Carter.

Cussy’s not only a book woman, however, she’s also the last of her kind, her skin a shade of blue unlike most anyone else. Not everyone is keen on Cussy’s family or the Library Project, and a Blue is often blamed for any whiff of trouble. If Cussy wants to bring the joy of books to the hill folks, she’s going to have to confront prejudice as old as the Appalachias and suspicion as deep as the holler.

Three sisters. An inherited Nantucket restaurant. One year before they can sell.Mandy, Emma and Jill are as close as three sisters who live hundreds of miles apart can be. They grew up together on Nantucket, but Mandy is the only one that stayed. Jill lives a glamorous life in Manhattan as a co-owner of a successful executive search firm. Never married, she is in her mid-thirties and lives in a stunning, corner condo with breathtaking views of the city and Hudson river. Everyone thinks there’s something going on with her partner, Billy, because as a workaholic, she spends more time with him than anyone else.

Submit Your Book

book for review, please visit Contact Me and complete the form. I’ll review your request and respond within 48 hours. I’m also happy to work with authors on interviews. To set up an interview, please use the same form.

Bestselling author Lisa Wingate brings to life startling stories from actual “Lost Friends” advertisements that appeared in Southern newspapers after the Civil War, as newly freed slaves desperately searched for loved ones who had been sold away.

Louisiana, 1875: In the tumultuous era of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest: Hannie, a freed slave; Lavinia, the pampered heir to a now destitute plantation; and Juneau Jane, Lavinia’s Creole half sister. Each carries private wounds and powerful secrets as they head for Texas, following roads rife with vigilantes and soldiers still fighting a war lost a decade before. For Lavinia and Juneau Jane, the journey is one of stolen inheritance and financial desperation, but for Hannie, torn from her mother and siblings before slavery’s end, the pilgrimage west reignites an agonizing question: Could her long-lost family still be out there? Beyond the swamps lie the limitless frontiers of Texas and, improbably, hope.

Louisiana, 1987: For first-year teacher Benedetta Silva, a subsidized job at a poor rural school seems like the ticket to canceling her hefty student debt—until she lands in a tiny, out-of-step Mississippi River town. Augustine, Louisiana, is suspicious of new ideas and new people, and Benny can scarcely comprehend the lives of her poverty-stricken students. But amid the gnarled live oaks and run-down plantation homes lie the century-old history of three young women, a long-ago journey, and a hidden book that could change everything.

As a fussy baby, Anne de Bourgh was prescribed laudanum to quiet her, and now the young woman must take the opium-heavy tincture every day. Growing up sheltered and confined, removed from sunshine and fresh air, the pale and overly slender Anne grew up with few companions except her cousins, including Fitzwilliam Darcy. Throughout their childhoods, it was understood that Darcy and Anne would marry and combine their vast estates of Pemberley and Rosings. But Darcy does not love Anne or want her.

Harry Potter has never even heard of Hogwarts when the letters start dropping on the doormat at number four, Privet Drive. Addressed in green ink on yellowish parchment with a purple seal, they are swiftly confiscated by his grisly aunt and uncle. Then, on Harry’s eleventh birthday, a great beetle-eyed giant of a man called Rubeus Hagrid bursts in with some astonishing news: Harry Potter is a wizard, and he has a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. An incredible adventure is about to begin!