Quiet Keystrokes and Midnight Ramblings

My kiddo and I have been wandering through the pages of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia over the last year or so, and finally arrived at the sixth book, The Silver Chair. It goes without saying that C. S. Lewis is one the most entrancing authors in children's literature, and he didn't fail to disappoint with The Silver Chair . This book takes Eustace and his schoolmate Jill on a terrific adventure through marshes, mountains, and caverns as they go on a hunt for a prince who went missing many years before. While this is a wonderful book on its own, it wasn't my favorite of the Narnia  series. The characters didn't seem as alive as in the other books, and with man-eating giants, a magical snake-queen and the freeing of an entire nation of underground people, their flatness was a disappointment. We aren't deterred though. We've started The Last Batle, the final book in the series and it's going along much better. Although this is a serie...

Sophie Warner watches from shore as her husband rows their daughter out into the water. The three-year-old is entranced with her first experience crabbing. But then, the unthinkable. A man approaches, attacks Sophie, and she's never seen alive again. Author Gregg Olsen is a master of weaving truth within lies. Throughout the book I had several moments where I was sure who was behind Mrs. Warner's disappearance, but each time I had an "aha", my finger turned on another character. With so much to gain, and even more to lose, everyone seemed to have a stake in the kidnapping and murder of the young mother. The novel was so gripping, I had a hard time putting it down and spent most of the last 24 hours walking the house with my kindle in my hand, stealing a quick paragraph here and there as I went about my day. I even got scolded for reading through dinner, something we banned long ago to focus on our family time. "How dare you read at the di...

My two great loves are books, and horse racing. When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a jockey. At 5 foot 3 3/4 inches, it's the only thing in my life that I've been too tall for. But my deep desire to live life on the track gets spun up with glee when I find a book that brings the daring world of horse racing alive, and Banker  does more than that. It goes behind the scenes to the underbelly of racing, revealing the schemes and cheats that industry bottom dwellers use to get a leg up in the game. Banker  is written from the perspective of an investment banker, rising through the ranks at his family owned financial company. His parents gambled their lives away at the track, and since he grew up in that environment, it comes to him to make a decision on whether or not to loan several million dollars to a horse breeder with visions of producing award-winning foals. The book is rife with charlatans, cheats, gamblers, murderers, and a few good people try...

Ryan Decker was a mercenary who specialized in retrieving high profile kidnapping victims and returning them to their wealthy and powerful families. But when a senator's daughter is kidnapped and her retrieval goes south, Decker finds himself locked away in prison, his family and the families of his entire team, murdered. When Decker is suddenly released from prison without explanation, he's thrust violently back into the world he'd left behind. The Russians are after him. Law enforcement is after him. And someone in power is hellbent on making sure that at least one of the groups succeed in wiping him off the face of the planet. The Rescue  kept me riveted. While I normally take a few days to read even the best of books (because, sleep), I finished The Rescue  within 24 hours of downloading it to my kindle. The action was fast. The conspiracies were believably complex. And most of all, I couldn't help but find myself rooting for Decker and the mysterious t...

I'm getting ready to commit some crimes. Not real ones, of course. Just written ones. As I'm wrapping up the Adaline series, I'm looking forward to getting back into mystery and suspense under my alter-ego D.K. Greene . To prepare for the stories I'll be telling there, I've started going back to my love of reading crime fiction. Hunter's Green is where I started, because Green is in the name and it seemed fitting as a placeholder while I got back into the mind frame of murder, deceit and criminal mischief. Hunter's Green was far more romantic in style and plot than I typically read. A young American woman flies back to the English estate she shared with her estranged husband after finding that he's likely to file for divorce and marry his childhood sweetheart. When she arrives, she discovers a power struggle has taken over the estate. Her husband, the current head of the household, is in danger of being ousted from his rightful plac...

Over the last several months, my son and I have been dipping our imaginations in Narnian lore. We continued our journey across the eastern sea with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , trailing Caspian and the children across the sea in a quest to find the missing men of Caspian's father's court. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader  captured the best parts of a seafaring adventure. Overflowing with monsters, sea people, magic and mystery, this book is on par with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as an exploitative adventure for youngsters. In it, Eustace replaces Edmond as the self-absorbed troublemaker, allowing Edmond's character to show how he's grown since becoming a king of Narnia. There were quite a few places where the story veered off from how the movie portrayed it, at least as I remember the film from watching it over the years. The book is undeniably better. If you're interested in reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for yourself, you can ...