Today’s a big day for Weir. It’s his birthday and after school he’s going to celebrate with everyone from his class. This year Weir is having a monster party!
It was going to be the best night of the year! Even better than the time a truck full of lollies spilled its load in the main street!
But that’s not all that’s happening today. It’s also Planet Day and Miss Franklin’s class are doing their part to make their school more environmentally friendly.
With a cake-tastrophe, a tough looking bird called Tyrannosaurus Pecks, an overabundance of toilet paper (this book must have been written pre-COVID …) and lots of green, this was a great addition to the series.
The costumes are a lot of fun (be on the look out for the bum monster!) and there are plenty of smiles.
I love the can-do attitude of Weir and his family and friends. When things don’t go to plan, everyone looks for creative solutions and, because they’re all working together to make the best of an unexpected situation, it all works out in the end. I love this series!
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MEEEEE! Not only is it PLANET DAY, it’s also Weir Do’s BIRTHDAY!
And his party’s going to be so HUGE you’ll see it from space! It won’t be easy … but it will be FUNNY!
Welcome to my horror gateway book. It turns out I was an even bigger scaredy-cat as a kid than I thought I was. This book absolutely terrified me, so much so that when the phone rang at night for months afterwards I’d hear in my head,
“Company’s coming.”
If you’re unfamiliar with this book, here are the basics. Jenny has a new babysitting gig for a family she’s only just met. Their house should be featured on a renovation show. The kid Jenny is babysitting, who looks angelic, has interests that range from watching Ghostbusters (awesome choice, kid!) to scaring the babysitter.
There’s a weird neighbour hanging around, threatening phone calls and a babysitter with a big imagination who is fearing the worst. Oh, and let’s not forget the newspaper headline …
THIRD BABYSITTER ATTACK HAS POLICE ON ALERT.
This read was a fun trip down memory lane but the things that scared me as a child seem silly now. I could have sworn that Jenny answered at least another dozen creepy phone calls and I don’t remember it being so obvious who the big bad was.
Note to my kid self: When you’re only introduced to a few male characters, it kinda narrows the field of potential male baddies.
I think as a kid I assumed the bad guy was going to be a stranger, because it was the 80’s and we were Stranger Danger all the way. It never occurred to me that you could actually know a villain so R.L. Stine probably didn’t even need to include any red herrings to fool me.
Jenny, who I can only assume failed Horror 101, does what all good potential victims do when they hear a strange noise in the house.
“Who’s there?”
For most of the book Jenny lets her imagination run wild, gets scared and second guesses pretty much everything. She waits for the final act, when she probably should be paying attention, to let her guard down.
80’s Nostalgia Bonus Points
🎧 Jenny has a Walkman. Cassettes … Those were the days. I loved my Walkman so much, even after I learned that other people could hear me sing while I was using it. ⏰ Laura, Jenny’s friend, wears a Swatch, one of the coolest accessories of my childhood. 📸 Flashcubes are mentioned in a description. I haven’t thought of those in years. It could be my memory deceiving me but I’m almost positive I got a minor burn from one of those.
I probably should apologise to you in advance. There are three more books in this series, I own them all and I just realised that Jenny is in every single one of them. I wonder if she invests in an answering machine. Please don’t tell me she thinks it’s a good idea to babysit again!
“Hello? Anyone there?”
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
From the minute Jenny accepted the Hagen babysitting job, she knew she had made a mistake.
First there was the dark and disheveled Hagen house, moaning and groaning with her every step. Then the crank phone calls started. “Hi, Babes. Are you all alone? Company’s coming.” When Jenny discovered a creepy neighbour prowling in the backyard and a threatening note in her backpack, she realised this wasn’t a harmless game.
But who would want to hurt her? What kind of maniac wanted to scare Jenny … to death?
Before I say anything else, I want to make a few things clear. I believe Laurie. What she experienced – being sexually assaulted, the perpetrator’s subsequent behaviour, the harmful responses she received from friends and university staff members – was horrific and she is not to blame for any of it. She deserved to be believed and supported while she was at college and she deserves those same things now.
What Laurie has accomplished here is remarkable. Writing about the events of your life is a difficult task under the best of circumstances. Needing to write accounts of my own experiences of sexual assault for non-public reasons has given me a general idea of just how daunting and painful a process this can be. I can’t even begin to imagine the vulnerability people must feel sharing this publicly and I commend Laurie for the courage and resilience this finished book represents.
Laurie was raped on the third Saturday of her freshman year of college. She was not only discouraged from reporting this to the police by university staff members but was also denied justice through the university’s own reporting process. Worse still, she was formally accused of lying by the university.
After essentially trying to cope with this trauma by herself, managing the best she could by overachieving and self-medicating, Laurie eventually found the support she deserved from the very beginning.
Given the subject matter, this was always going to be a difficult read, even though the book itself is quite short. If you find descriptions of sexual assault triggering, please be safe while reading this book. I had psyched myself up for the details I knew would be coming but was surprised by a few additional descriptions that I didn’t have time to prepare for. In particular, I thought the book was winding up so I let my guard down, then got hit by a major new revelation in the final chapter.
The next part of this review is difficult for me to write. I don’t feel like I have the right to judge anyone’s experiences or the choices they make so this isn’t that. However, I’m also uneasy critiquing the way anyone writes about their experiences, and that’s what this feels like.
Having said that, at times Laurie’s story came across as quite disjointed and could have benefited from some further editing. I recognise that traumatic memories are not formed in the nice, neat, linear way that non-traumatic memories are. Sometimes memories are only retained in flashes. They’re not necessarily remembered in the right order. There may be aspects of a sexual assault a victim never remembers.
All of this makes it harder to form a step by step narrative in our own heads, let alone when we try to make sense of it with others. I asked myself if I needed to take that into consideration as I was reading this book. I’d wonder about things, like where Sarah was or why no one accompanied Laurie to court, only to find out the answers in later chapters. The narrative jumped back and forth in time, making it more difficult to get a clear idea of the order of events.
The publisher says this book is part of a series that “tells the stories of the people who have battled and beaten mental health issues.” Although this should be obvious I feel I need to point out that sexual assault is not a mental health issue. Granted, it can result in a wide variety of trauma impacts, some of which include depression, anxiety and PTSD, but in and of itself it is not a mental health issue.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Trigger Publishing for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Like any student about to start university, Laurie Katz was excited to see what the year would bring. Little did she know that just three weeks into her first term, her life would come crashing down around her. What had started as a fun night out with friends ended with Laurie, alone with a terrible secret: she had been raped.
Traumatised and confused, she set out to get justice against her attacker. But when the authorities at her university dismissed her case, and warned her that she could be expelled, she was left unsure where to turn. It seemed as though things couldn’t get worse, then her attacker filed his own case.
Laurie’s story is a brave and honest reminder of the injustice still felt in society around sexual abuse. Laurie offers readers her advice, and provides them with the hope that they too can overcome a similar trauma.
Audrey is the new girl at Illumen Hall, a prestigious boarding school a world away from her old life and the memories that haunt her. She’s sharing a room with Ivy, who doesn’t seem to want anything to do with her. It isn’t long before Audrey learns that Lola, one of Illumen Hall’s most popular girls, died recently.
The police have closed their case but there may be more to the story than meets the eye. While the students and staff are still coming to terms with their loss, a new podcast raises the question of whether Lola’s death was an accident, suicide, or something more sinister. It turns out that Audrey isn’t the only one at Illumen Hall that’s keeping a secret.
I probably would have been slightly obsessed with this book if I’d read it when I was 13. I’ve always loved stories set in boarding schools and the mystery of the death of a student, combined with a school that has such a rich history and a potential secret society, would have been all I needed. Even as an adult I found this book easy to get into, but I found myself questioning things that wouldn’t have even registered on my radar as a kid.
The podcast transcripts were an interesting way of building the mystery and introducing theories, although none of them had enough content to last more than a couple of minutes. I had a lot of trouble believing a Detective would discuss any details of a case, no matter how briefly, with an anonymous caller.
A time stamp on a photo is believed to be accurate by the people who see it, with no questions raised about its authenticity. Although there’s nothing in this book to indicate that the time stamp had been fudged, it seemed strange that it wasn’t even a consideration. The resolution in this book that related to the person concerned was too easy for me.
I liked the idea of Ivy and Audrey’s points of view being written by different authors but if I didn’t already know this book was written by two people I never would have picked it. Usually I would think that this was a good thing, as the transitions between chapters felt fairly seamless. However, in this instance, I thought there should have been something obvious about the writing styles to differentiate the girls’ voices.
After the initial mystery was introduced the investigation didn’t move quickly enough for me for much of the book. I didn’t feel the urgency of the investigation. Towards the end of the book the pace picked up and I was really starting to look forward to getting some answers, but then the book just ended. Right in the middle of a scene.
There is a planned sequel, Two for Joy, currently scheduled for release in 2021. I knew ahead of time that this was the first in a series so I suspected I wouldn’t learn the answers to all of my questions here but I don’t feel like I got any of the answers I was seeking. Unfortunately, while I expected to be excited about the answers that will hopefully be revealed in the second book, I’m left frustrated by the lack of resolution.
There’s a website mentioned in the book that I obviously had to look up. The website doesn’t currently exist but perhaps it will by the publication date. Likewise, I tested out an email address but it was undeliverable.
‘I won’t cross the magpies, and the magpies won’t cross me.’
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Children’s UK for granting my wish to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Illumen Hall is an elite boarding school. Tragedy strikes when the body of a student is discovered at their exclusive summer party – on her back is an elaborate tattoo of a magpie.
When new girl Audrey arrives the following term, running from her own secrets back home in America, she is thrown into solving the case. Despite her best efforts to avoid any drama, her new roommate Ivy was close to the murdered girl, and the two of them can’t help but get pulled in.
The two can’t stand each other, but as they are drawn deeper into the mystery of this strange and terrible murder, they will discover that something dangerous is at the heart of their superficially perfect school.
Simon’s anger is big and it’s only getting bigger. Beasts begin to appear whenever Simon is angry and they chase everyone away. For a while Simon enjoys feeling like his anger is powerful but eventually, when his anger comes without a specific reason, he notices how lonely he is.
No one wants to be around him anymore but he doesn’t know how to get rid of his anger. Finally Simon learns to take responsibility for his feelings and to manage them in a calmer way.
I really liked the illustrations, which clearly showed Simon’s anger.
While plenty of time was spent watching Simon’s anger getting more and more out of control, there wasn’t much page time dedicated to explaining how he could learn to manage it.
I would have liked to have seen more of a learning curve for Simon once he recognised that anger was a problem for him. Although it made for a neat ending, it wasn’t overly realistic that the first time Simon tried mindfulness his anger simply floated away.
There are resources at the end of the book for parents and caregivers, explaining how to talk to children about their anger and ways they can manage it.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Flyaway Books for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
When Simon gets mad, he gets REALLY mad. So mad that big, bad, angry beasts appear. At first Simon loves having the beasts around to help scare off anyone who upsets him, but over time he realises that no one wants to be around him or the beasts. This makes Simon sad, so he decides to try to still his mind and practice being calm. And the beasts disappear!
Featuring colourful and expressive illustrations, this insightful book helps children ages 4 to 8 learn how to handle their anger. A guide for parents and teachers in the back of the book features strategies for talking to children about their emotions along with various exercises they can use to cope with anger.
The spreadsheet Midnight uses to organise her time is especially cluttered at the moment. Her life would be busy if she only had to think about school and preparations for her mother’s upcoming Viking wedding. Now she also needs to psych herself up for her first date (eep!) with her crush, Logan. Then there’s the Agency of Spectral Protection work that she and her best friend, Tabitha, do.
There’s never any shortage of spectral energy in Berry, Midnight’s home town, and Midnight is one of the few people who can see it. But with so much spectral energy around, there’s also more potential for the Black Stream, which is what happens when spectral energy becomes trapped in objects, becoming a dark force known as planodiume.
When strange robberies involving planodiume begin to occur around Berry, Midnight’s life gets even busier. If Midnight and Tabitha can’t solve these crimes then everyone in Berry could be in danger.
“This is a Code Black”
My favourite character in this series is Tabitha, who always wears black and knows the town cemetery better than she does her own home. I’m also a pretty big fan of Midnight’s future stepfather, Phil, who loves Vikings as much as he loves Midnight’s mother. Phil didn’t have a huge part in this book but he endeared himself to me so much in the first book that my love for him carried over into this one.
Adult readers of this series may need to ignore the red flags that wave furiously each time twelve year old Midnight is allowed to galavant around the town at all hours, working for a super secret organisation. They will also have to squish down the qualms they have about said super secret organisation hiring twelve year olds to undertake potentially dangerous work for them without parental permission. I suggest locking up your adult brain and simply enjoying the adventure as it unfolds.
Although you could potentially read this book without having read Midnight Reynolds and the Spectral Transformer, I would definitely recommend reading them in order. There are some major first book spoilers in this one and it’s possible the whole spectral energy thing may be slightly fuzzy if you weren’t there with Midnight when she first encountered it.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Albert Whitman & Company for the opportunity to read this book. I’m keen to read the next book in the series.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Twelve-year-old Midnight Reynolds has a huge secret – she’s a spectral protector, someone who helps ghosts cross over into the afterlife. Alongside her best friend Tabitha, Midnight is busy juggling the wilds of middle school with her undercover ghost-hunting job. When mysterious and dangerous robberies start happening in their small town, all signs point to some sort of spectral manipulation, and Midnight’s boss asks her to take over the investigation. Can Midnight find the culprit and stop them before the spectral energy endangers their town?
This book begins by asking if dragons were real (of course they were!) and exploring some of the commonalities between tales of dragons around the world. Twenty dragons are included in this dragon bestiary.
Information is provided about them, including the region, time period and habitat they were said to have lived, as well as whether they could fly or breathe fire. Attention is also given to their teeth and any special beliefs associated with them. Some were believed to be dangerous, while others were more benevolent.
At the end of the book you’ll find some examples of animals that share some traits with dragons, like the dragonsnakes of Indonesia, which have scales and a mysterious nature.
The illustrations are quite detailed. Some children may find some of the pictures scary. There wasn’t as much information as I would have liked but it would be enough to whet the appetite of young readers. Some of the fonts used were difficult to read.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and becker&mayer! kids, an imprint of Quarto Publishing Group, for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Whether they were real or myth, Creature Files: Dragons shows you the folklore of twenty dragons from around the world and what the people believed about them.
Do you believe dragons are nothing more than the scaly stuff of myths? Or do you think they really existed? Whatever side you’re on, this collection of twenty fascinating creatures is sure to spark your imagination.
In Creature Files: Dragons, you’ll take a tour through the world of fire-breathing, gold-hoarding, three-headed monsters and discover where and how these magical creatures came to be. Learn the unique folklore of cultures around the globe, from China to Russia to Eastern Africa, and see how people envisioned these otherworldly beasts through lush and evocative illustrations.
Included are many meaty facts to gnaw on – like which dragon had too many teeth to count, and which dragon had teeth as big as an adult’s arm – along with a realistic dragon-tooth necklace! And science lovers will also find something to sink their teeth into: facts about real-life dragons that exist today. These dragons may not breathe fire, but they share some of the same traits as their mythical brethren.
One of my earliest memories of school is when I attended a talk about snakes in the school library. At the end of the talk we were allowed to touch one of the snakes. Even though I was scared, I gently patted this snake and it felt incredible! I’ve been fascinated by them ever since. Because I live in the land of deadly creatures, I have spotted both brown and red-bellied black snakes in my yard but thankfully none have made their way inside my home (that I know of).
The information in this book will entirely freak you out, give you more respect for these cold-blooded creatures, or both. For each of the twenty reptiles featured, you will learn their scientific name and some fun facts, along with details about where they live, and their length and weight. There’s also a Danger Gauge and a Fang File, which includes a description and photograph.
I loved this book! I’m quoting my favourite fact for each reptile, although there’s plenty more where they come from.
Gila Monster – “Thanks to their fat-storing tails and their ability to digest really slowly, some scientists think these reptiles need to eat only three times a year!”
Gaboon Viper – “Instead of striking and releasing, like other snakes, the gaboon viper sinks its teeth in and holds on – injecting more venom into its victims than any other snake.”
Black Mamba – “These swift serpents are the fastest land snakes in the world, sprinting at speeds of up to 12.5 miles (20 km) per hour.”
American Alligator – “A single alligator can go through 3,000 teeth in its life.”
King Cobra – “While these deadly snakes can inject venom powerful enough to topple an elephant, they prefer to dine on other snakes.”
Rattlesnake – “Every time the rattlesnake sheds its skin, it gets another “ring”.” (on its tail)
Green Iguana – “they can swim underwater for up to 30 minutes.”
Emerald Tree Boa – “You’ll usually find them coiled around a branch in a loop with their head in the middle.”
Inland Taipan – “The inland taipan is considered by many to be the world’s most venomous snake.”
Black Caiman – “Like other crocodilians, the black caiman has a broad snout filled with about 76 teeth.”
Tuatara – “A tuatara has two rows of teeth on the top jaw and one row on the bottom.”
Bush Viper – “This big-eyed snake has rough scales to help it grip the trees it climbs while hunting.”
Red Spitting Cobra – “Despite their name, spitting cobras don’t actually spit – they’re really shooting venom out of tubes in their fangs. The spray can reach up to 8 feet (2.4 m).”
Indian Gharial – “An Indian gharial has about 110 needle-like teeth lining its narrow jaws.”
Boomslang – “If a boomslang thinks it’s been spotted, it will freeze, usually with the front of its body extended off the tree. They’ll even sway slowly, just like a tree branch moving in the breeze.”
Copperhead – “Copperheads have keeled scales, which means each scale has a ridge on it.”
Nile Crocodile – “Most reptiles leave their eggs and babies on their own, but Nile crocodiles guard their nests, help their babies hatch, and even keep an eye on them until they’re about two years old.”
Green Anaconda – “Weighing more than an adult lion and longer than a giraffe is tall, these colossal constrictors have an appetite for big prey.”
Komodo Dragon – “Dragons use their forked yellow tongues to smell, and they can catch the scent of a dead or bleeding animal up to 6 miles away.”
Leatherback Sea Turtle – “Out of 1,000 hatchlings, only one baby turtle will grow to be an adult.”
Thank you so much to NetGalley and becker&mayer! kids, an imprint of Quarto Publishing Group, for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Get nose to nose with twenty of the fastest, strongest, stealthiest, and most poisonous reptiles the planet Earth has to offer, with Creature Files: Reptiles.
From the deadly gaboon viper, with the longest fangs in the world, to the venomous Gila monster that lurks underground, reptiles have an extraordinary assortment of survival skills.
Fangs and venom aren’t these cold-blooded creatures’ only weapons: some are camouflaged to hide in plain sight, and others, like the Komodo dragon, have powerful claws for slashing prey. Still others use their awesome strength to overpower victims, like the green anaconda and its deadly squeeze or the saltwater crocodile and the 3,700 pounds of sheer force it puts into every bite!
Creature Files: Reptiles features twenty of the world’s most extraordinary reptiles, with reptilian profiles brought to life by vivid photographs and a host of intriguing facts. Each slithering or stalking animal comes with a Fang File to give you the lowdown on how it uses its teeth to pierce, crush, poison, or munch its meals. Can you match the three replica teeth included to the reptilian mouths they belong to?
Astronomers thinks almost all galaxies have black holes at their centers.
This book is a good introduction to the universe for astronomers in the making. It includes facts about the sun, terrestrial planets, gas giants, ice giants, dwarf planets, moons, comets, nebulae and galaxies. You’ll learn a little bit about each of the following:
The Sun
Mercury and Venus
Earth and Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto
The Moon
Europa
Titan
Comets
Orion Nebula
Eagle Nebula
Bubble Nebula
Ring Nebula
Cat’s Eye Nebula
Crab Nebula
Andromeda Galaxy
The Milky Way
Sombrero Galaxy.
On a dark night away from the city lights, you can see the Andromeda Galaxy without a telescope. It looks like a faint smudge in the sky. At 2.5 million light-years away, it’s the biggest, farthest thing you can see with your eyes alone.
I enjoyed the bite-sized pieces of information. I would have used this book as a resource for a school project but likely would have needed additional books to supplement it.
As the moon travels around the earth, it turns so that the same side is always facing the planet.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and becker&mayer! kids, an imprint of Quarto Publishing Group, for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
There is more to outer space than what we can see in the night sky. Explore it all with Amazing World: Stars & Planets and be a real space traveller.
How is a star born? Why does it die? What is the difference between a star cluster and a planetary nebula? Discover the answers to these questions and more in Amazing World: Stars and Planets! This exciting exploration is a door to the infinite realm beyond the pale blue dot we call home.
From stellar nurseries, to glowing green clouds, to spiral galaxies, find out about the dramatic lives of these explosive players in our universe. This is the perfect introduction to the great celestial bodies of outer space for science lovers and their children. Kids will love the gorgeous, bright images, and will also learn quickly from the easily digestible bites of information on each page.
Amazing World: Stars & Planets also includes a collection of glow-in-the-dark stickers to put on notebooks, folders, bedroom ceilings, anywhere!
Book mail!! A book I won in a giveaway arrived this week. I also had a book nerd dream come true this morning. I received a message from a publisher saying they wanted to send a book that’s on my TBR pile to me and asked if I wanted it. Um, is that a trick question? Of course I want more book mail! Woohoo!
The raven I met last week has gotten a lot braver and has brought a friend to meet me. The first two baby noisy miners of the season have also visited. I can’t believe how brave these birds are. Within 24 hours of them seeing me for the first time they were coming into the front yard with the adults. One of them has even come within six feet of me.
I’m not sure how much reading I’m going to get done in the next two weeks. I order heaps of stuff from my local library. The only problem is that the DVD’s always seem to arrive all at once. Tomorrow I need to collect 11 movies and 8 seasons of various TV series. DVD’s only get a two week loan at my library, which is not usually a problem. This time? It’s going to be a marathon!
Quote I’m loving at the moment: “She overcame everything that was meant to destroy her.”
Word of the Week: frisson, “a sudden feeling of excitement or fear, especially when you think that something is about to happen” (from Cambridge Dictionary)
Bookish Highlight of the Week: Just like last week, this week’s bookish highlight was Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches. I finished reading it a couple of days ago and can now say with absolute certainty that it’s my favourite book of 2020. I may love other books before the end of the year (and hope I love them all) but I can’t imagine loving anything more than I love the three Eastwood sisters.
I wake up, and for a few precious seconds I don’t realise there’s anything wrong.
The rumble of tyres on bitumen, and the hiss of air conditioning. The murmur of voices. The smell of air freshener. The cool vibration of glass against my forehead.
A girl wakes up on a self-driving bus. She has no memory of how she got there or who she is. Her nametag reads CECILY. The six other people on the bus are just like her: no memories, only nametags. There’s a screen on each seatback that gives them instructions. A series of tests begin, with simulations projected onto the front window of the bus. The passengers must each choose an outcome; majority wins. But as the testing progresses, deadly secrets are revealed, and the stakes get higher and higher. Soon Cecily is no longer just fighting for her freedom – she’s fighting for her life.
Kindle Black Hole of Good Intentions
The secrets lurking in a rundown roadside motel ensnare a young woman, just as they did her aunt thirty-five years before, in this new atmospheric suspense novel from the national bestselling and award-winning author of The Broken Girls.
Upstate NY, 1982. Every small town like Fell, New York, has a place like the Sun Down Motel. Some customers are from out of town, passing through on their way to someplace better. Some are locals, trying to hide their secrets. Viv Delaney works as the night clerk to pay for her move to New York City. But something isn’t right at the Sun Down, and before long she’s determined to uncover all of the secrets hidden …
Randall Woodfield had it all. He was an award-winning student and star athlete. He was drafted for pro football by the Green Bay Packers, and chosen by Playgirl as a centerfold candidate. Working in the swinging West Coast bar scene, he had his pick of willing sexual prospects.
But Randall Woodfield wanted more than just sex. An appetite for unspeakable violent acts led him to cruise the I-5 highway through California, Oregon, and Washington, leaving a trail of victims along the way. As the list of his victims grew to a total of at least 44, the police faced the awesome challenge of catching and convicting a suspect who seemed to handsome and appealing to have committed such ugly crimes – crimes that filled every woman within his striking range with feat and horror …
In the sequel to the New York Times best-selling novel Hope Never Dies, Obama and Biden reprise their roles as BFFs-turned-detectives as they chase Obama’s stolen cell phone through the streets of Chicago – and right into a vast conspiracy.
Following a long but successful book tour, Joe Biden has one more stop before he can return home: Chicago. His old pal Barack Obama has invited him to meet a wealthy benefactor whose endorsement could turn the tide for Joe if he decides to run for president.
The two friends barely have time to catch up before another mystery lands in their laps: Obama’s prized Blackberry is stolen. When their number-one suspect winds up full of lead on the South Side, the police are content to write it off as just another gangland shooting. But Joe and Obama smell a rat …
Set against the backdrop of a raucous city on St. Patrick’s Day, Joe and Obama race to find the shooter, only to uncover a vast conspiracy that goes deeper than the waters of Lake Michigan – which is exactly where they’ll spend the rest of their retirement if they’re not careful.
Schizanthus Nerd 