THOUGHTS ON THIS 'n THAT

  Planes, traines and automobiles with just the right amount of romance thrown in. WEDDING DASHERS (Berkley) is a case of mistaken identity in Heather McBreen's debut. Ada’s little sister is getting married. Which should be a happy thought, right? But the once close sisters have been in a year long fight, the wedding is all the way in Ireland, and Ada is so broke that she just barely managed to get a ticket on a budget airline. And as if things couldn’t get worse, said airline just cancelled her connection. Which means Ada is stuck in London with no way to make it to the wedding. Surely she’s hit rock bottom? So, there’s no reason for her  not  to spill her heart out about the over-the-top wedding, her sister’s worryingly quick engagement, and the womanizing best man she’s dreading meeting to a handsome also-stranded stranger at the bar. Until she realizes the stranger is headed to the same wedding. Oh, and he’s the infamous best man. Now, Jack and Ada must put their simm...

  When a local fisherman is mauled to death, it seems like the only possible cause is a mythical creature in the latest puzzling entry in this  USA Today  bestselling series. An ice fisherman is savagely mauled to death in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and an eyewitness claims the man was attacked by a hodag. There's just one problem with that: it's well known that the creature is not real and was created by a local hoaxer. So how could an imaginary creature be chomping on local sportsmen?  The suggestion that a hodag killed someone isn’t well received by the townsfolk because of its beloved ties to the town and the money it generates from tourist dollars. Due to this, people begin to suspect the witness is the real killer, especially when it’s discovered he has a tangled past with the victim.  The witness to the attack happens to be the nephew of Morgan Carter’s bookstore employee, Rita Bosworth, who convinces the professional cryptozoologist to travel to Wisconsin t...

  STRIKE AND BURN (Berkley) is a  breathless romantic thriller that doesn't just toe the line between danger and desire—it burns it to the ground. Honor Stone is all alone in this world. No family, no money, no future. So when she locks eyes with Strike Madden—in the morgue of all places—she’s not in the mood to be seduced. Sure, he’s drop-dead gorgeous, and the sizzle of attraction between them is undeniable, but she’s reeling from her identical twin sister’s murder. It’s the wrong time, wrong place, wrong everything.   Still, the enigmatic billionaire hires Honor as an artist to spearhead his carefully curated erotic animation studio—a job they soon find to be a dangerous mix of business and pleasure.   But when her twin’s obsessive killer targets Honor, the painful secrets of Honor’s traumatic past will finally be exposed with devastating consequences. Strike will stop at nothing to protect her, uncovering his own bone-chilling demons—a beautifully broken, dark si...

  Los Angeles lawyer Lena Antinori has dedicated her career to fighting discrimination, including for the LGBTQ community, but her own family's secret haunts her. At thirteen years old, she made the startling discovery that her father, Frank, was gay and her mother, Teresa, knew. Fearing social stigma, Teresa instituted a code of silence meant to protect their Italian Catholic family—a code Lena adhered to for decades. Now, Frank plans to marry his partner, and he wants Lena to help plan the wedding. Lena is torn between maintaining loyalty to her mother and supporting her father's newfound happiness. As her father’s wedding approaches, Lena learns her childhood wounds run deeper than she thought, and failing to heal them might sentence her to a life of hypocrisy and the inability to discover the true meaning of coming out. Told by Lena in the present, and her parents in the past,  Everything We Thought Was True  examines how the truth doesn't set you free until you embra...

  Courage. Perseverance. Faith. Resilience. The essential qualities of bestselling author Robert Dugoni's new novel, HOLD STRONG (LakeUnion), which he co-writes with authors, Jeff Langholz, and Chris Crabtree. It's based on a little known true story of one of the darkest chapters of WWII. I've read numerous books about WWII and Hitler trying to conquer in the European theatre, but HOLD STRONG thrusts readers deeply into the Pacific theatre, after the USA is bombed by the Japanese in Pearl Harbor. It's something I knew little about. The USA had been dragging our feet getting into WWII, but once the homeland was attacked, all bets were off and we were in 100%. Sam Carlson and his sweetheart, Sarah Haber are small-town folks in Minnesota when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Sam is sent to the Philippines and captured as a POW. Brutalized but unbroken by the Bataan Death March and POW camps, Sam is one of eighteen hundred starved and weakened prisoners herded into the cargo...

  I grew up playing with and collecting Barbie Dolls. I SO wish I had saved them. Vintage Barbie dolls now are worth a ba-zillion dollars, plus they hold so many memories. Bestselling author, Renee Rosen has written the definite, well-researched book about how the eleven and a half inches tall doll, became a legacy, LET'S CALL HER BARBIE (Berkley). In the world of toy dolls in the 50s there were dozens of baby dolls, peeing dolls, whining dolls, dolls of every kind, except a doll that let young girls know they could become anything they wanted to be when she grew up. Enter Ruth Handler, of Mattel who saw the German Bild Lilli doll while travelling in Switzerland and knew this is what the American market needed. The first Barbie debuted at the New York toy fair in March 1959. Mattel sold 300-thousand Barbies that year and the sales skyrocketed from there. Barbie dolls started being designed and taking jobs in male-oriented fields like an airline pilot, NASCAR driver and going into s...

  “Because she was my mother, the death of zaftig good-time gal Renay Corren is newsworthy to me, and I treat it with the same respect and reverence she had for, well, nothing. A more disrespectful, trash talking woman was not to be found.”    So began Andy Corren's unforgettable obituary for his mother, Renay Mandel Corren, a tribute that went on to touch the hearts of millions around the globe. In his brief telling of the life and legend that was Renay, a “loud, filthy‑minded (and filthy‑mouthed) Jewish lady redneck who birthed six kids,” Andy captured only a slice of his loving and fabulously unconventional mother. In this uproariously funny, deeply moving family portrait, readers meet the rest of his absurd clan: his brothers, affectionately nicknamed Asshole ,  Twin, and Rabbi; his one-eyed pirate queen of a sister, Cathy Sue; and then there’s Bonus, who Andy isn’t aware of until later in life since this mysterious oldest brother grew up at the Green Valley Scho...