Sunday Salon: Welcome Spring and New Books

Welcome to the Sunday Salon! Also submitted to Mari Reads for Mailbox Monday.

 Hope you are enjoying spring-like weather today, wherever you are!

I was lucky to win two ARCs from Random House Publishing. Here are the book descriptions:

Five Star Billionaire: A Novel by Tash Aw
Tash Aw charts the overlapping lives of migrant Malaysian workers, forging lives for themselves in sprawling Shanghai.

Blood and Beauty: The Borgias, a Novel by Sarah Dunant
A powerhouse of the Italian Renaissance, their very name epitomizes the ruthless politics and corruption of the Papacy. An epic novel which sets out to capture the scope, the detail, the depth, the colour and the complexity of this fascinating family.

I'm reading a lot of historical novels right now, so I'm looking forward to finding out more about the Borgias.  And the new wealthy in China are a hot topic, so a novel featuring the new Shanghai will be interesting. Publication dates for these books will be in July 2013.

I seem to have about seven books to review in the next month for book tours! April will be the busiest month! What was I thinking? But then I chose books that I really thought would be interesting. And they are!

Enjoy your day!

The Making of Us by Lisa Jewell

Friday 56 Rules:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader  *Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you. *Post it. *Add your (url) post in Linky at Freda's Voice.

Robyn Inglis celebrated her eighteenth birthday with a Voltz energy shot and the morning-after pill. The night before she'd still been seventeen, but she wasn't having her birthday party on a Sunday night, no way. Besides it had been half legal, the party hadn't started 'til nine o'clock, she'd turned eighteen at midnight, the last four hours she'd been partying as a proper bona fide paid-up member of the adult population, thank you very much. (p. 57)

About the book: "Three strangers are brought together by the father they never knew. Lydia, Dean and Robyn don’t know one another. Yet. Lydia is wealthy and successful, but lonely. Dean is a young, unemployed, single dad. Robyn is eighteen, gorgeous and intelligent, but she’s failing her classes and falling in love for the first time. Three people leading three very different lives. All lost. All looking for something. But when they slowly find their way into each other's lives, everything starts to change ..

What they don’t know is that a letter is about to arrive that will turn their lives upside down. It is a letter containing a secret—one that will bind them together and show what love and family and friendship really mean." (publisher)

Title: The Making of Us: A Novel by Lisa Jewell
Published August 14, 2012; Atria
Genre: contemporary fiction
Source: publisher

Book Review: WHEN MAIDENS MOURN by C.S. Harris

Looking up, he said, " Do you know where Miss Tennyson planned to take her young cousins yesterday?"
The nursemaid shook her had. "No. She told them it was a surprise."
"Could she perhaps have intended to show them the excavations at Camlet Moat?" (ch. 9)

About the book: Regency England, August 1812. When Gabrielle Tennyson is murdered, aristocratic investigator Sebastian St. Cyr and his new reluctant bride, the fiercely independent Hero Jarvis, find themselves involved in an intrigue concerning the myth of King Arthur, Camelot, and a future poet laureate...

Comments: A young woman is found stabbed and left in a boat at Camlet Moat outside of London. She was known for her ongoing research on a site some claimed as the original Camelot, and investigator Sebastian St. Cyr thinks her death may be connected to her work. The two young cousins who were with her that day are missing.

Recommendations: This is the first of the eight Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries that I've read. It's the seventh in a series. What ties the books together is the ongoing life of St. Cyr - his distant father, questions relating to his parentage, his love affair with an actress, and his marriage to Hero, the daughter of a prominent and influential member of government. Hero and St. Cyr work together on this mystery as the dead woman Gabrielle was a close friend of Hero's.

Excellent read. I am eager to read the next in the series, which is already out - What Darkness Brings.

Title: When Maidens Mourn: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery by C.S. Harris
Published March 5, 2013; Signet paperback
Genre: historical mystery
Source: review copy from the publisher

Book Review: The Missing File by D.A. Mishani

A sixteen-year-old boy, Oleg, disappears on his way to school in Tel Aviv and Inspector Avraham Avraham has to determine if he is a runaway or was kidnapped. Oleg's father was out of the country at the time and the boy's mother reports him missing. Oleg's had his backpack with him, though he left his cell phone behind. Zeev Avni,  an enigmatic neighbor, claims detailed knowledge of the boy as he had been his after-school English tutor, and he pursues Avraham with information he says he has. Zeev immediately comes into our cross hairs as someone who could be a suspect in the boy's disappearance.

The book is suspenseful and there are twists and turns in the case up to the last few  pages.  Apart from the tantalizing plot, there is the character and personality of Inspector Avraham, a very likable though not the most astute member of the investigating team. But that's part of his charm. He lives alone but at the end of the book, finds a love interest on a trip abroad whom he has to leave to return to Israel. The author assures us this is not the end of things for Avraham, however.

The first in the Inspector Avraham detective series is very promising. I am eager to read the next in the series.

Title: The Missing File: A Novel by D. A. Mishani
Release date: April 16, 2013; Harper
Genre: mystery, police procedural

D. A. Mishani is the editor of Israeli fiction and crime literature at Keter Books in Israel and is a literary scholar specializing in the history of detective literature. The Missing File is his first novel and the first in a series featuring the police inspector Avraham Avraham. Connect with Mishani on Facebook and find him on Goodreads.

Visit The Missing File book tour schedule for more reviews.
Review book received through TLC Book Tours.

Linked to Cym Lowell's Book Review Wednesday.

Mailbox Monday: Books and Proofs

Visit Mailbox Monday at host Chaotic Compendiums this week.

Here's what arrived last week:

Daddy's Gone A Hunting by Mary Higgins Clark:
A dark secret threatens two sisters when the family-owned furniture firm explodes into flames.

The Deadly Sisterhood: A Story of Women, Power, and Intrigue in the Italian Renaissance 1427-1527 by Leonie Frieda
An epic tale of eight famous women.


and some Uncorrected Proofs:

Making It by Helen Klein Ross
Contemporary advertising shenanigans as experienced by a bread-winning mom

Sight Reading by Daphne Kalotay
Three artists have their fates irrevocably interlaced.

The Perfume Collector by Kathleen Tessaro
The obsessive love between muse and artist, the power of memory and scent.

The Barbed Crown: An Ethan Gage Adventure by William Dietrich
Adventurer Ethan Gage plots revenge on Napoleon Bonaparte for the kidnap of his son.


What books arrived in your mailbox recently?

Book Review: Undercurrents by Pamela Beason

Welcome to the Sunday Salon!

Scary picture, isn't it? Scary for divers but more so for the sharks, targeted by illegal poachers for its fins and then thrown back into the ocean to be prey for other sharks and sea creatures. That's the premise for the mystery novel, Undercurrents by Pamela Beason, third in the Summer Westin mystery series.

Summer or "Sam" is a wildlife biologist and freelance writer, hired to write reports for an online publication, Out There, during a week-long trip to the Galapagos Islands, a World Heritage Center off the coast of Ecuador.

Sam is to do her reporting as two different personas, an underwater diver to trail Dr. Daniel Kazaki, the biologist doing a marine life survey, and as hiker Wildlife Westin, a reporter giving readers a view of the islands themselves.

"So, a post every day about the islands by Wilderness Westin, expert hiker and kayaker," Wyatt prompted.
"No problem...."
"And another by a new character that we'll create for the underwater adventures. You are a diver, right?" (p. 5)

Daniel hires a senior park naturalist, an Ecuadorian named Eduardo Duarte, to take them out on a small boat or panga every day.  And they are guests on a small cruise ship that will be their home base in between dives.

But things start to go wrong from day one. Daniel almost dies underwater as his oxygen tanks were contaminated with carbon monoxide. The native fishermen are hostile to the idea that Daniel's marine research will mean that they won't be able to fish as much as they like. Daniel and Sam find the bodies of finless sharks underwater, sharks whose fins had been removed and their blooded bodies thrown back into the deep. The count of sea cucumbers was way down. All this was evidence that local fishermen were supplying the Asian market with delicacies taken from these waters.

Sam and Daniel's lives are in danger. The mystery is intense as we follow Sam underwater and on land. The ending and wrap up was a little bit too neat for me, but I wholeheartedly recommend this book for those mystery readers who would also like a great setting - the Galapagos Islands, both underwater and on land. I learned a lot about scuba diving, its delights and its dangers.

Title: Undercurrents: A Sam Westin Mystery by Pamela Beason
Release date: April 2, 2013; Berkley
Source: review copy from publisher
Objective rating: 4.5/5

Deadly Stakes: A Novel by J.A. Jance

Friday 56 Rules:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader  *Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you. *Post it. *Add your (url) post in Linky at Freda's Voice.

"That's the problem," Detective Cutter said. "We don't know who the victim is. No identification was found on the body, and so far, no one matching the victim's description has been reported missing anywhere in the Phoenix metropolitan area. We initially thought that finding the owner of the phone would lead us to the victim."

"But I'm not dead," Lynn objected.

Title: Deadly Stakes: A Novel by J.A. Jance
Published February 5, 2013; Touchstone
Description: Ali Reynolds finds herself working against the police to clear two innocent names…with deadly stakes. Police academy-trained former reporter Ali Reynolds investigates the murder of a gold-digging divorcee on behalf of a woman accused of the crime. Lynn Martinson is dating the dead woman’s ex-husband, and she and her boyfriend Chip Ralston have been charged.