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Review | One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus
One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus | Released May 30, 2017 by Delacorte Press | Rating: 
| Genre: Young Adult, Fiction, Mystery| Amazon | Goodreads
Synopsis: Pay close attention and you might solve this.
On Monday afternoon, five students at Bayview High walk into detention.
Bronwyn, the brain, is Yale-bound and never breaks a rule.
Addy, the beauty, is the picture-perfect homecoming princess.
Nate, the criminal, is already on probation for dealing.
Cooper, the athlete, is the all-star baseball pitcher.
And Simon, the outcast, is the creator of Bayview High’s notorious gossip app.Only, Simon never makes it out of that classroom. Before the end of detention, Simon’s dead. And according to investigators, his death wasn’t an accident. On Monday, he died. But on Tuesday, he’d planned to post juicy reveals about all four of his high-profile classmates, which makes all four of them suspects in his murder. Or are they the perfect patsies for a killer who’s still on the loose?
Everyone has secrets, right? What really matters is how far you would go to protect them.
High school can be such a bitch.
Even more so when you have someone pulling a Gossip Girl and sharing all your secrets with the world.
I liked this book. I’m very particular about which YA books I’ll read – I’m not a fan of YA romance at all – but I did enjoy this book.
I’ll say this about it, if you love mysteries and thrillers but YA isn’t really your thing you may want to pass. But if you don’t mind the high school setting this is good mystery.
Review | The Hunger by Alma Katsu
The Hunger by Alma Katsu | Released March 6, 2018 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons | Rating: 
| Genre: Fiction, Horror, Historical Fiction, Mystery| Amazon | Goodreads
Synopsis: Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere.
Tamsen Donner must be a witch. That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the pioneers to the brink of madness. They cannot escape the feeling that someone–or something–is stalking them. Whether it was a curse from the beautiful Tamsen, the choice to follow a disastrous experimental route West, or just plain bad luck–the 90 men, women, and children of the Donner Party are at the brink of one of the deadliest and most disastrous western adventures in American history.
While the ill-fated group struggles to survive in the treacherous mountain conditions–searing heat that turns the sand into bubbling stew; snows that freeze the oxen where they stand–evil begins to grow around them, and within them. As members of the party begin to disappear, they must ask themselves “What if there is something waiting in the mountains? Something disturbing and diseased…and very hungry?”
Well, damn this is a good book!
I don’t really know what else to say about it. Ok, I take that back. The only thing that’s keeping this from being a 5 star review is that there wasn’t a fall out of your seat, jaw dropping moment.
Aside from that, I was immediately hooked from the first. The Hunger is a great twist on the tale of the Donner party that makes for sheer suspense. I highly recommend reading this book. I already want to read it again!
But don’t take my word for it. Take Stephen King’s:
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Friday Feels
Review | The Thirst by Jo Nesbø
The Thirst by Jo Nesbø | Released May 9, 2017 by Knopf | Rating: 
| Genre: Crime, Thriller, Mystery, Fiction | Amazon | Goodreads
Synposis: The murder victim, a self-declared Tinder addict. The one solid clue—fragments of rust and paint in her wounds—leaves the investigating team baffled.
Two days later, there’s a second murder: a woman of the same age, a Tinder user, an eerily similar scene.The chief of police knows there’s only one man for this case. But Harry Hole is no longer with the force. He promised the woman he loves, and he promised himself, that he’d never go back: not after his last case, which put the people closest to him in grave danger.
But there’s something about these murders that catches his attention, something in the details that the investigators have missed. For Harry, it’s like hearing “the voice of a man he was trying not to remember.” Now, despite his promises, despite everything he risks, Harry throws himself back into the hunt for a figure who haunts him, the monster who got away.
If you didn’t know, I love the Harry Hole series. I own almost all the books (and I’m very picky about which books I’ll actually buy; I usually check out from the library), and have read a few of them multiple times.
The Thirst is book 11 in the series and I so wanted to love this book. I was mildly disappointed by Police (the 10th book in the series) and was hoping that The Thirst would bring back the thrill and suspense of Phantom, The Leopard and The Snowman. Which, this book did, up until about a little over halfway through the book.
My main hang up with The Thirst is that it’s too long. You think the book has reached it’s natural conclusion and then it keeps going. There’s one more twist (which to me wasn’t super twisty) before it ends. I could have done without the last few chapters, or some chapters in the middle could have been removed instead.
Overall, I liked the book. I didn’t know where it was going for most of it and enjoyed reading it until the last several chapters, which became a bit tedious. I probably won’t read it again, but I’m glad I read it.
Monday Motivation
Nonsense & Books 