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Dark, Disturbing Spinoff Starter With Meat. In a first in my experience with Spangler, this is a book where there is a lot of interesting theological discussion *just* below the surface of this tale - hidden enough so that you can enjoy the actual story as told without diving too deep, but also obvious enough that it is fairly easy to follow Spangler's thinking for anyone who chooses to do so. That is the "meat" here - there really is a lot to ponder, and at least through certain sections of the tale, Spangler really makes you wrestle with a big theological word you rarely see outside of church... if you choose to do so.

If you don't want to wrestle with your theological outlook, this is still, on a more surface level, a dark and disturbing thriller from a guy that is known for his dark and disturbing thrillers in his Detective Casey White series (where this spins off from, but which is only tangentially referenced - a few...

Hollywood Hope. This one is very different from Lindstrom's debut, actually corrects some mistakes it made (somewhat), and even manages to land haymakers even Stephen King couldn't land quite so well... while directly calling out King. Yes, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is called out a few times in this tale, and yes, the tale largely follows a similar path to a point... and yet Lindstrom really does take that framework and make it his own in a tale as old as Hollywood itself.

At its heart is a guy who went to Hollywood as a typical midwestern guy looking to make it as a star... who then encountered Hollywood as it actually is, up to an including a #MeToo level scene (that is brief yet present) before falling to its also far too real underbelly (or so I've been told - I've never been further west than Pho...

More Memoir Than Science. In all honesty, one of the books I keep coming back to as an example of what this book *is* is Rachel Held Evans' Searching For Sunday, just a more explicitly anti-Christian one rather than someone who still considered themselves a believer in Christ but was searching for a version of the faith that made more sense to themselves.

Here, we get a so-called "Elder Millennial" or "Xennial" similar in age to both Evans (before she tragically suddenly died a few years ago now) and myself, though from a different area of the US than the Southern Appalachia Evans and I both called home - the New Mexico deserts were Eaves-Egenes' homeland. Like Evans and myself, Eaves-Egenes grew up in the American Church (she's never ultra specific on which exact version beyond it being "evangelical", but that can mean a wide-ish range of actual beliefs), but unlike myself (though similar to Evans in that Evans did become more open to the more mystical within Christianity), Eaves-Egenes ultimately becomes one of the so-called "Ex-vangelicals" who have seemingly left Christianity behind... and still seems quite bitter about the breakup. In Eaves-Egenes' case, the breakup was even so ...

Solid Southern Royalty Family Drama. We don't have actual royalty in the United States, but in different areas of the country we do have very rich families - sometimes rich going back many generations, sometimes (particularly over the last century) much newer (ala The Great Gatsby). This is a modern tale of one such family, and Gilbert really does a great job of bringing us - even those of us who themselves rose from "trailer park trash" to having "respectable" jobs and titles like I have - into this world in a stunningly vivid manner that will truly transport you to the hills of western Appalachian horse country from no matter where you may actually live in the world.

Having grown up just miles away from a prominent horse racing facility and event - the Atlanta Steeplechase at Kingston Downs in Kingston, GA - and rubbing elbows with some of the elite of my home County on the borderlands of southern Appalachia and Atlanta due to... well, I never actually knew why and the one thing I was aware of seems a bit too self aggrandizing to proclaim in this review... I actually have enough experience a...

Solid Creepy Creature Feature Thrills. If you're a Creature Feature kind of person, or perhaps an XFiles or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or similar type show fan, you're going to love this book. Yes, it is deep in the Dane Maddock Universe, but Wood is generally careful these days of not adding in *too* much to any given story that you need to know about beforehand, and here it basically amounts to one or two characters from other books directly showing up + a few references to the immediately prior book where Maddock himself updates his relationship status. Spoilers for those books, but mild. If you're really particular, always start at Book 1 of a given series anyway, or perhaps in the case of this sprawling universe, start from Original Publication Date and read through the se...

Powerful Examination Of Grief. Look, if I can read this book while staring down my wife's major heart surgery in less than two weeks while also dealing with my dad living in congestive heart failure for a couple of years now while also having a very old cat... you can read this powerful story of loss and love and finding yourself through your grief too. Yes, you too may be a bit delayed by all of the above and more, or your particular variant thereof, but you can absolutely make it through this book. Indeed, I would go so far as to say you *need* to make it through this book. Because this Autism Acceptance Month, let this Autistic tell you something about our experience: We read as much to learn about the human condition and to prepare our minds to handle different situations and emotions almost as for any other reason - at least some of us. (And maybe even just me - I tend to be so hyper rare as to possibly be unique even among billions of people in so many ways, and maybe this is one of them.)

There is a major spoiler for the epilogue of this book that at least some of you will want to know up front - but it *is* a major spoiler that could alter how other readers approach the book or even whether they give the book a chance at all. So here's how I'm going to handle this: There will be a paragraph deeper in the review where I will explicitly say that I am going to reveal the spoiler in that exact paragraph, and then I'm going to bury the spoiler in the middle of a lot of reasonable sounding text such that your eye isn't immediately drawn to it. That way, those who want to see the spoiler can still read that paragraph, but that paragraph won't stand out to other readers as anything exceptional in any way.

Some, including at least one author I've read that knows how to create some very dusty rooms herself, have called this Pagan's best work yet... and I'm likely to agree with them. The rare perspective on this love story - Pagan's clear preferred term - that is actually a romance with deep tragic elements - it does in fact meet all known RWA/ RNA requirements, for the couple at hand at minimum, though it may be argued that it meets them in a similar manner as Tom Clancy's Without Remorse being technically the best romance novel I've ever read does. In other words, *I* think the marketing on this book should clearly be as a romance, for a lot of different reasons, but I can also see booklandia in an uproar about that and Pagan and...

Yes, you read that headline right. According to recently released data from Pew Research, 51% of Americans say they had read “all or part of” 10 or fewer books in the past 12 months. In fact, more people answered that they had read no books in that period (25%) than had read 11 or more books during it (24%).

Of types of books read (a question where multiple answers were allowed), print remains king - and it isn’t particularly close. Even as those reading what I refer to as “dead tree edition” books has dropped since this survey began 15 yrs ago and is now down to less than 2/3 of Americans at 64%, that number is still more than double eBooks (31%) or audiobooks (26%).