I Heard The Owl Call My Name: Margaret Craven

An oldie, but a goody. An ill vicar is sent to a Native American town and learns more about life than what he could teach. A white man falsely becomes friends with the native to basically steal a symbol of their heritage showing how white man has always treated the wiser natives. The vicar eventually dies but learns more about friendship and life than most.

Abandon: Blake Crouch

Another fantastic and disturbing story about the depths of greed and the darkness of man. This story explores human relationships and an abandoned mining town. An estranged father invites his journalist daughter to the mountains to do a story on ghost hunters. His real motive is uncovered when the group gets killed off one by one by others also looking for the legendary gold. The chase just seems to continue minus one person till the very end. Action packed with an ending that is both a relief and depressing.

Paragon Walk: Anne Perry

A cute Victorian mystery solved by the policeman's wife. The snide exchanges between the women are very amusing.

Beaded Hope: Cathy Liggett

A deeply religious and inspiring book about helping others and being thankful for what you have. A group of four women in harrowing times of their lives go to South Africa with their church and find meaning in their lives. They bring back bead work made by the local women to sell in the states as a form of income for the Africans to feed their family and get treatment for AIDS.

Afraid: Jack Kilborn

An insanely intense book. I loved the number of characters that were dynamic and you got to know. It was also very unpredictable and characters wee killed off like flies, which disturbed me. A red ops team lands in a small town in Wisconsin and kills off the entire town (-3) in order to find a man who had become a recluse and no one had information on where he lived. Fast paced and hard to put down.

The Girl in the Green Raincoat: Laura Lippman

This was a cutesy short novel geared toward older readers I think. It didn't really hold my interest, but it was a short enough read that I finished. A woman is on bed rest and sees the same lady in a green raincoat daily walking her dog. When one day the dog is out by itself she becomes a detective to determine what happened to the woman, who ended up being a murderer.

Stealing Faces: Michael Prescott

Actually a very good book once you get into it. I liked how the relationship between the two characters leaves you guessing until the end. A man stalks women, then takes them to the desert giving them a head start before he hunts them, until he realises someone is hunting him and knows what he is.

Trapped: Greg Iles

A very well written suspenseful book. A crazed man sets out to murder the family of his dead mother's doctor, who he believes let her die. Suspenseful and fast paced

The Christmas Box: Richard Paul Evans

An insightful book that will ground you about what is really important in life. A man and his young family move into an elderly woman's home to become caretakers and learn the importance of living.

The Truth Machine: James Halperin

An interesting look into the speculative future if a machine is developed that detects when someone is lying. The idea behind the book is that the problems in the world are caused by corrupt and greedy individuals in power. The machine starts in the court system to determine the guilt of criminals, but then becomes a daily part of life, children at the age of four wear them and no one lies. It is an interesting story of utopia? interwoven with the story of the truth machine's inventor, a genius and murderer. I wasn't thinking there would be a happy ending, yet there was and in a disturbing way I was disappointed.