Well January has come and gone and hopefully we are all out of the so called January blues. The days are slowly getting long and before we know it well be getting read to meet spring, with the snowdrops, and crocuses telling spring is just around the corner. I love spring as it’s full of wonder and renewal and the spring colours see so bright after the winter gloom.
So now it has become that time in the month again that I get to choose, along with other Amazon Prime Members my Amazon First Reads book and this months 8 books are:
Psychological Suspense
The Silence by Daisy Pearce, Pages: 316, Publication Date: 1 March 2020
Synopsis: She’s broken. She’s vulnerable. She’s just what Marco was looking for.
Stella Wiseman was a child TV star, but there’s nothing glamorous about her life now. Alone in her thirties, she’s lost her parents and her friends and she’s stuck in a dead-end job. But just as she hits rock bottom she meets Marco, a charismatic older man who offers to get her back on her feet. He seems too good to be true.
Is he?
She appreciates the money he lavishes on her. And the pills. But are the pills just helping her sleep, or helping her avoid her problems?
With Stella’s life still in freefall, Marco whisks her away to a secluded cottage where she is isolated from everyone except him. But the closer he pulls her, the worse she gets. He tells her it’s all in her head, and she just needs time away from the world.
No longer sure what’s real and what’s not, Stella begins to question whether she was wrong to trust Marco. Was she wrong to trust herself? Is the one person she thought was fighting for her survival actually her biggest threat?
Contemporary Fiction
In an Instant by Suzanne Redfearn, Pages: 326, Publication Date: 1 March 2020
Synopsis: A deeply moving story of carrying on even when it seems impossible.
Life is over in an instant for sixteen-year-old Finn Miller when a devastating car accident tumbles her and ten others over the side of a mountain. Suspended between worlds, she watches helplessly as those she loves struggle to survive.
Impossible choices are made, decisions that leave the survivors tormented with grief and regret. Unable to let go, Finn keeps vigil as they struggle to reclaim their shattered lives. Jack, her father, who seeks vengeance against the one person he can blame other than himself; her best friend, Mo, who bravely searches for the truth as the story of their survival is rewritten; her sister Chloe, who knows Finn lingers and yearns to join her; and her mother, Ann, who saved them all but is haunted by her decisions. Finn needs to move on, but how can she with her family still in pieces?
Heartrending yet ultimately redemptive, In an Instant is a story about the power of love, the meaning of family, and carrying on…even when it seems impossible.
Fantasy
The Killing Fog by Jeff Wheeler, Pages: 404, Publication Date: 1 March 2020
Synopsis: The Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the Kingfountain series conjures an epic, adventurous world of ancient myth and magic as a young woman’s battle with infinite evil begins.
Survivor of a combat school, the orphaned Bingmei belongs to a band of mercenaries employed by a local ruler. Now the nobleman, and collector of rare artefacts, has entrusted Bingmei and the skilled team with a treacherous assignment: brave the wilderness’s dangers to retrieve the treasures of a lost palace buried in a glacier valley. But upsetting its tombs has a price.
Echion, emperor of the Grave Kingdom, ruler of darkness, Dragon of Night, has long been entombed. Now Bingmei has unwittingly awakened him and is answerable to a legendary prophecy. Destroying the dark lord before he reclaims the kingdoms of the living is her inherited mission. Killing Bingmei before she fulfils it is Echion’s.
Thrust unprepared into the role of savoir, urged on by a renegade prince, and possessing a magic that is her destiny, Bingmei knows what she must do. But what must she risk to honour her ancestors? Bingmei’s fateful choice is one that neither her friends nor her enemies can foretell, as Echion’s dark war for control unfolds.
Thriller
A Killer’s Wife by Victor Methos, Pages: 361, Publication Date: 1 March 2020
Synopsis: From the bestselling author of The Neon Lawyer comes a gripping thriller about a prosecutor confronted with the darkest part of her past and the worst fears for her future…
Fourteen years ago, prosecutor Jessica Yardley’s husband went to prison for a series of brutal murders. She’s finally created a life with her daughter and is a well-respected attorney. She’s moving on. But when a new rash of homicides has her ex-husband, Eddie, written all over them—the nightmares of her past come back to life.
The FBI asks Jessica to get involved in the hunt for this copycat killer—which means visiting her ex and collaborating with the man who tore her life apart.
As the copycat’s motives become clearer, the new life Jessica created for herself gets darker. She must ask herself who she can trust and if she’s capable of stopping the killer—a man whose every crime is a bloody valentine from a twisted mastermind she’s afraid she may never escape.
Historical Fiction
This Terrible Beauty by Katrin Schumann, Pages: 366, Publication Date: 1 March 2020
Synopsis: From the bestselling author of The Forgotten Hours comes an unforgettable story of one woman’s journey to reclaim what she lost in a country torn apart by the devastating legacy of WWII.
On the windswept shores of an East German island, Bettina Heilstrom struggles to build a life from the ashes. World War II has ended, and her country is torn apart. Longing for a family, she marries Werner, an older bureaucrat who adores her. But after joining the fledgling secret police, he is drawn deep into its dark mission and becomes a dangerous man.
When Bettina falls in love with an idealistic young renegade, Werner discovers her infidelity and forces her to make a terrible choice: spend her life in prison or leave her home forever. Either way she loses both her lover and child.
Ten years later, Bettina has reinvented herself as a celebrated photographer in Chicago, but she’s never stopped yearning for the baby she left behind. Surprised by an unexpected visitor from her past, she resolves to return to her ravaged homeland to reclaim her daughter and uncover her beloved’s fate, whatever the cost.
Mystery
Hide Away by Jason Pinter, Pages: 365, Publication Date: 1 March 2020
Synopsis: From the bestselling author of the Henry Parker series comes a page-turning thriller about a vigilante who’s desperate to protect her secrets—and bring a killer to justice.
On the surface, Rachel Marin is an ordinary single mother; on the inside, she’s a fierce, brilliant vigilante. After an unspeakable crime shatters her life, she changes her identity and moves to a small town in Illinois, hoping to spare her children from further trauma…or worse. But crime follows her everywhere.
When the former mayor winds up dead, Rachel can’t help but get involved. Where local detectives see suicide, she sees murder. They resent her for butting in—especially since she’s always one step ahead. But her investigative genius may be her undoing: the deeper she digs, the harder it is to keep her own secrets buried.
Her persistence makes her the target of both the cops and a killer. Meanwhile, the terrifying truth about her past threatens to come to light, and Rachel learns the hard way that she can’t trust anyone. Surrounded by danger, she must keep her steely resolve, protect her family, and stay one step ahead, or else she may become the next victim.
Memoir
A Drop of Midnight by Jason Dialité, Pages: 297, Publication Date: 1 March 2020
Synopsis: World-renowned hip-hop artist Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité’s vivid and intimate journey through his own and his family’s history—from South Carolina slavery to twenty-first-century Sweden.
Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up between worlds—part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man’s-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, colours, and eras to find a sense of belonging.
In A Drop of Midnight, Jason draws on conversations with his parents, personal experiences, long-lost letters, and pilgrimages to South Carolina and New York to paint a vivid picture of race, discrimination, family, and ambition. His ancestors’ origins as slaves in the antebellum South, his parents’ struggles as an interracial couple, and his own world-expanding connection to hip-hop helped him fashion a strong black identity in Sweden.
What unfolds in Jason’s remarkable voyage of discovery is a complex and unflinching look at not only his own history but also that of generations affected by the trauma of the African diaspora, then and now.
Nonfiction
Anger is My Middle Name by Lisbeth Zornig Andersen, Pages: 218, Publication Date: 1 March 2020
Synopsis: An empowering memoir of resilience and redemption, and the rage that helped a girl escape the darkness of a harrowing childhood.
Born to a violently dysfunctional home in working-class Denmark, Lisbeth Zornig Andersen and her three older brothers were bounced between foster care and state-run institutions, then back again to their chemically dependent mother and sadistic stepfather. For Lisbeth, it was a childhood without perimeters. It was blighted by poverty, sexual abuse, neglect, betrayal, and further victimisation by the broken Danish social services system that forced Lisbeth to live where and how it saw fit. Coming of age with a myriad of fears and emotional disorders, Lisbeth had three things that would become driving forces in her life: she was extraordinarily bright, extremely wilful, and exceptionally angry.
From hell to liberation, this is Lisbeth’s emotional and galvanising memoir told in two voices: that of a young girl who was unwanted, challenged, and defiant, and that of a woman who channelled her rage into a positive force as a passionate advocate for children’s rights. Whatever darkness defines the past, it can be used to change the future. Lisbeth’s heart-wrenching and ultimately uplifting journey is proof.
This month I found it easy to choose which book to get. It just had to be the Historical Fiction: This Terrible Beauty by Katrin Schumann. I really like historical fiction especial when is between 1800 to 1969. As there are so many notable event that happen between these time that I’m interested in.
** Which book will you choose? Let me know. **
Gadget Girl 71 