Finished: Win (Coben) Windsor Horne Lockwood III aka Win, is the best friend of detective Myron Bolitar, the main character of many of Harlan Coben's books. He's the rich, lethal, well-tailored, pretty boy who always has Myron's back, and has saved him several times when things looked bleak. He does so with witty repartee and cocky confidence. He's a great character who you really grow to love if you read the Myron Bolitar series. So, finally, he got his own story, and it's a great one! Win gets entangled in the mystery of what happened to the six young activists in the 60's who burned down a building that was supposed to be empty, but ended up causing some innocent bystander deaths. These activists are also tied to Win's own family when one of them is found murdered all these years later, and in his possession he's got the Vermeer painting stolen from Win's family years ago; as well as a briefcase that belongs to his cousin, Patricia, who had been kidnapped and raped while being held in what was known as the Hut of Horrors, where the remains of many other young women were found after she escaped her captors. Hints and clues take Win all over the place, particularly to his own family compound to talk to his father and see how he or his brother or their mother could have been involved in any of the mysteries. It's a page-turner that kept me reading, with a bit of a surprise ending. It left me hoping Coben writes more Win books. :-)

 Finished: The Guest List (Foley) Another page-turner that I could barely put down! Guests gather on an island off the coast of Ireland to attend the wedding of Jules, a high class magazine editor and Will, a television star with a Bear Grylls type show. The island has only the single manor in use, restored by the wedding planner and her husband. Only the wedding party stays on the island the night before, with the rest of the guests arriving by boat on the wedding day. Many stories about old school days between the groom and his friends come out, as well as a few secrets between other guests. By the time the wedding ceremony is finished the next day and all the guests have gathered in the tents for the reception, a terrifying storm has hit the island, and when the lights go out, someone is murdered. The story told from different viewpoints explains how several different people would have a motive for killing the victim, each new surprise making my head spin! The prose flows easily and lets you get to know each of the wedding party pretty well, especially the various narrators. I was glad to see the victim go, surprised at who the killer ended up being, but satisfied with who was actually blamed for the murder. :-) Obviously I don't want to give too much away on this one because it's a good read. 

Finished: Then She Was Gone (Jewell) Another page-turner about a fifteen year old girl, Ellie, who goes missing on her way to the library one day. There is no single word of her until ten years later when some evidence comes to light. In the meantime, her mother, father, older brother and older sister have all been shattered by her loss and her parents divorce. We hear the story from the viewpoints of several different characters, and as the horror of what happened unfolds, the seemingly coincidental relationship between Ellie's mother and a new man she has met takes you hurdling forward until you know yourself exactly every aspect of what happened to Ellie and how every character is involved. 

 Finished: The Gifted School (Holsinger) A book I simply could not put down because I just had to see who made it into the gifted school lol. The story of four mothers, best friends, who met eleven years earlier in an infant swimming class when their children were babies. Now, the children are all fifth-graders of varying talents and closeness and the mothers remain close friends. A new academy for gifted children, grades 6-8 for the lower school and 9-12 for the upper school is opening in Crystal, Colorado and only 1000 spots will be available for all the students in the four surrounding counties. The competition will be fierce and will also show us exactly what our mothers (their spouses) and the children are all made of, and if their relationships will survive at all after the competition to be granted entry to the school ends. To be honest, out of all the parents, there is only one who I like....who isn't some kind of helicoptering or over-achieving or living-vicariously-through parent. She's the mother of twin boys, and her ex-husband, their father, is a piece of competitive work. There is only one child I like in the entire bunch too...oh wait...no there isn't. Not a single child is unaffected by their entitlement. They talk about other school children when with each other; they are jealous and lie about their sibling (i.e. the twin boys); they are so self-involved that they don't understand how the consequences of their actions could harm other people. Mind you, these are still just fifth-graders we are talking about. Sometimes I feel like they were written a bit too old...as if they're in their teens. However, maybe the times have just changed that much! Anyway, there is one little boy I do like from the poorest county, Atik, whose mother cleans the houses of two of the four best friends. He is brilliant and eager and kind and talented. I'm so happy that he makes it into the school As for the shenanigans that some of the parents get into, well, they are jaw-dropping and you'll just have to read like I did to see whose friendships survive and who gets into the school after all is said and done...other than Atik, of course. :-)

 Finished: The Four Winds (Hannah) The story of how a farming family in the panhandle of Texas battles to make it through the Dust Bowl years of the early 1930's. Elsa Wolcott is a 25 year old, well-to-do, oldest daughter of parents who feel that she'll never have a future as a wife and mother. Unmarried at her age, they've given up on her. To finally stand up for herself, Elsa sleeps with the first young man who shows and interest in her and become pregnant. Her family disowns her, drives her to the Martinelli farm, and dumps her on their doorstep to be married. It takes awhile, but the Martinelli matriarch, Rose, finally comes to love and respect Elsa. While the farm is a thriving wheat producer, the family is happy and doing well. Elsa and her husband, Rafe, have two children, Loreda and Anthony. Rafe is never really happy, though, as he had been planning to go to college and see the world before he was forced into marriage and to stay on the farm with this parents and new wife. When the first year of the  Dust Bowl hits and devastates all the farm crops with its lack of rain and winds of dust storms, the destruction is more than Rafe can handle and he leaves his wife and children to head to California. His parents, Elsa and the children are all devastated. They remain on the farm, with Rose and her husband, Tony, refusing to leave the land, and Elsa right there with them, having come to love the land as her own, as much as her new Martinelli parents. They suffer unthinkable hardship in the next couple of years, but when 7 year old Anthony falls very ill and nearly dies from dust pneumonia, the doctor advises Elsa to get him to a climate where he can breathe more easily after he recovers enough to travel. This is when the true heartbreaking adventure begins. Tony and Rose still refuse to leave their land, so Elsa sets off in the old jalopy of a truck with her two children, very little money, very little food and very few belongings to cross the country to find a better life for her children in California. Little does she know she's heading into even worse conditions. People fleeing the Dust Bowl disaster and arriving from Texas, Oklahoma and other states were unwelcome and disdained by most native Californians. They were allowed to live nowhere but in makeshift tent cities. They begged for whatever work they could get, mostly surviving by picking cotton during cotton season. The migrant children, if they attended school, were ostracized by the other children. Medical care was denied. People were starving and dying. Elsa barely squeaked by with Loreda and Anthony, until the straw the broke the camel's back finally descended upon them...a terrible flood in the tent city that washed away all of their belongings and money except for the truck, which they were barely able to save (along with their own lives). By this time they have met "communist" union organizer, Jack, who Elsa has steered them very clear of. She wants no part of organizing against the rich landowners who are paying her barely enough to survive as a cotton picker. As conditions continue to deteriorate, as the cowardly landowners produce less cotton, and therefore pay the migrants even less, Elsa finally falls into step with Jack and realizes the only way to fight the injustice is to speak up and protest. Elsa and Jack realize they are in love, and for the first time in her life, Elsa is told that she's beautiful and strong and desired. The migrants, led by Jack and Elsa, are on the verge of having a successful second day of striking by sitting down in all the cotton fields in the area when Elsa is shot by one of the landowner's security guards. She passes away able to tell her children and Jack how she feels about them and vice versa. It's such a tragic moment. :-( Her last words to Jack are begging him to take her children back to Tony and Rosa in Texas, and he does. The book closes four years later when Loreda, now 18, is about to be the first Martinelli to head off to college. The farm has survived the Dust Bowl years and is a thriving wheat supplier again. Loreda says goodbye to her mom at the family cemetery and turns to follow the dreams her mom always wanted her to follow. A very good book, but wow did it smack me in the face with timeliness as I couldn't help but think about all the children at the borders who have been torn from their parents...people fleeing horrible situations, looking for a better life for this families. 

 Finished: The Survivors (Harper) A literal page-turner...the story of a 30 year old man who takes his wife and baby back to the beach town on Tasmania where he grew up to visit his parents, bringing back the memories of an accidental tragedy that happened 12 years before that has burdened him with guilt. Of course, the day after he's back in town, another tragedy occurs, bringing both the past and the relationships of everyone involved, past and present, right back into the limelight. A book that keeps you guessing who could be the perpetrator, and more importantly, one that smacks you in the face with the male objectification of women, starting at an early age and seemingly condoned unwittingly as "normal teenage boy" behavior. Not going to give away the plot line on this one. This is the third book I've read by Jane Harper and I've really enjoyed them all. :-) 

 Finished: What Could Be Saved (Schwarz) This the intricate story of a family who is ripped apart when the eight year old son and brother is kidnapped while the family lives in Bangkok, as the father, Robert, who secretly works for the government, is assigned a project that involves subverting North Vietnamese progress by identifying native boys that may be working as spies. While the wife and children have no idea what the father does for a living, their somewhat idyllic life in Asia moves forward as the wife, Genevieve, hosts and attends the required work parties every weekend, and the children attend school and extracurricular activities. All of the American households have Thai housekeepers, cooks and drivers who do all the manual work. The book goes back and forth in time between 1972, when little Philip Preston is kidnapped to 2019 when his youngest sister, Laura, then seven and now in her fifties, receives a phone call from a woman in Thailand telling her that her brother is alive and has been living there for decades and he now needs to come home. Laura whose father dies a few years after Philip's kidnapping and whose formidable mother is now suffering from dementia, calls her older sister, Beatrice, who was twelve at the time of the kidnapping. Bea, always taking responsibility as the oldest, refuses to believe this person could be Philip so doesn't agree to go with Laura to bring him home. Laura goes on her own, and sure enough, the man she meets is definitely her brother! We flash back to their childhood and the relationships between the siblings, and between each of the children and their parents, and between the parents themselves. All of them have their flaws, but they are, in the end, just a normal family, each taking some guilt for the disappearance of Philip, even though none are to blame. (Well, I do kind of blame the inattentive mother.) The compelling story delves into each character's feelings, their motivations for taking the actions they do, and of course, into the mystery of how and why Philip disappeared, and how far and wide everyone searched for Philip before giving up. As a reader, I was sad for all the years the sisters lost with their brother, and for all the heartache the parents suffered. As Philip ends up telling Laura, though, he went through some horrific times, but came out of them living a meditative life with a group of people led by a teacher who he grew to respect and love. He truly thought his family had been contacted and refused to pay a ransom for him (a lie he was told by an evil woman), and he ended up living an alternative life....not the happy family life Laura had imagined they should have had, but still he had lived his life. A very good read that will stay with me for a bit! 

Here's a bit of a review from Sarah McCraw Crow from BookPage that put into better words what I was feeling: 

As the novel opens, 54-year-old Laura Preston is treading water. Her art plateaued years ago, and she’s in a stagnant relationship with a lawyer named Edward. She doesn’t get along with her disapproving sister, Bea, and their mother, Genevieve, is slipping away to dementia. When Laura gets a call from a stranger who says her long-lost brother, Philip, has been found, she impulsively buys a ticket to Bangkok and sets off to find him.

This sounds like a setup for a suspense novel, and What Could Be Saved does offer suspenseful moments and surprising reversals. But two other elements make this novel uniquely satisfying: the portraits of each Preston family member, and the novel’s depiction of the unintended consequences of late 20th-century Americans abroad.

In Bangkok, Laura connects with the man who might be Philip, and from there, the narrative slips back to 1972, where it rotates through the perspectives of mother Genevieve; father Robert; young Laura and Philip; and Noi, a homesick Thai servant to the Prestons. Through their stories, readers learn what brought the Preston family to Bangkok, how the Vietnam War has spilled into other countries and the truth behind Philip’s disappearance. As the story shifts back and forth in time, the present-day Laura warily tries to make sense of Philip’s new presence, unearthing further truths about her family.