This is a choose-your-own-mystery. I loved these Goosebumps books as a kid so I figured I would love this one now as an adult. Nope. I found this to be very juvenile; they tried way too hard to be funny. 2/5.

Ria has always been determined to have her husband's family love her. They're wealthy and glamorous. They're a little intimidating. And Ria believes she'll never be good enough. When Ria's husband, Grayson, leaves the house for work one morning and doesn't return, Ria is left to raise their daughter on her own with the help of her mother-in-law. Grayson's family say they have no idea what happened to him but she gets the feeling they know more than they're letting on. I did finish this one, but at no point did it grip me and keep me hooked well into the night. Unlikable characters, lots of repetition. A forgettable read for me. Thanks to Netgalley and Bookouture for an ARC. 2/5.

This starts off with Karla watching her husband pack his suitcase. He's fallen in love with someone else. To be honest I can't summarize this into something interesting because I did not like this book. I started skimming a third of the way through. Same things over and over and over. Karla wants Jason to borrow money from her father. Her father and Jason do not like each other. Jason develops feelings for someone else. But will not communicate with his wife at all! It was frustrating! You guys are married, communicate with each other. TALK. The twists were ridiculous. This was just a horrible read for me. Thanks to Netgalley and Bookouture for an ARC. 2/5.

Three years ago Libby's husband left her and their infant son Ethan. She's been struggling to launch her writing career while also taking care of Ethan. But now things are looking up and mother and son are on their way to have some fun on vacation. Although it's not much fun looking over your shoulder every minute. Libby has never told anyone about what happened when Ethan was born, and no one could find her at a faraway resort, right? Wrong. Ethan wanders into an elevator and disappears. CCTV footage shows an adult leading Ethan away by the hand. When then woman and Ethan are found hours later, the woman tells everyone she's Ethan's mother. I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but I know this wasn't it. It starts off intense and gripping. Libby loves her son Ethan and is very attentive, but all it takes is the blink of an eye to lose him. So what's going on?! Who is this woman who has Ethan and how is she his mother?! The book was even...

Mitchell's Inn is a secluded mountain lodge. What seemed cozy in the brochure ends up being a nightmare when a storm hits and cuts off the electricity and with it all contact with the outside world leaving the guests and small staff trapped with a killer. Of course I couldn't wait to get my hands on this. I loved The Couple Next Door and A Stranger in the House. It sounded great - an old mountain lodge nestled in the woods, no wi-fi just enjoying nature and one another's company. But this one was disappointing right from the get-go. I understand there were lots of characters so we could guess who the murderer was and who'd be the next to die but I had a hard time remembering who was who. The writing was juvenile, repetitive and choppy.  The sudden change in character point-of-view was jarring. The story was unbelievable. The reveal was anticlimactic. I can't believe this is written by the same author.  2/5.

This started off good - Annabelle Elder is an antiques dealer. She collects erotic art, but her life is the complete opposite of steamy. When she attends a New Year's Eve party at Haven Hotel with her best friend she decides to be a little more open-minded, especially when she meets handsome, rich, charming Jared Golden and discovers the pleasure palace he has set up in the hotel. Only those who've received invitations may go and nobody will spill what goes on behind closed doors. I liked the fancy hotel and waiting to see what will happen between Annabelle and Jared, who seemed to be interesting as individuals, but things became soo boring between them. It was the same thing over and over and over with one completely weird scene in the middle that had me wondering things like 'why??' and 'what the fuck???' So much heat in their eyes, their blood, their touch, their everything! To be honest I skimmed the hell out of this book after I managed to get...

This had an interesting premise - newly single Conrad Blunt has his secretary find an escort for him to take to the charity ball.. his sister doesn't like that idea and has her best friend done up to accompany him which he doesn't know and he doesn't remember Emma anyway. But this was boring. It was repetitious. It was like the author went through the thesaurus and used weird words to describe the anticlimactic sex scene between these two. Ugh. Thank God it was short and it was free. I won't be reading more in this series or looking for more from this author. 2/5.

As a child Kay Kelly had always envied Violet-May Duff - she was pretty and she was privileged. As new friends Kay is welcomed into the grand old Duff house. She is charmed by Violet-May's younger sister, Rosemary-June. She takes a liking to Mr. Duff, is intrigued by Mrs. Duff. And she falls hopelessly in love with Violet-May's older brother, Robbie. It all seems too good to be true. And Kay finds out one September afternoon that it is, when the three young girls take baby Alexander Duff for a walk. Kay Kelly is now in her thirties and when her path crosses with the Duff family once again, it doesn't take her long to realize something is wrong. Kay has to go through what happened that day long ago on Bone Bridge and face the terrible truth. This started off good. It's divided into book one and book two. Book one is when Kay and Violet-May were younger and how quiet Kay Kelly is accepted into Violet-May's very different world. I found their lives interesting and I wa...

Jakób Kowalski is planting a bomb on the train tracks shortly before the train passes by, his only problem is that it was the wrong train. Fighting with the Polish resistance against Germany and Russia, their intent was to destroy a German troop transport, not destroy a train going to Auschwitz. On that train was six-year-old Gretl Schmidt. Although she is spared from the concentration camp, she is now an orphaned German Jew who finds herself lost in a country hostile to her people. Jakób's guilt and compassion allow Gretl to stay with him for three years and the pair form a strong bond. But Jakób believes Gretl will have better opportunities in South Africa where German war orphans are promised bright futures with adoptive Protestant families - so long as her Jewish roots, Catholic education and connections to communist Poland are never discovered. Poor Gretl. She had been through a lot but she was determined and headstrong and I couldn't help but root for her to have some hap...

Duneen is a remote village in Ireland where little happens. Until human remains are discovered on an old farm. The remains are believed to be Tommy Burke's who was last seen twenty-five years earlier, getting on a bus to Cork. As Sergeant P.J. Collins struggles to solve a big case for the first time in his career he uncovers anger, resentment, secrets, and regret from some of the community's residents.  I really like the cover. Unfortunately, there's not much else I like about this book. I found the characters lacking depth. They're unlikable and forgettable. And they blame the disappearance of Tommy Burke twenty-five years ago for their unhappiness to this day? Ugh. There were three Ross sisters and I couldn't keep straight who was who. There were too many characters and side stories. It was like a bad romantic comedy. I wanted to know what happened to Tommy Burke, but this was very boring to get through. I dreaded picking it back up and had to start skimming the...

Corey has moved away from the small town of Lost Creek, Alaska, and her best friend, Kyra. It's been seven months and she's just days away from going back to visit. But Kyra has died. Corey is devasted and confused. How could this have happened? Kyra promised to wait for her. When Corey returns to Lost, it isn't the same small community who accepted her and talked about Kyra, saying she didn't belong because of her mental illness. It's the opposite - Corey is the outsider now and Kyra is praised for her talent. The people of Lost say her death was meant to be. But Corey knows it wasn't meant to be. She knows Lost is keeping secrets and she's going to find out what they are. When I started this book I thought it was so good! The writing was wonderful, the bond between the two girls was strong, the Alaskan setting was beautiful. I put this down just after the halfway point because I needed sleep. I couldn't understand how this book was getting such low r...

Tom Hanks has written seventeen stories all of which have at least one typewriter in them. Sadly, for me, most of these stories were VERY boring. They're long and filled with nothing memorable. I loved the first story, "Three Exhausting Weeks" which is about friends who have known each other since high school who suddenly take things to the next level. I thought it was jam-packed with adventure and I did like the characters (who are in two other stories as well). And I liked "A Month on Greene Street" which is about a single mother and her three children moving into a new house and at first she thinks her neighbour is weird, desperate and unemployed and she does whatever she can to avoid him, but it turns out she was wrong about him. I found all the other stories extremely painful to get through and I'm so happy I'm done! I won an ARC through a Goodreads giveaway. Thank you to Knopf for my copy. 2/5.

Nora Brown lives a quiet life with her husband and six-year-old daughter in Seattle. She's an English teacher at a high school. It's the last day before Thanksgiving break and she'll be going away with her family, but before she leaves her classroom she sees a girls face floating on top of the drapes. She's terrified - does this mean she's going crazy or is she just tired? Over Thanksgiving vacation she sees the face again, and this time the girl whispers "remember the Valentine's dress." Nora eventually talks to a psychiatrist where a secret that was hidden deep within is revealed.   The best part of this book, to me, is that it's short. I feel bad for saying all this but the characters weren't really fleshed out, the writing was just okay and I couldn't really get into the story. I figured when I read in the blurb about Nora seeing a face there would be a little bit of a thrill, some tension, SOMETHING! But what happened in the book was...

In four years Prime Space will put the first humans on Mars. Helen Kane, Yoshi Tanaka, and Sergei Kuznetsov are going to spend seventeen months in the most realistic simulation ever created in order to prove they're the crew for the job.  Helen is retired from NASA. This is her last chance to return to where she feels at home, where she can be her best self. Even if that means leaving her grown daughter behind.. again. Yoshi wants to prove himself worthy of his wife, even though he loves her completely but maybe he doesn't love her in the right way. (this is weird.) Sergei is going to Mars so he can be tested beyond the point of exhaustion. He wants to prove to his father and to himself that he is not meek. He wants to set a good example for his sons. Days turn into months and even though the astronauts are busy, the lives and people they left behind have a way of seeping into their minds. I was so excited when I won this. And I was so excited when I finished it. Sadl...

This is a short story prequel to Pretty Girls which was one of my favourite reads of 2016. Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes takes us through the day Julia Carroll went missing. She did things a typical nineteen-year-old would do - went to classes, went out that night with her roommate and best friend, Nancy. She thought about her younger sisters and how she should look out for them more and what they would do together that weekend. Although she had lots of different things going on in her life, her mind always came back to Beatrice Oliver. She went missing five weeks ago and it terrified Julia that a girl her own age could walk out the door and not return and can't be found. And really, it became repetitious for me. Same with what happened with her boyfriend that night. It became repetitious especially in a short story and it just felt bogged down. This was a disappointing read for me. It didn't have the same feel as Pretty Girls at all.

Nineteen-year-old Gwendolyn Hooper is starting her new life in Ceylon with her new husband Laurence. He's rich - the owner of a tea plantation - and charming and Gwen is in love. But life in Ceylon isn't quite what she expected. The plantation workers aren't very nice and Laurence seems to be hiding a few things from her. And eventually Gwen will come to have a secret of her own - and it's a doozy. I feel like this book took forever for me to get through. There's too many words, it's overly descriptive, the characters aren't very interesting, and absolutely nothing happens! 

This is book number two in The Hatching series. And it is exactly like the first one. Filled with so many different characters from all around the world that I don't care who's who. I don't want their life story, I want action. They're preparing for the spiders? Okay, fine. But there are so many different characters, everyone doing their own thing, that there is not enough actual action from the spiders. So, again, the concept of flesh-eating spiders is cool but it is not executed very well in either book.

A ten-thousand-year-old egg sac has been found at the Nazca Lines and is sent to a laboratory in Washington, D.C. where it hatches and an ancient species of killer spiders emerge. Now the black, skittering mass is causing global pandemonium. This book is told from multiple perspectives - people from all over the world where these giant, man-eating spiders are out of control. It quickly became boring reading about these people. I wanted the main characters to be the spiders but they play a minor role compared to these peoples' lives and how they're preparing for and dealing with the spiders. It was disappointing.

Nora hasn't been in touch with her childhood best friend Clare in ten years. Then out of the blue an invitation to Clare's hen do arrives in her inbox. She knows going is a bad idea. She just didn't know how bad. This book was sloooooooow. The writing was nothing spectacular. I did like the last 15% or so of the book even if some of it was a bit far-fetched/convenient, but overall this was a disappointing read for me.

Shona McIver was thirteen when she was murdered. That was almost forty years ago, and modern DNA evidence shows that the wrong man has been serving time. As Shona's brother Tom returns to Scotland from South Africa to scatter their mother's ashes, he grows closer to Sarah and together they try to figure out who could have killed Shona. Sarah was Shona's best friend and was with her just before she was killed. As Sarah's life begins to unravel she begins to realize that we don't always know the people closest to us. I felt like I was reading a book. I was not, at any time, absorbed in the story. I didn't really care for the characters. Lots of things were convenient. It all fell flat for me.