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  GWENDY'S BUTTON BOX Twelve-year-old Gwendy Peterson lives in Castle Rock, Maine. Like many girls her age, she has confidence issues and concerns of her weight and fitting in with other students her age.  She will be going to middle school at the end of summer and she does not want her nickname - Goodyear - to follow her to school. One day a man (he introduces himself as Richard Farris) calls out to her and he gives her a special box ... he calls it a button box due to the buttons and levers around it. One lever dispenses chocolates, another issues rare Morgan Silver Dollars. Just as Mr. Farris has promised, the box has magical properties that are just right for a 12 year old girl, and Gwendy will discover that those chocolates themselves have magical properties.  And when Mr. Farris warns Gwendy that there are buttons that she should be wary of, and even a button she should never push, Gwendy comes to learn that as delightful the box can be, it is a burden to care for i...

 Lois Cairns is ... was ... a film history professor. She is currently out of a job and now in a deep depression after her son was diagnosed with autism. She retreats to where she is comfortable - film history - where she discovers the previous lost to the public, early 20th century Ontario filmmaker Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb (possibly Canada's first female filmmaker?) who disappeared. Lois throws herself into researching Whitcomb, her obsessions and her filmmaking (often one and the same), but the mysterious forces that may have been behind Whitcomb's disappearance are invading Lois's life, putting not only herself but her son and husband's lives in danger as well. This is billed as a contemporary ghost story, something which really interests me, and combined with the subject of films, this looked really appealing to me. So, we've got two great characters (Cairns and Whitcomb) with both a contemporary and historical setting (modern film researcher and 1900's fil...

 Ranger Sam Burrack is on his way south in search of a notorious gang of bandits. He's gotten a tip from Escalante - a prisoner in the Yuma Penitentiary - that the Cowboy Gang are holing up along Bad River. The mayor of the nearby village is as corrupt as the gang and if the rumors are true, they've even got a former Russian assassin among their gang, making their bank and train robberies that much more dangerous. Burrack knows he won't be able to just walk in and make arrests, he's going to have to be patient and then maybe he'll be able to pick them up one at a time. So this book wasn't quite what I was expecting and had me thinking about the "western" genre. Typically, when I choose to read a western - a classic style western - I'm looking for character, action, setting, and story, pretty much in that order. And when that order is changed up my first reaction is that I didn't like the story. Such is the case here. This is a slow-moving, thou...

 I was going to start this review with the comment that we've finally seen it all ... we've now got a Star Trek cookbook. But as I went to snag the cover image to post on my blog, I learned that we didn't finally get a Star Trek cookbook ... there have been a few of them over the years.  I wish I had been aware of them ... for the past twenty years I've been the primary cook in the house, and I think I would have tried more ST recipes for the family if I had known about them. But to this book... This is an interesting mix of cookbook and coffee-table book. While I read this from my computer, it appears to be a larger sized book with a lot of glossy photos of the various foods. You could definitely put this on your coffee table for your friends and visitors to pick up, thumb through, and create some conversation. But while it works as a coffee-table book, the primary purpose is as a cookbook and this works quite well. There are some nice variations of some traditional ...

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS CONTAINED IN THIS REVIEW  Warning, reading this book is likely to raise your hackles and ignite your ire. In 1994, convenience store clerk, 18 year old Heidi Allen, was kidnapped from the store (she was working alone at the time). Her body has never been found. When local man Gary Thibodeau heard about Heidi's disappearance from the store, he went directly to the police to see if he could be of any help.  He knew he had been in the store and purchased something from Heidi shortly before she disappeared.  Little did Thibodeau realize what would happen next. Through circumstantial evidence, a failed justice system, and law enforcement and local judicial personnel who may have a stake in getting this resolved quickly, Gary Thibodeau and his brother are charged with kidnapping and murder. Gary's brother is acquitted for lack of any real evidence.  Gary, however, with the same evidence, is found guilty and sent to prison. Twenty years later...

 Take one fleabag motel and have three cozy mystery authors bring their regular characters into that motel and you get three novellas loosely tied together. In "Diners Keepers, Losers Weepers" by Terri L. Austin, it is just before Christmas and Rose Strickland and friends are planning a visit to Graceland. Their planned accommodations fall through and they are forced to take a room in the seedy "Heartache Motel." At this motel an Elvis impersonator is found dead and some missing jewels may hold the key to solving the murder.  But can Rose solve the murder, visit Graceland (a life-long desire) and still get home before Christmas? "Quick Sketch" by Larissa Reinhart is a Cherry Tucker mystery. Cherry and her boyfriend head to Memphis to help out a cousin who's been hustled and taken for his entire life savings just before Christmas.  Cherry isn't much of a gambler herself and her boyfriend Todd loves poker but isn't meant for the big-time. Because...

It is getting harder and harder to run an illegal empire what with cameras and drones everywhere. But Move-Easy - one of London's most notorious criminals - sends 'rat runners' (youngsters who move about 'the Void' to evade detection) to do his work. Now he has sent Scope, a teenage girl who spends most of her time creating false evidence and forensically cleaning up Move-Easy's messes, and a few other rat-runners to confront an old enemy.  But Scope suspects that the target is innocent and she looks for a way to spoil the kill without crossing or attracting unwanted attention from Move-Easy. This is a short story (called a novella on Goodreads) that is part of the author's Rat Runner series. I thought it was an interesting world and I it definitely had me curious to possibly read the first Rat Runner book.  Being a short work, we're focused a bit more on the action (nicely written here), but I definitely wanted to know more about Scope - what got her wo...