Shea's Bookshelf

The Guest List by Lucy Foley is her fifth standalone novel and could be best categorized as the little sibling Caper Mystery novel that never thought it was good enough and so it had do everything better. Mystery told by the criminal’s POV? How about five POVs where you don’t know who to trust? Red herrings? How about not know who the victim is until the end?

Long Bright River by Liz Moore is a Detective Mystery Novel that unravels in alternating POVS: Then and Now. You see our detective as a young girl, broken and needing love. You see her hardened and sure of herself, making her mark on the world. You see her sister sure of herself, bright and alive. And you see her strung out and hungry, bruised by the world. You see their upbringing, their neighborhood, the cops and the teachers who prowl the streets. You’re looking for who’s to blame, but when society’s broken, who can be held responsible?...

Before I learned about Disney, there were adventures with Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Woods. I didn’t grow up with a TV, but I had many different versions of the books—short companion novels, pop-up books, longer chapter books. I even had multiple stuffed animals—all Pooh—and even one with a honeypot that sang his famous song. Looking back, I can’t remember what exactly it was that delighted me so…

A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd is a Cozy Mystery novel. The title is the first intrigue. Who is bound to keep a promise after the person is dead? The message is the second intrigue. “Tell Jonathan I lied. I did it for Mother’s sake. But it has to be set right.”…

How Long 'til Black Future Month? is divided into 22 short stories that read like a full-length novel. You hear science fiction and fantasy and you think you know what you’re about to read, but Jemisin has you board a spaceship and then as you do that first look at the little blue planet you find that you don’t recognize anything at all. It’s disconcerting and freeing and you freefall back to earth hoping to understand why you’re feeling so seen and so vulnerable at the same damn time…

You know me, I’m a ‘find my way into a random, used bookstore and accidentally spend $300 on books’ kind of woman. I’m a ‘just one more chapter at midnight’ kind of woman. My best spent day is on the couch reading a book cover to cover. But there are a few authors where I will buy all of their works and Alka Joshi is now one of them. The Secret Keeper of Jaipur follows Malik, now a young adult in his young twenties…and uses her story-telling prowess to intensify the drama with everything from a collapsing building to gold-smuggling sheep…

The year is 1634. The stage is the Saardam, a ship sailing on the Indian Ocean, leaving Batavia (or what is now Jakarta, Indonesia) and heading for Amsterdam, Netherlands. The cast is a literal motley crew of dignitaries, officers, and crew members who not only have to handle the seas but are also faced with transporting a prisoner and two mysterious pieces of cargo. And that was before the devil presented itself…

The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club…

From the first page, Läckberg isolates you in this tiny, frozen town, swirling you into the mystery of why Alex, the bright light of Fjällbacka, would kill herself. The Ice Princess by Camilla Läckberg is a Detective Mystery Novel. It is the first novel in her Erica Falck and Patrik Hedström 10-book series, set in her hometown of Fjällbacka…

I love reading. I will stumble upon the used bookstore in whatever town I’m in. My body is covered in tattoos based on books. I delight in the act of reading and the intrigue of the plot as much as I enjoy the craft of the author in telling his story. In Daniel Tammet’s Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing, I seem to have found a bibliophile and logophile in similar reverence…

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler is a Detective Mystery Novel…Chandler’s writing style feels like the 1930s and gives you images of black and white noir films. This story seems to have a simple plot—detective gets hired to stop his client from being black-mailed—that resolves in the middle of the story. But suddenly you’re confronted with a labyrinth of Daedalus proportions…

Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl was one of my favorite books as a kid, and though I'm not one to reread books, I've read this one dozens of times. First, you've got an author who is the master of craft. He feels like just another kid and so you want to listen to what he's got to say. He uses language that is familiar to us, doesn't demean us, but rather like he's inviting us in on his adventures. Second…