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Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray

19/08/2015Amber 2 Comments

Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray
Series: The Diviners #2
Genre: Paranormal
Release Date: 25th August 2015
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Source: Publisher
Add it: Goodreads
Rating: four-half-stars

After a supernatural showdown with a serial killer, Evie O'Neill has outed herself as a Diviner. Now that the world knows of her ability to "read" objects, and therefore, read the past, she has become a media darling, earning the title, "America's Sweetheart Seer." But not everyone is so accepting of the Diviners' abilities...

Meanwhile, mysterious deaths have been turning up in the city, victims of an unknown sleeping sickness. Can the Diviners descend into the dreamworld and catch a killer?

I’ve been looking forward to Lair of Dreams ever since I read The Diviners nearly two years ago *sobs* This sequel to Libba Bray’s fantastic The Diviners (I love this book so much I would actually marry it if I could) isn’t as compelling as her first but it’s still an outstandingly good read and definitely one of my favourite books this year. Continue reading →

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith

15/06/2015Amber 2 Comments

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith
Series: Cormoran Strike #1
Genre: Crime
Release Date: April 18, 2013
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Source: Bought
Add it: Goodreads
Rating: three-stars

A brilliant debut mystery in a classic vein: Detective Cormoran Strike investigates a supermodel's suicide. After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, thelegendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

You may think you know detectives, but you've never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you've never seen them under an investigation like this.

It took me a long, long time to get around to reading The Cuckoo’s Calling because I wasn’t sure I wanted to read anything by JKR that wasn’t set in the HP universe. I’m a bit weird like that. But I finally got to it and I enjoyed it, thank god, otherwise I would have been pretty distraught. (Also why I’m not reading The Casual Vacancy.)

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Stolen by Kelley Armstrong

22/05/2014Amber 12 Comments

Stolen by Kelley Armstrong
Series: Women of the Otherworld #2
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Release Date: May 1, 2010
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Source: Bought
Add it: Goodreads
Rating: four-stars

Elena Michaels is a wanted woman. Ten years ago she was transformed into a werewolf by her lover. Her transformation makes her powerful. But in the wrong hands, it also makes her deadly.

And now, just as she's coming to terms with it all, a group of scientists learns of her existence. They're hunting her down, and Elena is about to run straight into their trap. But they haven't reckoned on Elena's adoptive family, her Pack, who will stop at nothing to get her back.

They haven't reckoned on Elena, either. And that's a very big mistake ...

You might remember that I was forced into reading this series. Tatum bought me Bitten for my birthday because she loved it after Lauren made her read it last year. I was hesitant about it, and I had a few issues with the book after reading, but I really enjoyed Bitten. So, obviously, I had to read Stolen so I could get more Elena.

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The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

26/03/2014Amber Leave a comment

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
Genre: Historical
Release Date: April 1, 2010
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Source: Bought
Add it: Goodreads
Rating: two-stars

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlow, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism. Kostova's masterful new novel travels from American cities to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th, from young love to last love. THE SWAN THIEVES is a story of obsession, history's losses, and the power of art to preserve human hope.

This terrible, terrible book drags on for over six hundred pages; trying to finish it was an exercise in patience while slowly feeling the will to live fall away. You would think a novel about secret histories would be intriguing but the premise of this novel is presented in such a dry way that any possibility of it being interested is murdered without ceremony before the first fifty pages. It was just so bad.

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Bitten by Kelley Armstrong

22/01/2014Amber 16 Comments

Bitten by Kelley Armstrong
Series: Women of the Otherworld #1
Genre: Paranormal
Release Date: May 1, 2010
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Source: Gift
Add it: Goodreads
Rating: four-stars

Elena Michaels didn't know that her lover Clay was a werewolf until he bit her, changing her life for ever. Betrayed and furious, she cannot accept her transformation, and wants nothing to do with her Pack - a charismatic group of fellow werewolves who say they want to help.

When a series of brutal murders threatens the Pack, Elena is forced to make an impossible choice. Abandon the only people who truly understand her new nature, or help them to save the lover who ruined her life, and who still wants her back at any cost.

I have to. I’ve been fighting it all night. I’m going to lose.

—

Bitten is one of those books that I have picked up to buy multiple times, but have always swapped it for another book that I deemed more important, or one that I was more excited for. Thanks to the new Canadian TV show, and the fact that this is Lauren’s favourite series ever, I finally managed to pick it up. Or, rather, Tatum bought it for me for my birthday so I had no other choice. It was either this, or read Code Name Verity, and I don’t want to be destroyed just yet, thank you.

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