Pretty Baby

 Read over 5 days.

byMary Kubica

A chance encounter

She sees the teenage girl on the train platform, standing in the pouring rain, clutching an infant in her arms. She boards a train and is whisked away. But she can’t get the girl out of her head…

An act of kindness

Heidi has always been charitable but her family are horrified when she returns home with a young woman named Willow and her baby in tow. Dishevelled and homeless, this girl could be a criminal – or worse. But despite the family’s objections, Heidi offers them refuge.

A tangled web of lies

As Willow begins to get back on her feet, disturbing clues into her past starts to emerge. Now Heidi must question if her motives for helping the stranger are unselfish or rooted in her own failures.

Praise for Pretty Baby
‘Pretty Baby is almost hypnotic and anything but predictable…This book will give insomniacs a compelling reason to sit up all night.’ – Kirkus

My Thoughts:

This was a good read. The sort that grabs you on the first page and doesn’t let go until the last full stop. A chance encounter leads to an act of kindness which eventually descends into a web of lies. It is a story that is told by three(unreliable?) narrators. Chris husband to Heidi and Willow a homeless girl who Heidi initially looks kindly upon. But all is not as it seems. A simple story of a kindness to your fellow human soon becomes something completely different. The frailties, secrets and lies of the three narrators web a brilliant tale of underlying menace. The writing is top notch and the chapters short which makes you want to read on and never get bored. The characters are well drawn and rounded. My first read from Mary Kubica and on this example wont be my last. I recommend this book to all.     Mary Kubica Goodreads Author Website http://www.marykubica.com/ Twitter MaryKubica Member Since March 2013 URL https://www.goodreads.com/Mary_Kubica edit data Mary Kubica is the bestselling author of THE GOOD GIRL (2014) and PRETTY BABY (2015). She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in History and American Literature. Mary lives outside of Chicago with her husband and two children and enjoys photography, gardening and caring for the animals at a local shelter.

Bloody Scotland

I’m chuffed to have won tickets for the gala opening of Bloody Scotland 

Things I Couldn’t Tell My Mother

 

bySue Johnston

There was a lot that we kept from my mother. My dad would say to me as a teenager “Don’t tell your mother.” We couldn’t face the disapproval.

Sue Johnston always seemed to be disappointing her mother. As a girl she never stayed clean and tidy like her cousins. As she grew older, she spent all her piano lesson money on drinks for her mates down at the pub, and when she discovered The Cavern she was never at home. The final straw was when Sue left her steady job at a St. Helen’s factory to try her hand at that unsteadiest of jobs: acting.

Yet when Sue was bringing up her own child alone, her mother was always there to help. And playing her much-loved characters Sheila Grant in Waking the Dead and Barbara in The Royle Family– although her mum wouldn’t say she was proud as such, she certainly seemed to approve. And in her mother’s final months, it was Sue she needed by her side.

The relationship with your mother is perhaps the most precious and fraught of any woman’s life. When she began writing, Sue set out to record ‘all the big things, and all the small things. Everything I wanted to tell my mother but felt I never could’. The result is a warm, poignant and often very funny memoir by one of Britain’s favourite actresses.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          My thoughts and review:

I picked this book up on holiday. I have known Sue as an actress for a few years. Appearing in things like Brookside, Waking the Dead and Medics amongst other things. She is an actress of vast range. Tv Soap Operas, Crime shows and comedy etc. I enjoyed this book immensely. It’s full of humour, pathos and stories about well known people in the same business as Sue. But the part of the narrative that appealed to me was her relationship with her parents and their relationship with each other. Though Sue has a large extended family I feel that being an only child has given her the drive and determination to be a success in her chosen profession. This was a good read and I would recommend it. A worthy 4 stars.

Quicksand

byMalin Persson Giolito

There could be two sides to Maja Norberg that shift silently like quicksand: the question is, which one do you believe?

Is Maja a normal 18-year-old, the poster girl next door, popular and excelling at her schoolwork, caught in the middle of a terrible tragedy? Or, is she the most reviled teenager in the country?

Either way, everyone knows her name. She has spent nine excruciating months in jail, awaiting trial for a mass murder that killed her boyfriend and her best friend, and now the time has come for her to enter the courtroom. What did she do? Or is it what she didn’t do that brought her here?

Is Maja a cold-blooded murderer or is she just a girl who has lost her way and, as a consequence, now lost the ones she loved?

My thoughts and review.

This was my first read by this author. A great read that keeps the reader turning the pages. It is the story of a shooting at a Norwegian high school and the aftermath and fall out that results. Surviving the shooting, Maja Norberg, finds herself on trial as one of the perpetrators of the shooting. The story is told in a series of flashbacks, present time trial and the doubts in Moja’s own mind. All of Moja’s class mates have their own story and skeletons in their own cupboards. A story not only of a crime and trial but the resultant ramifications on the wider society. Moja, Sebastian, Samir and Amanda ar all well drawn characters and have integral parts in the story. But I found the most loathsome character is Claes, Sebastian’s father. A well told tale that draws the reader in and does not let them go. Thanks to my friend Ewa Sherman for this book and reomendation. Grab a copy folks! ABOUT MALIN PERSSON GIOLITO Malin Persson Giolito was born in Stockholm in 1969, and grew up in Djursholm. She has worked as a lawyer for the biggest law firm in the Nordic region and as an official for the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. Persson Giolito has published three previous novels. Her latest novel, Quicksand (Störst av allt), was published by Wahlström & Widstrand in June 2016 and has been sold to 24 countries and was awarded the Best Crime Novel of the Year Award 2016, Sweden’s official suspense literature award, which is given by the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy. She lives in Brussels together with her husband and their three daughters