Last Seen in Havana Teresa Dovalpage (A Havana Mystery, #4) Publication date: February 6th 2024 Genres: Adult, Mystery, Thriller A Cuban American woman searches for her long-lost mother and fights to restore a beautiful but crumbling Art Deco home in the heart of Havana in this moving, immersive new mystery, perfect for fans of Of Women and Salt . Newly widowed baker Mercedes Spivey flies from Miami to her native Cuba in 2019 to care for her ailing paternal grandmother. Mercedes’s life has been shaped by loss, beginning with the mysterious unsolved disappearance of her mother when Mercedes was a little girl. Returning to Cuba revives Mercedes’s hopes of finding her mother as she attempts to piece together the few scraps of information she has. Could her mother still be alive? Thirty-three years earlier, in 1986, an American college student with endless political optimism falls deliriously in love with a handsome Cuban soldier while on a spontaneous visit to the island. She d...

Review: The Hiking Trip - Jenny Blackhurst - January 2023 This particular book caught my attention with the tagline first as it is the same tagline for the TV series "Pretty Little Liars". It also had a great premise for the book. The book starts with Laura hearing on the radio that bones have been found in the National Park and has been rumoured that they belong to a traveller that went missing twenty-five years ago aka Seraphina. This news takes Laura back twenty-five years when she went travelling herself on the hiking trail. The book then goes back twenty-five years and introduces us to Maisie - a young fresh-faced girl who decided on a whim to hike a trail and along the way met some interesting people including Sera and Rick as well as Mitchell who is now due to her testimony spending his life in prison for a murder he didn't commit. When Laura learns that Mitch has also been released from prison, she starts to worry especially when someone is coming after her fami...

Review: The Ninth Month - James Patterson and Richard DiLallo - August 2022   As usual, I like to give the author writing with James Patterson a go, some are hits and others are misses. The Ninth Month was one of those hits. The book starts with introducing us to Emily who is an alcoholic and druggie, she also has no one really as her parents were always mainly focused on themselves and paraded Emily around when they needed a child or an accessory. They had their faults, but what worked for Emily was they were really wealthy and always provided financially for her. One day, she ends up in the hospital after a bad overdose and meets Beth - one of the nurses. The two become fast friends especially when they both learn that they are pregnant at the same time. For Emily, this is her first child but for Beth - it is her fourth.  As Emily hasn't been the most responsible with her body, Beth is there as her support person throughout the pregnancy. The book then flips to the present...