Review: The Launch Party - Lauren Forry - June 2023 It seems that the way back into reading—and out of a slump—for me is thrillers, as yesterday I managed to read two books! The Launch Party was one that had been sitting on my bookshelf, and it immediately caught my attention. It’s a locked-room-style mystery set in an unexpected location: the moon. Ten people are given the opportunity of a lifetime—to experience Hotel Artemis, a luxury hotel built on the moon by the Apollo Group. The group of guests is flown up for what’s meant to be a two-week, once-in-a-lifetime stay. But what starts out as an exciting adventure quickly turns sinister. When they arrive, the hotel is completely empty—no staff, no explanations—and the guests are now stranded on the moon. Things take a deadly turn when one of the ten is found murdered, and suspicion immediately falls on another guest. A detective teams up with a journalist to uncover who’s responsible and why. Just when they think they’ve identified...

Review: Seven Minutes Later / The Cage - Bonnie Kistler - February 2022 As I started reading this book, it sounded familiar and the character's name Shay Lambert was burned in my memory bank and that's when I did some book research and discovered it had also been titled The Cage and I had tried to read it in September 2022 , but at the time I couldn't push through and it ended up being a DNF. This time, I did manage to finish it but I did see why at the time , I had rated it DNF as it was a slow-paced story and does end up going off in tangents and strange directions. The book starts off with two women in an elevator and the lights go out and the elevator stops. Seven Minutes later, the lights come on and the elevator doors open. Everyone gasps as one of the women are dead with her brains blown out. Shay tells the police how Claudine had a panic attack and took the gun out of her bag and they wrestled with the gun when it went off and killed Claudine. This is the story tha...

  Review: Clean - Alia Trabucco Zeran - Translated by Sophie Hughes - October 2024 This particular book isn't one I normally would have gone for but something in the blurb when it was offered as an ARC from HarperCollins NZ caught my attention and so I was like I am going to give it a go. The cover isn't much and again this is one of those books I can tell you that you shouldn't judge by the cover, but then again these are the sort of covers that come with the whole "literary fiction" genre. The book starts with us meeting Estella who is a maid for a wealthy family and we learn that the daughter has died when the daughter died, the family fell apart and so she speaks behind the locked door and tells us the story of her career and how she met a family, moved in with them and helped raise their daughter. Estella felt like a part of the family but in parts, you can see that the line between part of the family and an employee is often blurred. As this is a literary ...