​I’ve been away from thrillers for a while. On purpose. Just got tired of all the formulaic crap flooding the market. But then I liked Goodman’s work, so I figured I’d try it again, see if I can be pleasantly surprised. And lo and behold, I was!
This isn’t to say The Bones of the Story isn’t formulaic. It’s formulaic as all get out. You know that checklist that all thrillers are working off these days? Yeah, this novel checks several of the boxes very prominently.
Young people getting together and doing things that’ll sure to haunt them in the future - check.
Those same people coming together 25 years later when the bodies start to drop – check.
A remote Academia setting – check.
An inclement weather trapping them together – check.
What sets this locked campus mystery aside isn’t its originality, but its ability to work the formula well. Goodman not only writes very well, but she plots nicely, too. The story twists and turns and surprises plenty. Even though the party responsible was the one I’ve had my suspicions about all along, the motives were still a surprise. And that’s really all you can want out of a book like that – to play along with a puzzle, try to solve it, and be surprised in the end. So yeah, fun was had. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

​This one set on my TBR list for a while, and in all honesty, I maybe should have left it sitting there. But then I’ve been a fan of Lebbon for a long time and was curious what he’d been up to. Apparently, this climate disaster of a novel. Which objectively isn’t a disaster of a novel, but it does leave a lot to be desired.
Outside of occasional odd word repetition (which should have been dealt with in editorial), Lebbon is actually a very good writer. It’s what attracted me to his books in the first  place. Literary, in my books, is the best horror, and Lebbon goes for literary. Character driven, well described, all that.
What’s missing here is on the plot side of things.
Droughts had turned a significant swatch of North America into a desert. It could use some rain. And, conveniently enough, the is a Rainmaker available. Only he doesn’t do that anymore and has done all he  could to stop his daughter, who intertied his gift, from doing it too.
As it turns out, when one makes the rain, they bring down more than  just water. No idea why. None is this is really explained. The Rainmaking thing isn’t really explained either.
The author chose to focus on the actual play-by-play of the chase (two chases, technically)  that’s at the heart of this novel. It unravels in almost real time from multiple perspectives in minute detail.
Lebon is good on detail, but at some point it becomes glaringly obvious that the entire novel is just people driving and shooting in the desert. It overrides everything, even the characters. Not to mention, the multiple perspective thing is drastically overdone with a dizzying amount of switches. People, tenses, etc. It’s way too much.
It’s almost like there’s all this descriptive writing and narrative trickery to distract you from how thin the plot actually is.
So, overall, it reads easily and quickly and is technically accomplished, but doesn’t really engage. Good writing goes a long way for me, but this was likely one of my least favorite Lebbon books. Interested to see how he does on the next one, where he goes from dust to snow. Thanks Netgalley.

Nice place ... But is it haunted? Now, there’s the question, the notion that’s been beaten to death, revived, and beaten to death all over again in genre fiction. It’s a cliché that can be measured in square feet. And it comes with its own real estate listing. A couple buys a place, idyllic on the outside, nightmarish on the inside. Soon, strange things begin to occur. Who’re you gonna call?
Yes, this book even has a ghostbuster, of a sort. The main plot revolves around all those tried-and-true clichés but it is objectively a pretty decent take on them.
I’ve been reading Coppel for a while now, not so much because he’s the best thing out there, but because he’s so reliable. Mediocre but reliably so, you always get exactly what you expect with him, pretty much. This book is no exception. In fact, it’s better than most of his work. So much so, I'm going to round up my rating. While not literary per se, his writing is very nicely paced, realistic with details, and humorous in banter. 
The plot is basic enough to explain: a family moves from West to East coast, gets a picturesque property in Northern Virginia, commuting distance to DC, and starts nesting. Only their next keeps getting weirder and weirder. You think you want extra square footage? Sure, yeah, but you wouldn’t want a self-expanding place to live it, that’s just creepy. So what pushes people out? What’s enough and what’s too much? Would a metal bed with restraints in the attic do the trick? No? Well, how about an antique chamber pot, poop and all?  Fireless smoke?  Okay, okay, here’s a doozy … what about an unshakable certainty that you and your family are not alone?
Read on and find out what the family in the book does. It’s a fun, quick read. Recommended for genre fans.

I'm surprised the title made it through the PC police. It's apparently offensive, more in some forms than others. One day, it may have to be redone as Madness. Until "madness" gets done away with, too. And then what, one wonders?

I love Tim Marshall’s books.  I’ve probably said this before but  … What that man doesn’t know about geography is likely not worth knowing. Which is to say, Marshall knows a LOT about geography and has written plenty about it. So much so that he might have exhausted terrestrial matters, because in this book he takes to the skies.
Space being the final frontier, it’s a natural progression. People have spent centuries disputing and fighting over areas of Earth and eventually, they will take their squabbling into space.
As technology progresses and more money is being poured into research and development, governments and private companies are looking to increase their presence in the outer space. The current laws governing these matters and vague and outdated, so it can be either a free-for-all or yet another source of contention, but nation after nation, people are reaching for the stars, whether for scientific, political,  or purely pecuniary reasons. Okay, let’s be honest, it’s mostly the latter. From space retreats to tourism to exploiting other planets for their resources, people want to monetize space. It’s in the language itself, when the conversation turns to  colonizing space. I mean, words like colony colonialism, colonization don’t particularly carry a lot of positive associations. Yet, it’s an inextricable part of the past that echoes into the present, and one day will likely feature in the future.
The question is who gets there first and how. And that’s what this book is about, basically. And Tim Marshall does a terrific job of walking you through the current situation from contextualizing it through the past examples to playing out possible space war scenarios. Marshall writing style is intelligent, erudite, and rather funny, resulting in a nonfiction book that’s as engaging as any work of fiction, but smarter than most. It educates while entertaining and makes you look up to the sky with wonder from a more informed perspective.
A great read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.