The Butterfly Garden

The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison.

Paperback: 286 pages
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer (June 1, 2016)
ISBN-10: 9781503934719


Amazon Review:

Near an isolated mansion lies a beautiful garden.
 
In this garden grow luscious flowers, shady trees…and a collection of precious “butterflies”—young women who have been kidnapped and intricately tattooed to resemble their namesakes. Overseeing it all is the Gardener, a brutal, twisted man obsessed with capturing and preserving his lovely specimens.
 
When the garden is discovered, a survivor is brought in for questioning. FBI agents Victor Hanoverian and Brandon Eddison are tasked with piecing together one of the most stomach-churning cases of their careers. But the girl, known only as Maya, proves to be a puzzle herself.
 
As her story twists and turns, slowly shedding light on life in the Butterfly Garden, Maya reveals old grudges, new saviors, and horrific tales of a man who’d go to any length to hold beauty captive. But the more she shares, the more the agents have to wonder what she’s still hiding…
 
Like ..wow!... I can't believe someone actually came up with the idea for this book!
It was fast reading because the whole thing was like someone talking to you and you listened to every word.  The book was "horrible".. but you couldn't put it down without knowing how it would end! .. and of course I can't tell you how it ends or you might not read it.
 

Murder in Park Lane by Karen Charlton.
Paperback: 316 pages
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer (March 26, 2019)
ISBN-10: 1503955621

 

Amazon Review:

London, 1812. At a fashionable address in leafy Mayfair, a far cry from Detective Stephen Lavender’s usual haunts, a man is found dead in his room. He has been brutally stabbed, but the door is locked from the inside and the weapon is missing.

The deceased is David MacAdam, an Essex businessman with expensive tastes. As Lavender and Constable Ned Woods travel between London and Chelmsford seeking to understand MacAdam’s final hours and unearth the grisly truth, they uncover a tangled web of deceit behind his stylish facade. The unusual circumstances of MacAdam’s death are nothing compared to the shady nature of his life and it seems the house on Park Lane is at the heart of a dark conspiracy.

But when a second body turns up, everything they think they’ve learned is thrown into doubt. Can Lavender and Woods find out who’s behind these shocking murders before more lives are ruined?

This was an enjoyable read.  Short chapters , which I like, and good characters.  In fact, almost to many characters!  But I did seem to keep them straight, so that would mean anyone can!

I've read a few others of Karen Charlton, so she's not a new author to me.  The book is a "2 fer".. two for one murder investigation. I figured it out about the time the book did ! lol.

So it's onward and upward to the next mystery..............

There There

There There , a novel by Tommy Orange.

Print Length: 292 pages
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (June 5, 2018)
ASIN: B075HY1NFB




An Amazon Best Book of June 2018: What does it really mean to be an Indian/Native American/American Indian/Native? Orange's vivid debut novel allows a unique cast—ranging from teenagers to elders—to pull this question apart even as they add a modern layer of complexity: They live in the urban landscape of Oakland, California. The thrust of Orange's cross-cut storytelling is not to force his characters onto a strict plot line but to explore the varied ways of being an Indian and, more important, of feeling like an Indian. Fractured families, Oakland itself, and detachment from tradition make an Indian identity seem even more elusive to the younger characters, but it's a feeling that they unknowingly share—and that Orange wants to expose. As an amateur filmmaker says to a teen he's interviewing, "When you hear stories from people like you, you feel less alone." Isolation and longing permeate the page, lifted briefly only as the characters intersect at the Big Oakland Powwow, with chaotic results. If I have any quibble about the book (and it could be a failure of mine, really), it's that there are a few too many characters for me to comfortably hold in my head. But then again, this isn't a comfortable novel, and therein lies its power and purpose. —Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review

Tommy Orange’s “groundbreaking, extraordinary” (The New York Times) There There is the “brilliant, propulsive” (People Magazine) story of twelve unforgettable characters, Urban Indians living in Oakland, California, who converge and collide on one fateful day. It’s “the year’s most galvanizing debut novel” (Entertainment Weekly).

As we learn the reasons that each person is attending the Big Oakland Powwow—some generous, some fearful, some joyful, some violent—momentum builds toward a shocking yet inevitable conclusion that changes everything. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle’s memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will to perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss.


There There is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. It’s “masterful . . . white-hot . . . devastating” (The Washington Post) at the same time as it is fierce, funny, suspenseful, thoroughly modern, and impossible to put down. Here is a voice we have never heard—a voice full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. Tommy Orange has written a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. This is the book that everyone is talking about right now, and it’s destined to be a classic.

This book won't be for everyone.  But, it will be for people like me who have such strong feelings for Native Americans.   I read a book called, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee .  It was about much of the history of Western Native American's. How they were treated. How they were massacred. And how they tried to survive. I will forever keep that book.

Now, There There comes along.  If you can get thru the preface without crying , the book is probably not for you.  It is a book however of "stories" of some young Native American's of "today" .. how they survive.. or not.   It is the second book of Native American's that I will keep forever.

The Wolf in Winter

The Wolf in Winter by John Connolly.

Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books(October 28, 2014)
ISBN-10: 1476703183


Amazon Review

The community of Prosperous, Maine has always thrived when others have suffered. Its inhabitants are wealthy, its children’s future secure. It shuns outsiders. It guards its own. And at the heart of Prosperous lie the ruins of an ancient church, transported stone by stone from England centuries earlier by the founders of the town…

But the death of a homeless man and the disappearance of his daughter draw the haunted, lethal private investigator Charlie Parker to Prosperous. Parker is a dangerous man, driven by compassion, by rage, and by the desire for vengeance. In him the town and its protectors sense a threat graver than any they have faced in their long history, and in the comfortable, sheltered inhabitants of a small Maine town, Parker will encounter his most vicious opponents yet.

Charlie Parker has been marked to die so that Prosperous may survive.

Prosperous, and the secret that it hides beneath its ruins…

I'm not sure what to say about this book.  I did read the entire book. Nice short chapters. The Wolf in the title seemed to have little to do with the story. (at least to me)  The whole town seemed to be  a "religious cult" that also felt they needed to "feed'" their "god" with a human female now and then.

It wasn't my kind of book though I read it all wondering if I was missing something to make me more "into" the story.

There was one paragraph I found myself reading more than once.. it  dealt with a street person:

"Each day is the same, and each day you get a little older and a little more tired.  And sometimes you'd remember who you were.  You were a kid who played with other kids. You had a mother and a father.  You had a husband. You had a wife. You were loved.  You could never have imagined that you would end up this way."

It could actually mean many people, not just street people.

If you like John Connolly I think you will like this book.