Mistletoe Promise

Richard Paul Evan is the best selling author of "The Christmas Box."

     Mistletoe Promise is a quick and easy read, that's a beautiful story.  What some might think is a love story between 2 people but then it takes an unexpected turn and becomes much more.

    Two main characters, Elise and Nicholas each have a painful past that leaves them quilt ridden.  Through each other they learn to live and love again and do the hardest thing of all; Forgive Themselves.

Revival by Stephen King

One of the things I’ve always liked about Stephen King novels, is the suspension of disbelief they inevitably engender.  Pragmatic by nature, I’m the last one to throw spilled salt, or avoid cracks on the sidewalk. However, give me five hundred pages of a good King novel and I’m turning on the hallway lights, checking door locks, and just generally feeling a little creeped out (in the most pleasant of ways I assure you).  The power his books have over me lies, in large part, with his ability to create such fully-fleshed characters, women and men I can well imagine I have met, in line at the BMV, on a crowded bus, or at an extended family reunion.  Flawed, but decent folk, too much like the rest of us for me not to be invested in their well-being.  King’s newest novel, proves to be no exception to this.  The novel’s main character, Jamie Morton, opens the novel with a nostalgic look-back into his childhood, to a time when the catalyst to alluded horrors, his “fifth business” first entered his life.  The Reverend Charles Jacob and his charming family arrive in the small Maine town of Harlow in 1962, where they become fatefully intertwined with the Morton family, until a horrific tragedy drives them apart.  Jamie and Charles meet again, several times over the ensuing decades, with lasting effects on Jamie, both good and ill. In his fifties, Jamie, at last apprehending that the long-sought realization of Charlie’s obsession (the source and application of De Vermis, a “secret” electricity) may be more terrifying than miraculous.  The last 200 pages of this novel virtually read themselves.  A cross between a Mary Shelley gothic novel and a Bill Bryson memoir, Revival, is sure to go down as yet another King classic.

Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

     For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident.  Refusing to believe she was abandoned, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice's old journals. Alice was a scientist who studied grief among elephants, she wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother's whereabouts.
     Jenna lists two unlikely allies in her quest: Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to fame finding missing persons, only to later doubt her gifts, and Virgil Stanhope, the jaded private detective who'd originally investigated  Alice's case along with the strange, possibly linked death of one of her colleagues.  The three work together to uncover what happened to Alice, they realize that in asking hard questions, they'll have to face even harder answers.
     Jodi Picoult has written a new novel with elephant lore that explores the animals’ behavior when faced with death and grief, and combines a poignant tale of human loss with a perplexing crime story that delivers a powerhouse ending.
     With plenty of twists and a surprising ending, a book unlike anything the author has ever written before. 

The Tilted World

In 'The Tilted World' husband and wife authors Tom Franklin's (Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter) and Beth Ann Fennelly's (Great With Child) collaboration creates a story that swirls in the murky waters of moonshining and murder. It's 1927 in Hobnob, Mississippi, during the Great Flood, and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover has sent federal revenue agents, Ted Ingersoll and Ham Johnson, to investigate the disappearance of two prohibition agents. On the way, Ingersoll and Ham come across a baby who is the sole survivor of a country-store robbery gone awry. Ingersoll, who is an orphan himself, can’t bring himself to leave the baby with a local agency. Instead he seeks out Dixie Clay, a 22-year-old mother who has recently buried her only child. Dixie Clay, along with her womanizing and abusive husband Jesses Holliver, is a bootlegger. To add to the plot, the Hollivers are possibly the last to have seen the missing revenuers. As the Mississippi waters begin to swell well beyond the banks, Dixie Clay and other residents grab what meager belongings they have and escape the eminent disaster and the adventures takes off.

The author’s voices are harmonious and the language poetic. Fennelly and Franklin convincingly describe a time and place where the landscape (as well as lives) was wildly off-kilter.