Audiobook "No One To trust" by Iris Johansen

Elena Kyler was born in Colombia and raised by her rebel fighter father, formerly an American mercenary. After her father dies and her rebel comrades sell out to druglord Rico Chavez, Elena, now in her mid-20s, concocts a desperate plan to save herself and her five-year-old son Barry from Chavez, who also happens to be Barry's father. She contacts the DEA, who call in the Bondian Sean Galen, a debonair maverick. The plan is to bring Elena and Barry to the U.S., then capture Chavez when he comes for his son. After a daring air-lift escape, Sean, Elena and Barry make it to California, but an ambush by Chavez's men leaves them running for their lives. Unaccustomed to relying on the kindness of strangers, Elena finds herself forced to lean on Sean as the two zigzag across the U.S., falling in love along the way. In the current climate, the threat of drug cartels feels dated and Chavez is such an over-the-top nasty that he's downright silly. Add to that a melodramatic anti-heroine, who's also a cliched assassin-with-a-heart-of-gold seeking spiritual redemption, and a Southeastern climax that's as '80s as Miami Vice, and the sum total becomes a derivative stew.

Audiobook "Hot Blooded" by Lisa Jackson

First One Dead Body...

A prostitute lies strangled in a seedy French Quarter hotel room. Miles away, in a rambling plantation house on the sultry shores of Lake Ponchartrain, popular late-night radio host Dr. Samantha Leeds receives a threatening crank call. All in a day's work for a celebrity. Who would think to link the two?

Then Another...

A second hooker's corpse turns up. Samantha's ominous caller persists, along with a mysterious female claiming to be a woman from her past -- a woman who's been dead for years. With Detective Rick Bentz convinced that the serial killer prowling the shadowy streets of New Orleans is somebody close to Samantha, she doesn't dare trust anyone. Especially not Ty Wheeler, her seductive new neighbor who seems to know more about her than a stranger should.

...And Another

Somebody has discovered Samantha's darkest secret. Somebody is convinced that lives must be sacrificed to pay for her sins. So far, the victims have been strangers. Prostitutes. But as a cunning, cold-blooded killer grows bolder, Samantha wonders in dread if she will be the next to die...

Audiobook "Mount Vernon Love Story" by Mary Higgins Clark

In Mount Vernon Love Story -- famed suspense writer Mary Higgins Clark's long-out-of-print first novel -- the bestselling author reveals the flesh-and-blood man who became the "father of our country" in a story that is charming, insightful, and immensely entertaining.

Always a lover of history, Mary Higgins Clark wrote this extensively researched biographical novel and titled it Aspire to the Heavens, after the motto of George Washington's mother. Published in 1969, the book was more recently discovered by a Washington family descendant and reissued as Mount Vernon Love Story. Dispelling the widespread belief that although George Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis, he reserved his true love for Sally Carey Fairfax, his best friend's wife, Mary Higgins Clark describes the Washington marriage as one full of tenderness and passion, as a bond between two people who shared their lives -- even the bitter hardship of a winter in Valley Forge -- in every way. In this author's skilled hands, the history, the love, and the man come fully and dramatically alive.

Challenge card April 2011

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Audiobook "I Heard That Song Before" by Mary Higgins Clark

Mary Higgins Clark takes you deep into the mysteries of the human mind, where memories may be the most dangerous things of all.

Kay Lansing grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, daughter of the landscaper to the wealthy and powerful Carrington family. One day, accompanying her father to work, six-year-old Kay overhears a quarrel between a man and a woman that ends with the man's caustic response: "I heard that song before." That same evening, young Peter Carrington drives the nineteen-year-old daughter of neighbors home from a formal dinner dance at the Carrington estate, but she is not in her room the next morning and is never seen or heard from again.

Decades later, a cloud of suspicion hangs over Peter, not only for his neighbor's disappearance but also for the subsequent drowning death of his own pregnant wife in their swimming pool. But when Kay Lansing, now a librarian in Englewood, asks Peter's permission to hold a literary benefit cocktail party on his estate, she comes to see Peter as misunderstood and when he begins to court her, she falls in love -- and marries him. However, she soon makes a discovery that leads her to question her husband's innocence. She believes that the key to the truth lies in the identities of the man and woman whose quarrel she witnessed as a child. What she does not realize is that uncovering what lies behind these memories may cost Kay her life.

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Earth Day card - Card exchange April 2011

Audiobook "Charade" by Sandra Brown

A medical miracle gave TV personality Cat Delaney more than a new heart. It gave her a second chance at life. After leaving Hollywood to host a San Antonio TV show spotlighting children with special needs, Cat fights to gain respect as a newscaster. She meets Alex Pierce, an ex-cop turned crime writer, who regards her as a woman, not as a heart patient. When fatal "accidents" begin killing the other heart recipients, Alex may -- or may not -- be her most important ally.

With her new world turning sinister and a mysterious stalker shadowing her every move, Cat is caught in a dark maze of betrayal and secrets...and perhaps sees too late the mask hiding a killer's face.

Currently Reading: "The Thomas Berryman Number" by James Patterson - His very first book ever! !

James Patterson's first novel...


The Thomas Berryman Number begins with three terrifying murders in the South. It ends with a relentless and unforgettable manhunt in the North. In between is the riveting story of a chilling assassin, the woman he loves, and the beloved leader he is hired to kill with extreme prejudice.

Audiobook "Daddy's Little Girl" by Mary Higgins Clark

From Mary Higgins Clark, America's Bestselling "Queen of Suspense," comes a chilling story of murder that reaches the heights of suspense while exploring the depths of the criminal mind.

Ellie Cavanaugh was seven years old when her older sister was murdered near their home in New York's Westchester County. It was young Ellie's tearful testimony that put Rob Westerfield, the nineteen-year-old scion of a prominent family, in jail despite the existence of two other viable suspects.
Twenty-two years later, Westerfield, who maintains his innocence, is paroled. Determined to thwart his attempts to pin the crime on another, Ellie, an investigative reporter for an Atlanta newspaper, returns home and starts writing a book that will conclusively prove Westerfield's guilt. As she delves deeper into her research, however, she uncovers horrifying facts that shed new light on her sister's murder. With each discovery she comes closer to a confrontation with a desperate killer.

Currently Reading; "French Toast: An American in Paris Celebrates the Maddening Mysteries of the French" by Harriet Welty Rochefort

FFrom Publishers Weekly

During the 1970s, Rochefort moved from Shenandoah, Iowa, to Paris, where she met and married her husband, Philippe. Here, she offers her reflections on what it's like to be the wife of a Frenchman and the mother of two French-American children. Although presented with a confidence that comes with long experience, the observations shared (Rochefort's but also those of French and fellow expatriate friends) are hardly illuminating. Rochefort relies on her experiences with French in-laws and friends to conclude that the French, unlike their American counterparts, would rather talk about sex than money, are quarrelsome and require their children to work hard in school. She finds that French wives are wonderful cooks who allow their husbands to dominate the conversation at parties and are always responsible for packing their husbands' suitcases. French husbands, according to Rochefort, really do shower less than American men but are infinitely more relaxed and adept at flirtation and seduction. (She comments that a single woman can live safely in France because French men aren't as oppressively aggressive as American men). In sum, her memoir, though competently written, trades in what appear to be old stereotypes, which, even if true, bring nothing new to our understanding of the French.

FFrom Library Journal

Did you know that in Paris it is quite normal to bang the cars in front and back of you as you maneuver in and out of a parking place? Or that you should fold and not cut the lettuce in your salad and that even fruit is eaten with a knife and fork? Fortunately, for those unacquainted with the finer points of French etiquette, Rochefort's book bridges the culture gap admirably. The Iowa-born author is a freelance journalist married to a Frenchman and has lived in France for over 20 years. Drawing on personal experience, she records her observations about Frenchwomen; French attitudes to food, sex, love, marriage, and money; the French educational system; and the dynamics of living in Paris. Some stereotypes are reinforced, but this chatty, informative book is great fun to read and over too soon.

Audiobook "Toys" by James Patterson and Neil McMahon

James Bond and Jason Bourne have just been topped! A battle for the world is set into unstoppable motion and Hays Baker is the only one who can save it.
Hays Baker and his wife Lizbeth possess super-human strength, extraordinary intelligence, stunning looks, a sex life to die for, and two beautiful children. Of course they do—they're Elites, endowed at birth with the very best that the world can offer. The only problem in their perfect world: humans and their toys!
The one with the most toys—dies
The top operative for the Agency of Change, Hays has just won the fiercest battle of his career. He has been praised by the President, and is a national hero. But before he can savor his triumph, he receives an unbelievable shock that overturns everything he thought was true. Suddenly Hays is on the other side of the gun, forced to leave his perfect family and fight for his life.
Now a hunted fugitive, Hays is thrown into a life he never dreamed possible—fighting to save humans everywhere from extinction. He enlists all of his training to uncover the truth that will save millions of lives—maybe even his own. James Patterson's Toys is a thriller on a hyper plane—with a hero who rivals both James Bond and Jason Bourne.

Audiobook "On the street where you live" by Mary Higgins Clark

In the gripping new novel from the Queen of Suspense, a woman is haunted by two grisly murders separated by more than a century, yet somehow, inextricably linked...

Following a nasty divorce and the trauma of being stalked, criminal defense attorney Emily Graham leaves Albany to work in Manhattan. Craving roots, she buys her ancestral home, a Victorian house in the seaside resort town of Spring Lake, New Jersey. Her family sold the house in 1892, after one of Emily's forebears, Madeline Shapley, then a young girl, disappeared.

As the house is renovated and a pool dug, a skeleton is found and identified as Martha Lawrence, a young Spring Lake woman who vanished several years ago. Within her hand is the Wnger bone of another woman, with a ring -- a Shapley family heirloom -- still on it. Determined to Wnd the connection between the two murders, Emily becomes a threat to a seductive killer...who chooses her as the next victim.

Birthday card for Ellen

Audiobook "Nothing to Lose" by Lee Child

Two small towns in the middle of nowhere Colorado: Hope and Despair. Between them, nothing but twelve miles of empty road. Jack Reacher can't find a ride, so he walks. All he wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets are four hostile locals, a vagrancy charge and an order to move on.

They're picking on the wrong guy.

Reacher is a hard man. No job, no address, no baggage. Nothing at all, except hardheaded curiosity. What are the secrets that Despair seems so desperate to hide?

With just one ally—a mysterious woman cop from Hope—and many enemies, Reacher goes up against a whole town, hunting the rich man at its core, cracking open his terrifying agenda, asking the question: Who has the edge—a man with everything to gain, or a man with nothing to lose?

Currently Reading "Bowling Across America" by Mike Walsh

Audiobook "Final Scream" by Lisa Jackson

The sound every killer waits for.

When there’s no escape from a cold-blooded killer, scream, scream as loud as you can…or it might be the last sound you ever make . . . .

As white-hot flames sear the dark night, a killer waits in the trees, watching the mill burn, listening for the screams—the only proof that justice has finally begun for the sins of long-ago.

For journalist Cassidy Buchanan, this inferno is a living nightmare: a reminder of the horrible, mysterious fire that destroyed her wealthy family seventeen years ago—and of Brig McKenzie, the handsome hellraiser accused of setting the blaze.

That tragic crime has never been solved, and already the whispers have begun in Prosperity, Oregon: Another fire, more deaths, and one common denominator—Cassidy herself.

Cassidy came home to Prosperity to put the past behind her, but it seems the past isn’t finished with Cassidy. Someone doesn’t want her to uncover the chilling truth…someone who has killed before and will kill again…a cold-blooded psychopath who is only waiting to hear her….FINAL SCREAM.

(previously published as INTIMACIES)

"Happy Spring" Card Exchange March 2011

March 2011 Challenge #2