49. The Ascent by Allison Buccola

listened on Audible (purchased)

352 pgs.

2025
Adult mystery
Finished 11/3/25
Goodreads rating:  3.90
My rating: 4
Setting: Contemporary Philadelphia, with flasbacks both 10 and 20 years ago

My comments: This was a good mystery, and at one point I was definitely wondering if Lee was an untrustworthy narrator because some of her reasoning didn't seem...well...reasonable.  This story definitely proves that some people are not at all what they seem.  I was left a bit upset that there was no resolution about why she was abandoned and how, that was the biggest mystery for me.  Stories that include insider's looks at a cult always interest me.

Goodreads synopsis:  What would you do if the past showed up on your doorstep? A woman who grew up in a cult must decide if she can trust the stranger claiming to have answers to the dark mysteries of her childhood.

Twenty years ago, the members of a reclusive commune outside Philadelphia vanished without a trace. The mystery of their disappearance has never been solved. No sightings of the members were ever verified, and no bodies ever found. But the group did leave one thing a twelve-year-old girl wandering alone on the side of the road in search of her lost family.

In the years since that morning, Lee Burton has tried to put the pain of her past behind her. She has built a new identity for herself, with a doting husband and seven-month-old daughter, Lucy. No one in her life now knows about her connection to “the cult that went missing,” not even her husband. But new motherhood is proving a bigger challenge than she anticipated. She doesn't want to let Lucy out of her sight even for a moment. She can't return to work. She's not sleeping, and she's starting to have paranoid thoughts of Lucy being harmed.  

Then a stranger shows up on her doorstep, offering to finally answer all of Lee’s questions about her past—if she could only trust that the woman is who she says she is. As she digs deeper into the woman's history, the safe, stable life that Lee has constructed for herself threatens to shatter. In The Ascent, Allison Buccola has crafted a nerve-rattling thriller about motherhood, identity, and the truths we think we know about our families.

27. Return to Sender by Craig Johnson

#21 Walt Longmire

listened on Libby - read by George Guidall

335 pgs.

2025
Adult mystery
Finished 6/19/25
Goodreads rating: 4.32
My rating: 4
Setting: contemporary Montana "red desert"

My comments: So many obstacles to overcome, but good ole Walt stays calm and figures out how to outsmart the bad guys over and over again.

Goodreads synopsis:  When Blair McGowan, the mail person with the longest postal route in the country of over three hundred mile a day, goes missing the question becomes—where do you look for her? The Postal Inspector for the State of Wyoming elicits Sheriff Longmire to mount an investigation into her disappearance and Walt does everything but mail it in; posing as a letter-carrier himself, the good sheriff follows her trail and finds himself enveloped in the intrigue of an otherworldly cult.

Packed to the brim with twists and turns, the 21st novel in the New York Times bestselling Longmire series pushes Walt to his absolute limits, forcing him to wrestle with the impossible What good are your morals, if you’re marked for the dead letter office?

12. The Taken Ones by Jess Lourey

#1 Steinbeck & Reed

listened on Audible
339 pgs.
2023
Adult Murder Mystery

Finished 2/7/2024
Goodreads rating: 4.27
My rating: 4.5
Setting: contemporary Minnesota

My comments: Van Reed is a cold case agent for the MBsomething-or-other - I think the same agency that Virgil Flowers works for.  Her horrible upbringing in a cult has left her bruised with psychic nightmares about really bad people.  The characters in this book certainly dip into every possible type.... including a LOT of stupid, mean cops!  Well written. Liked it a lot.

Goodreads synopsis:  Two girls vanished. A woman buried alive. Between two crimes—decades of secrets yet to be unearthed.

Summer 1980: With no fear of a local superstition, three girls go into a Minnesota wood. Only one comes out. Dead silent. Memory gone. No trace of her friends. The mystery of the Taken Ones captures the nation.

Summer 2022: Cold case detective Van Reed and forensic scientist Harry Steinbeck are assigned a disturbing homicide—a woman buried alive, clutching a heart charm necklace belonging to one of the vanished girls. Van follows her gut. Harry trusts in facts. Their common ground is the need to catch a killer before he kills again. They have something else in common: each has ties to the original case in ways they’re reluctant to share.

As Van and Harry connect the crimes of the past and the present, Van struggles with memories of her own nightmarish childhood—and the fear that uncovering the truth of the Taken Ones will lead her down a path from which she, too, may never return.

89. The Line Between by Tosca Lee

Listened to the audio via CHIRP
read by Cassandra Campbell
Unabridged audio (10:07)
2019, Howard Books
389 pgs.
Adult Dystopia
Finished 9/16/19
Goodreads rating:  4.22 - 1373 ratings
My rating:  5
Setting: Dystopian US/Colorado mid-country area, some on-the-road

First line/s: "The farmer moved into the woods looking for his pigs."

My comments:  This contemporary dystopian thriller set in a cult enclave and the area between Iowa and Colorado is an excellent thriller with the range of unsettling events between a religious cult and the end of the world being brought about by a deadly flue - quick death with no cure.  The protagonist, Wynter, was one pretty cool, strong, smart female.  Couldn't put it down.
     The sequel to this book, which comes out at the end of thew week, believe it or not, sounds like another really tnese ride.  I think I'm gonna have to wait awhile to get over this one before I read that one!

Goodreads synopsis:  In this frighteningly believable thriller from New York Times bestselling author Tosca Lee, an extinct disease re-emerges from the melting Alaskan permafrost to cause madness in its victims. For recent apocalyptic cult escapee Wynter Roth, it’s the end she’d always been told was coming.
          When Wynter Roth is turned out of New Earth, a self-contained doomsday cult on the American prairie, she emerges into a world poised on the brink of madness as a mysterious outbreak of rapid early onset dementia spreads across the nation.
          As Wynter struggles to start over in a world she’s been taught to regard as evil, she finds herself face-to-face with the apocalypse she’s feared all her life—until the night her sister shows up at her doorstep with a set of medical samples. That night, Wynter learns there’s something far more sinister at play and that these samples are key to understanding the disease.
         Now, as the power grid fails and the nation descends into chaos, Wynter must find a way to get the samples to a lab in Colorado. Uncertain who to trust, she takes up with former military man Chase Miller, who has his own reasons for wanting to get close to the samples in her possession, and to Wynter herself.
          Filled with action, conspiracy, romance, and questions of whom—and what—to believe, THE LINE BETWEEN is a high-octane story of survival and love in a world on the brink of madness.

28. The Body Counter by Anne Frasier

#2 Jude Fontaine
listened on Audible
Read by Emily Sutton-Smith
Unabridged audio (8:31)
2018, Thomas & Mercer
297 pgs.
Adult Murder Mystery
Finished 3/17/19
Goodreads rating:  4.36 - 2107 ratings
My rating:4.5
Setting:  contemporary Minneapolis/St. Paul

First line/s:  "The woman in the apartment upstairs was screaming again."

My comments:  I remembered quite a bit about the first novel as I listened to this one, even though I read it quite a bit ago.  Jude Fontaine is difficult to forget, the corrupt governor's daughter, up-and-coming detective in the Minneapolis police who had been abducted and held captive in a dark cell for three years.  Discovering her father  and brother too, I think) was cruel and corrupt, she had killed him/them in the line of duty.  That was book number one.  In this book she is pitted against a serial killer who is following the Fibonacci sequence in his bloody slaughters.  Very bloody....  Fascinating story - one of those truly gritty, horrifying serial killer tomes.  Jude Fontaine is fascinating, as is her partner, Uriah Ashby.  Looking forward to number three.
     An added note to remember before reading number three and forgetting all the nitty-gritty of this one:  at the very end we discover that Elliot Kaplan, her downstairs neighbor and photo-journalist "friend" - and even suspect at one time for the murders - is actually her illegitimate brother.  She does not know.  Apparently her father had had an affair with or raped Elliot's mother.  Alsto, the relationship between Jude and Uriah is getting a little bit interesting in a vague way.  (Elliot is just out of the hospital.  He had been locked into "her" cell for three days and left for dead, but she realized it just as they were starting to demolish the house, which she had purchased.)

Goodreads synopsis:  From a New York Times bestselling author comes the chilling follow-up to the Thriller Award winner The Body Reader.       
          Months after discovering the mastermind behind her own kidnapping, Detective Jude Fontaine is dealing with the past the only way she knows how: by returning to every dark corner of it. But it’s a new, escalating series of mass slayings that has become her latest obsession at Homicide.      
          At first, Jude and her partner, Detective Uriah Ashby, can see no pattern to the seemingly random methods, the crime scenes, or the victims—until they’re approached by a brilliantly compulsive math professor. He believes that the madman’s next move is not incalculable; in fact, it’s all part of a sequential and ingenious numerical riddle. His theory is adding up. The body count is rising.
          But when the latest victim is found in Jude’s apartment, the puzzle comes with a personal twist that’s going to test the breaking point of her already-fragile state of mind. For all she knows, her number may be up.

22. My Life With the Liars - Caela Carter

Borrowed the book from the Tucson Library
2016, Harper
285 pgs.
Middle grade CRF
Finished 4-4-16
Goodreads rating:  4.13
My rating: 5
Setting: Contemporary Anywhere, USA

First line/s:  "It is just like Father Prophet said it would be.  the dark is everywhere, inky black above and below and to either side, squishing me back into the seat where the strap across my shoulders holds me, trapped."

My comments:  This was a WOW book for me, at the end.  As an adult.  I'm not sure how kids will relate to it.  But I sure would like to find out!

Goodreads synopsis:  Perfect for fans of Mockingbird and Counting by 7s, Caela Carter’s middle grade debut is a story of one girl’s strength and courage as she decides who she is and what she will believe in.
          Behind the white-washed walls of the compound, life was simple. Follow the rules, “live in the Light,” and all would be well. Zylynn was excited to turn thirteen and begin the work of bringing others into the light, to save them from the liars and the darkness of the outside world. But when she is taken away by a man who claims to be her father, Zylynn is confused and desperate to return to her home.
          Zylynn resists her new life—until she finds small comforts like shampoo, the color pink, and strawberries. But as her thirteenth birthday approaches, Zylynn must make a difficult decision—to stay with the enemy or find her way back to the light. And neither may be what it seems.

39. The Rule of Won - Stefan Petrucha

Published 2008
Walker & Co.
227 pages
For: Middle School up
Rating: 5

This is a read-in-one-long-sitting book. Once begun, you have to find out where it's going.

Caleb Dunne is a self-proclaimed slacker, perhaps a sophomore or junior in high school. His perky girlfriend, Vicky, is running for student body president, and not happy with his uncaring attitude. So she invites him to a "Crave", a meeting of students who have read The Book of One. The Crave is led by Ethan Skinson, new to the school, and an "expert" on the teachings of the book. And what are those teachings? That the universe only gives you what you ask for. Good or bad.

So, as a unit, the kids decide to come up with a crave and chant for it over and over, together and alone. When the school gets funding, everyone thinks it's because of them. And when they win a basketball game (the NEVER win), they think it's because of all the chanting and belief in The Book of One. But when Caleb, who is still not sure he believes in any of this, challenges Ethan to let them vote on the next crave, the corner turns. They end up choosing the wish that everyone passes the upcoming Algebra test. It happens - but because the algebra teacher is in a bad car accident. Things start getting darker and darker and more and more out of control. And although Caleb is a slacker, he is wise and unafraid and proceeds with honor and humor.

Humor. There's lots of it in this book. I enjoyed it greatly. There's a prologue that I wish I'd gone back to once or twice during my reading, it gives some interesting foreshadowing, and I wonder how it would have changed my thinking as the reading progressed.

Thought-provoking. Gang mentality. Following blindly. Having a mind of your own. Yippee, Caleb. You're very endearing. I'd love to know what you're doing now.

While hunting for a decent bookcover to add to this, I came across a pretty cool website for kid's book reviews. And it has a
great, much more detailed review.