107. Find Me by Ann Frasier

#1 Inland Empire

listened on Audible
narrated by Erin Bennett

Unabridged audio (9:16)
2020
282 pgs.
Genre/Level
Finished 7/21/2020
Goodreads rating: 4.14 - 21,189 ratings
My rating: 4.5
Setting: Palm Springs/Joshua Tree/29 Palms/High  Desert of southern California

First line/s:  "It was dark by the time Cathy Baker took off along the Southern California trail just outside the town of Redlands."

My comments: Anne Frasier is becoming one of my favorite authors in the mystery/murder mystery genre.  Always plenty to anticipate, never a dull moment; believable characters, and lots of twists and turns.  Psychopaths and sociopaths -- imagine being born into a family with these characteristices...and imagine living your whole life knowing that, as a kid, your much-adored father uses you as bait to reel in innocent young women to their deaths.  How do you live with that?  Anne Frasier takes you into the minds of her characters to allow you to hear their thoughts and feel their pain.  Couldn't put it down  Looks like there might be more in the series, too, yippee!

Goodreads synopsis:   A bone-chilling family history is unearthed in a heart-stopping thriller by New York Times bestselling author Anne Frasier.

          Convicted serial killer Benjamin Fisher has finally offered to lead San Bernardino detective Daniel Ellis to the isolated graves of his victims. One catch: he’ll only do it if FBI profiler Reni Fisher, his estranged daughter, accompanies them. As hard as it is to exhume her traumatic childhood, Reni can’t say no. She still feels complicit in her father’s crimes.

          Perfect to play a lost little girl, Reni was the bait to lure unsuspecting women to their deaths. It’s time for closure. For her. For the families. And for Daniel. He shares Reni’s obsession with the past. Ever since he was a boy, he’s been convinced that his mother was one of Fisher’s victims.

A five-hundred-mile road trip lies ahead. Thirty years of bad memories are flooding back. A master manipulator has gained their trust. For Reni and Daniel, this isn’t the end of a nightmare. It’s only the beginning

44. The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner

read on my iPhone/Kindle/Book/Audible
2016, Crown Books for Young Readers
384 pgs.
YA CRF
Finished 8/1/2017
Goodreads rating:  4.21 - 8280 ratings
My rating:  5 Top-notch fiction
Setting: Contemporary rural Tennessee, somewhat near Nashville

First line/s:  "There were things that Dillard Wayne Early Jr. dreaded more than the first day of school at Forrestville High.  Not many, but a few."

My comments:  This wonderful book is about so many things.  It's about rising above the atrocities of horrible parenting.  It's about friendship, real friendship that touches your core.  It's about grief and about withstanding the hundreds of little pushes in the wrong direction that it might bring.  It's about perseverance and resilience.  It's about living your life for yourself, and finding the little things that matter the most and can sustain you, no matter what. Not only was this a fantastic book for young adults, fut for old adults, too.

Goodreads synopsis: Dill has had to wrestle with vipers his whole life—at home, as the only son of a Pentecostal minister who urges him to handle poisonous rattlesnakes, and at school, where he faces down bullies who target him for his father’s extreme faith and very public fall from grace.
          The only antidote to all this venom is his friendship with fellow outcasts Travis and Lydia. But as they are starting their senior year, Dill feels the coils of his future tightening around him. The end of high school will lead to new beginnings for Lydia, whose edgy fashion blog is her ticket out of their rural Tennessee town. And Travis is happy wherever he is thanks to his obsession with the epic book series Bloodfall and the fangirl who may be turning his harsh reality into real-life fantasy. Dill’s only escapes are his music and his secret feelings for Lydia—neither of which he is brave enough to share. Graduation feels more like an ending to Dill than a beginning. But even before then, he must cope with another ending—one that will rock his life to the core.
          Debut novelist Jeff Zentner provides an unblinking and at times comic view of the hard realities of growing up in the Bible Belt, and an intimate look at the struggles to find one’s true self in the wreckage of the past.

27. The Year the Swallows Came Early - Kathryn Fitzmaurice

Booklist Starred Review
Grades 4-6, ages 9-12
273 pages
Published Feb. 2009
Rating: 5

Madelyn, my Because of Winn Dixie lover, is going to adore this book. I can't wait to share it with her. This is Kathryn Fitzmaurice's first . Wow. And here's an oxymoron for you, it's a simple, complex book. There's a little bit of everything in it, and real people, imperfect adults, imperfect kids, but real. That's what I liked best. There's lots of metaphor and symbolism, but when it comes right down to it, it's the books simplicity that got me. I couldn't put it down.

Groovy Robinson's in the sixth grade, and all of a sudden her life is turned upside-down. Her father is arrested and taken to jail, and Groovy knows not why. When her mother finally tells her the story, her whole world is shaken, and the father she'd been ready to welcome home no matter what he'd done looks a lot different in her eyes. The normally-positive kid goes into a decline, even refusing to be called "Groovy", the nickname her father gave her, but her given name, Eleanor, instead. Her love for cooking, her plans to be educated at a great cooking school, disappear. She mopes. She's depressed. Many stories are woven into this one. Her best friend, Frankie's problems with his wandering mom. Even her mother's horoscope, supersticious-filled pronouncements and her firned Mirasol's determination to be an artist all work into the plotline. It's a delicious story. It's real.

It takes place in or near San Jaun Capistrano, California, where the swallows are said to return thousands of miles every year at the same time (like the monarch butterflies to Monterey). However, I researched a bit on the internet (isn't that what a good story's supposed to do, make you think further and relate to it?) and it sounds like they haven't returned for a few years. Nevertheless, I'm hoping my summer jaunt through southern and mid-coastal California next month will take me to this well-defined setting so that I can see it for myself. And one of the California Missions is here, too!

FIRST LINE: "We lived in a perfect stucco house, just off the sparkly Pacific, with a lime tree in the backyard and pink and yellow roses gone wild around a picket fence."