Helen Monks Takhar

Accidentally read from p13 to 184 in one sitting without missing a beat. Could not put it down. Very strong characters and in the hands of a master of words ( author was a journalist ). Big part of the plot was money which lost me ( she was a financial journalist ). Was intrigued by The Circle and much mystery and murder.
Then ..she overturned the plot. And I felt totally disoriented and began to loose ..the plot literally.
And a found body just unexplained.
After that it was a case of finishing the last few pages with no grief that it had ended. However love this new found author . I tweeted her and she replied and that made up for a bit of a shaky ending.… (mehr)

This is a workplace rivalry book, We have Katherine a woman in her forties who is an editor of a magazine which has just been taken over, she has just come back to work after being off with MH issues, and Lily in her twenties, Lily is an intern and the niece of the new owner and she basically wants to destroy Katherine.
This is told in both Katherine and Lily’s POV and what I first thought was just going to be a rivalry between the different ages turned out to be more sinister.
I didn’t like either character all that much, and I did struggle to get through this, I had to keep putting it by to read something else, it was a little slow. It was dark and twisty with secrets but it wasn’t for me.… (mehr)

This was a creepy one that did an excellent job of looking into all the extremes we can see in relationships between different generations, and the way that both paranoia and gaslighting can work. I don't think the ultimate payoff in the ending held up and made it worth it. This was very much an analysis of two mentally ill women, which kind of made the book lose a lot of its creepiness and just become plain sad. While I did race through the last quarter to get to the reveal, I set this down at 47% and could have forgotten it quite easily.… (mehr)

Rose, the daughter of a scam artist, lost everything when her father died. Now she and her mostly unemployed husband struggle to make ends meet in a neighborhood turned upscale by the presence of an exclusive school, the Woolf Academy.
Despite her social insecurity and his difficulty fitting in, she applies for her son to attend the Woolf and he is accepted. There are strange goings on here, including a tight group of women called The Circle who run the school, the death of one of them, and their charismatic but suspicious and overbearing leader. Soon Rose is called upon to enter The Circle, but at what price?

Many have really liked this book; I am an outlier. It was well written with twists and turns but it just wasn’t for me. I really had to force myself to stay with the book as I found it tedious. I couldn’t get invested in the story; most of the characters were unlikable and I just didn’t care what happened to any of them. Incidentally, I the saw genre of this book as more of a horror story than a mystery.

Thanks to #Netgally and #RandomHouse for the ARC.… (mehr)