January 2022 – Pleasant Nights

Title: The Lighthouse Witches

Author: CJ Cooke

Genre: supernatural mystery

Thank you to NetGalley for this book!

I’m not a big fan of witch stories, but this one sounded like a lot of fun. It’s told in both 1998 and 2021, which is a really difficult way to write a book because you can’t give too much away in either storyline because the other plot will be ruined, but Cooke does a great job balancing them. Overall, this book was really enjoyable and had a fun twist at the end.

From Goodreads: When single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in a 100-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, it’s an opportunity to start over with her three daughters–Luna, Sapphire, and Clover. When two of her daughters go missing, she’s frantic. She learns that the cave beneath the lighthouse was once a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The locals warn her about wildlings, supernatural beings who mimic human children, created by witches for revenge. Liv is told wildlings are dangerous and must be killed.

Twenty-two years later, Luna has been searching for her missing sisters and mother. When she receives a call about her youngest sister, Clover, she’s initially ecstatic. Clover is the sister she remembers–except she’s still seven years old, the age she was when she vanished. Luna is worried Clover is a wildling. Luna has few memories of her time on the island, but she’ll have to return to find the truth of what happened to her family. But she doesn’t realize just how much the truth will change her.

While in the 2021 storyline, Luna will frequently think about the past, but it’s not always clear that is what’s happening. I was a bit confused at times and had to go back and reread. That might have been my fault, though, because I read quickly and easily could have missed the shifts. The wildling idea was nice and creepy, but the book isn’t really scary. This isn’t a complaint, but just to let people know what to expect. The twist at the end absolutely made sense, which is a must for me. I despise twists that exist just to throw the reader off. But this one was great. Overall, this book was a lot of fun and kept me reading and guessing.

All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

The Diamond Formula

The Electricity Fairy

Title: As the Wicked Watch

Author: Tamron Hall

Genre: thriller

Thank you, NetGalley for this book!

I really wanted to love this book. I’m a big fan of Tamron Hall’s and want good things for her. But, I found this book uneven to the point of frustration. I’m bummed! I loved the main character and the fact that Hall was able to put her own journalistic background into the story. This aspect definitely worked well. But the actual plot just fell apart over the course of the book.

From Goodreads: When crime reporter Jordan Manning leaves her hometown in Texas to take a job at a television station in Chicago, she’s one step closer to her a dream: a coveted anchor chair on a national network.

Jordan is smart and aggressive, with unabashed star-power, and often the only woman of color in the newsroom. Her signature? Arriving first on the scene—in impractical designer stilettos. Armed with a master’s degree in forensic science and impeccable instincts, Jordan has thus far been able to balance her dueling motivations: breaking every big story—and giving voice to the voiceless.

From her time reporting in Texas, she’s sure she has covered the vilest of human behaviors, but nothing has prepared her for Chicago. You see, Jordan is that rare breed of journalist who can navigate a crime scene as well as she can a newsroom—often noticing what others tend to miss. Again and again, she is called to cover the murders of black females, many of them sexually assaulted, most brutalized, and all of them quickly forgotten.

All until Masey James—the story that Jordan just can’t shake, try as she might. A fifteen-year-old girl whose body was found in an abandoned lot, Masey has come to represent for Jordan all of the frustration that her job—with its required distance—often forces her to repress. Putting the rest of her workload and her (fraying) personal life aside, Jordan does everything she can to give the story the coverage it desperately requires, and that a missing black child would so rarely get. Three young boys are eventually charged with Masey’s murder, but Jordan remains unconvinced.

There’s a serial killer on the loose, Jordan believes, and he’s hiding in plain sight.

I liked the concept of the plot. A journalist takes a deep dive into a murder. Great. But this story had too many characters. Some of them could have been combined into one that had more purpose. I also felt like the pacing was off. If a book is going to be about a serial killer (not saying it is or not, but there are two deaths in the book) the second death shouldn’t be at 90% of the way through the book. The ending was completely rushed and jumped around a lot. I still think Hall is fantastic, but this book needed a good edit.