Weekend Quotes #488

In My Hands Today…

The Berry Pickers – Amanda Peters

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

In My Hands Today…

A Mumbai Murder Mystery – Meeti Shroff-Shah

Among the rarefied circles of Mumbai’s posh Temple Hill, there is nothing more tragic than the loss of face — not even loss of life.

Award-winning novelist Radhi Zaveri flees home to Temple Hill trying to escape a broken heart and humiliating writer’s block.

But she is met by a terrible tragedy. Her pregnant best friend Sanjana’s father has killed himself.

And yet, just hours before, he was telling Sanjana that he couldn’t wait to hold his grandchild in his arms. What triggered this desperate act? And why is their young maid so terrified?

Radhi is determined to uncover the truth. But the deeper she digs beneath the diamond-studded prayer meetings and the lavishly catered ‘pure-veg’ brunches, the faster she finds herself drawn into a web of festering grievances, hidden agendas and long-buried secrets.

In My Hands Today…

The Fifth Avenue Apartment – Pamela M. Kelley

Thirty-year-old Sophie has longed to live in Manhattan but could never afford to do so–even with roommates. She has just been laid off from a job that she didn’t love.

When her 92 year-old great aunt invites her to stay with her for a while–in her Fifth Avenue Apartment, Sophie jumps at the chance to move to the city. She decides to temp for a while to find out what industry she wants to go to next as she is burned out from the stress of working at a law firm.

Meanwhile her aunt is playing match-maker with their very attractive neighbor, Max. Although he has been dating a supermodel for the past year, so he goes firmly into the friend zone.

Much to Sophie’s surprise, after temping as a receptionist in a luxury real estate agency, she discovers she has an aptitude for it and is offered a chance to move into sales. She’s nervous about all commission and declines the opportunity.

But then life happens, bringing some big changes, and she reconsiders.

She falls in love with the work although it is challenging and things don’t always go as expected. She also has to deal with a jealous, cutthroat co-worker and the flattering attention of their charismatic and brilliant boss. Sophie has a lot to learn about real estate, navigating toxic co-workers and what she wants in a relationship.

In My Hands Today…

No Darker Place – Debra Webb

They want revenge. They need each other.

Detective Bobbie Gentry has one objective: to stop the serial killer who robbed her of her husband, her child and her life. Nick Shade understands Bobbie’s pain and her desire for vengeance. He’s on a mission of his own, and the murderer known as the Storyteller is next on his list.

Nick knows that the best way to find his target is to stick close to Bobbie. But as she becomes more and more reckless in her attempts to lure the Storyteller out of hiding, he has to make a choice. Will he protect her from herself even if it means passing up the chance to take out one more monster? As for Bobbie, she’s forced to decide just how much she can trust this stranger who knows so much about her.

And both of them are about to learn whether or not two broken people can save each other.

In My Hands Today…

The Wonder of It All – Barbara Taylor Bradford

James Falconer–a tycoon and a self-made man, seems to have the world in the palm of his hand. But The Great War looms, and James decides to fight for king and country.

The fighting is bloody and brutal, and James returns a changed man, with wounds both physical and mental. His beloved wife is dead, but a new woman returns to help nurse him back to health.

Georgiana Ward once held James in her thrall, but years have passed and bitterness has set in. Still, the old attraction is there and James is determined to make amends to both Georgiana and his child Leonie–now a grown woman and someone he hasn’t seen in decades.

Leonie is having none of it, and is embarking on a dangerous journey with a man who might very well destroy her. As James fights to return to the man he once was, he needs to find a way to heal his body, soul, and family.

In My Hands Today…

The Ball at Versailles – Danielle Steel

It’s the summer of 1959 and the Palace of Versailles is hosting an event that will make history. It is an exclusive dusk to dawn ball in which a select group of American and French debutantes will be presented to international society and royalty. Four young women, all with something to prove, receive what some see as the invitation of a lifetime.

Amelia Alexander, who hopes to eventually attend law school, hesitates to participate in what she sees as an archaic and privileged tradition. But her indomitable widowed mother, Jane, who’s struggled financially and sacrificed for a career, encourages her to attend. Jane would do anything for Amelia to have the chance at happily ever after.

Felicity Smith is equally uncertain about the ball. Although her family is prominent in the Dallas social scene, Felicity prefers to keep to herself, avoiding the older sister who torments her. But to get out of her sister’s shadow, Felicity decides to accept. If it’s a success, the tables will have turned at last.

For Caroline Taylor, the beautiful ingénue and daughter of Hollywood legends, the ball is an irresistible opportunity. But an unexpected heartbreak just before she leaves for France gets things off to a bad start.

Then there’s Samantha Walker, an art history major with an overprotective father. Her excitement about the invitation is overshadowed by the emotional and physical effects of a past tragedy that still haunts her.

For all these young women, Paris and one transcendent night will change their lives forever. Bestselling author Danielle Steel extends an invitation to all, in The Ball at Versailles.

Weekend Quotes #487

In My Hands Today…

Last Summer at the Lake House – Heather Dixon

“Are you okay?” A wave of cold sweeps over Alex. The silence on the end of the phone seems to last forever.
“It’s Dad,” her sister finally says. “He had a massive heart attack. He’s gone.”

When sisters Alex, Sam and Jess are called back to the family lake house in Summerville after the death of their beloved father, they learn that he was hiding a devastating secret.

Alex is the one who discovers the stash of love letters hidden away in the shed by the lake where they used to play as children during the long, hot summers. She adored her father. But she just has to know who wrote these notes, and she doesn’t want to be talked out of it by her husband or her sisters, who each have their own reasons for avoiding digging deeper. As everyone tries to protect their grieving mother from more trauma, and manage their own shock, tensions rise in the lake house. Even under one roof, sharing a room just as they used to each summer as children, the sisters have never felt so isolated from one another.

A chance encounter at a local grief counselling group leads Alex to make a shocking discovery about her father. With the true scale of their father’s deception revealed, everything Alex and her sisters thought they knew about him – and about their family life – is called into question. Alex knows that if she’s going to find out the truth she’s going to have to go it alone – and that means keeping some secrets herself.

As they each deal in their own way with the fallout from their father’s secret history, the three women’s lives begin to change in ways they could never have predicted. Can Alex hold onto the family she thought she had, and held so dear, if everything she ever knew was a lie?

In My Hands Today…

Vatican Knights – Rick Jones

While on a visit to the United States, Pope Pius XIII is kidnapped by a terrorist cell calling itself the Soldiers of Islam. If the United States and its allies do not meet their demands, they will execute the pope.

So when FBI Specialist Shari Cohen is called to duty to track down the terrorist cell responsible, she learns that she is not alone. Deep behind the Vatican walls a secret order dispatches a clandestine op group of elite commandos known as the Vatican Knights. Their mission: bring the pope back alive.

As Cohen and the Knights work in tandem they uncover a White House conspiracy involving high-ranking members on Capitol Hill. When she begins to get too close to the truth about the pope’s kidnapping, she becomes the target of indigenous forces trying to keep the conspiracy safe. However, in order to get to her they must go through the Vatican Knights.