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What It Was Like by Peter Seth
Published by The Story Plant
Publication Date: September 2, 2014
ISBN-10: 1611881900
ISBN-13: 978-1611881905
Pages: 464
Review Copy from: The Story Plant
Edition: TPB
My Rating: 5+
Synopsis( via Amazon):
“It’s really a very simple story. What happened was this: I met this girl and did a very stupid thing. I fell in love. Hard. I know that to some people that makes me an idiot and a loser. What can I say? They’re right. I did some extremely foolish things; I’m the first to say it. And they’ve left me in jail and alone.”
So begins one of the most compelling, emotionally charged, and affecting novels you are likely to read this year.
It is the summer of 1968 and a young man takes a job at a camp in upstate New York before starting his first semester at Columbia University. There, he meets Rachel Price, a fellow counselor who is as beautiful as she is haunted. Their romance will burn with a passion neither of them has ever known before…a passion with the power to destroy.
In the tradition of Endless Love and Gone Girl, What it was Like is an intimate, raw, and revealing journey through the landscape of all-consuming love. It announces the debut of a remarkable storyteller.
My Thoughts and Opinion:
WOW!! WOW!! WOW!!!
It has been a few days since I read the last word and closed the back cover, before putting my thoughts in writing, because it took me some time to process and reflect on what I had just finished reading.
From reading the back cover/synopsis and previous reviews, I knew that somewhere in these pages, an outcome was going to be tragic. And a love story was to be told.
But before I go any further, I received a copy of this book from the publisher, I am a member of The Story Plant’s Spread the Word Initiative, with a little tease “It’s both romantic and suspenseful, but it’s not romantic suspense.” However, please know, I was asked, in return for this copy, I would provide an honest review, which I will.
Did I say WOW??!! I still don’t know where to start with this review because my head is still reeling.
It is a story of, to name a few elements, a first love, obsession, manipulation, parental love, friendships, boundaries, unconditional love and one life changing decision. Characters and settings will touch every reader and will evoke memories and emotions as one turns the pages. Gripping!! A page turner!!
I could not put this book down, reading into the early hours. Riveting!! And when I read the last word I was astounded. Is what I just read a fictional novel? Or was it based on truth? Was it an autobiography? Or is this debut author a masterful, first-rate storyteller that has my head reeling still? Outstanding!!
My prediction…in the coming days, weeks, months, this book will become a bestseller!!! And Peter Seth will be a familiar name in the literary world!! An extraordinary read!!! Bravo Mr. Seth!! And kudos to publisher, Lou Aronica, for discovering this brilliant author!!
I am definitely spreading the word on this book, and I’m sure, once you read it, you will be doing the same!!!

The Insanity Plea by Larry D. Thompson
Published by Story Merchant
Publication Date: May 4, 2014
ISBN-10: 0989715477
ISBN-13: 978-0989715478
Pages: 378
Review Copy from: Author/PICT
Edition: ARC
My Rating: 5
Synopsis:
A young nurse is savagely killed during a pre-dawn run on Galveston’s seawall. The murderer slices her running shorts from her body as his trophy and tosses the body over the wall to the rocks below. As dawn breaks, a bedraggled street person, wearing four layers of old, tattered clothes, emerges from the end of the jetty, waving his arms and talking to people only he hears. He trips over the body, checks for a pulse and, instead, finds a diamond bracelet which he puts in his pocket. He hurries across the street, heading for breakfast at the Salvation Army two blocks away, leaving his footprints in blood as he goes.
Wayne Little, former Galveston prosecutor and now Houston trial lawyer, learns that his older brother has been charged with capital murder for the killing. At first he refuses to be dragged back into his brother’s life. Once a brilliant lawyer, Dan’s paranoid schizophrenia had captured his mind, estranging everyone including Wayne. Finally giving in to pleas from his mother, Wayne enlists the help of his best friend, Duke Romack, former NBA star turned criminal lawyer. When Wayne and Duke review the evidence, they conclude that Dan’s chances are slim. They either find the killer or win a plea of insanity since the prosecution’s case is air tight. The former may be a mission impossible since the killer is the most brilliant, devious and cruel fictional murderer since Hannibal Lecter. The chances of winning an insanity plea are equally grim.
It will take the combined skills of the two lawyers along with those of Duke’s girlfriend, Claudia, a brilliant appellate lawyer, and Rita Contreras, Wayne’s next door neighbor and computer hacker extraordinaire, to attempt to unravel the mystery of the serial killer before the clock clicks down to a guilty verdict for Dan.

Heaven Is For Real by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent
Published by Thomas Nelson; Original edition
Publication Date: November 2, 2010
ISBN-10: 0849946158
ISBN-13: 978-0849946158
Pages: 163
Review Copy from: Borrowed
Edition: TPB
My Rating: 4
Synopsis:
A young boy emerges from life-saving surgery with remarkable stories of his visit to heaven.
Heaven Is for Real is the true story of the four-year old son of a small town Nebraska pastor who during emergency surgery slips from consciousness and enters heaven. He survives and begins talking about being able to look down and see the doctor operating and his dad praying in the waiting room. The family didn’t know what to believe but soon the evidence was clear.
Colton said he met his miscarried sister, whom no one had told him about, and his great grandfather who died 30 years before Colton was born, then shared impossible-to-know details about each. He describes the horse that only Jesus could ride, about how “reaaally big” God and his chair are, and how the Holy Spirit “shoots down power” from heaven to help us.
Told by the father, but often in Colton’s own words, the disarmingly simple message is heaven is a real place, Jesus really loves children, and be ready, there is a coming last battle.
My Thoughts and Opinion:
I have wanted to read this book for quite awhile and finally had the chance to. I also wanted to read it with an open mind, not having my own beliefs interfere. Was I able to? Did I find comfort? Or did I find controversy? Was it believable?
A friend called me after watching the movie, telling me I had to see it. However, I would much rather read a book first then watch the movie, which I explained this to her. The next thing, she is at my door with the book. Perfect! I read the book in 2 sittings.
As the synopsis states, the story is about a little boy who is on the brink of death and brought into surgery. The parents, which the father is a Pastor, pray, make deals with God, ask for a prayer chain from his congregation and sit and wait for the doctor to come out of surgery with the news. Their prayers are answered. However, a few months later, they will be learning more about their faith and beliefs from their young son. How can this 4 year old know about the things he starts to talk about?
Colton starts describing what Heaven looks like, what Jesus looks like, meeting relatives that he has never met but was with while in Heaven, even how long he was there.
I am Catholic and have always believed, and witnessed, many, many things that were mentioned in this story. Like Colton’s dad, I received, which was witnessed, a “shoots down power” from the Holy Spirit.
Another thing that Colton told his parents was that he “met his sister”
pg 94 I have two sisters. You had a baby die in your tummy, didn’t you?
For me, this brought great comfort. I lost a baby 32 years ago, and to this day, wonder if it was a son or a daughter.
I not only enjoyed reading this book, but it emphasized what I have always believed. There is a God and there is a Heaven. If you are Spiritual person, I highly recommend this book because you will experience, through Colton, that we are never alone.
Genre: Crime
Published by: Rosarium Publishing
Publication Date: May 2014
Number of Pages: 264
ISBN: 978-0989141185
DETROIT, 1974
To become the King, you have to take the crown. It won’t be given up lightly. Heroin kingpin, Willis McDaniel, has been wearing that particular piece of jewelry for far too long, and youngblood, Lennie Jack, thinks it would look really good on his head. When a junkie tells Jack about a big delivery, the young Vietnam vet makes his move. Feeling his empire crumble, McDaniel puts the word out to find whoever’s responsible. The hunt is on, the battle is engaged, and the streets of Detroit run red with blood.
In 1974 Vern E. Smith took the crime fiction world by storm with his debut novel, The Jones Men. Heralded as “a large accomplishment in the art of fiction” by the New York Times, The Jones Men went on to be nominated for an Edgar Award and became a New York Times Notable Book. The art of crime fiction has never been the same since.
For Bennie Lee Sims’ wake, Lennie Jack chose the sky-blue Fleetwood with the chromed-up bumpers and the bar-line running from the trunk to the dash, dispensing six different liquors with chaser.
Joe Red brought the car to a halt in front of Fraser’s Funeral Parlor on Madison Boulevard. He backed it in between a red El Dorado with a diamond-shaped rear window and a pink Lincoln with a leopard-skin roof.
Lennie Jack wore a medium-length Afro and had thick wide sideburns that grew neatly into the ends of a bushy moustache drooping over his top lip. He got out of the passenger seat in a manner that favored his left shoulder. He had on a cream-colored suede coat that stopped just below the knee, and a .38 in his waistband.
Joe Red was shorter and thinner and younger than Lennie Jack. He got his nickname for an extremely light complexion and a thick curly bush of reddish brown hair; it spilled from under the wide-brimmed black hat cocked low over his right ear. He had on the black leather midi with the red-stitched cape; he had a .45 automatic in his waistband.
They came briskly down the sidewalk and went up the six concrete steps to the entrance of Fraser’s.
An attendant in a somber gray suit and dark tie greeted them at the door.
“We’re here for Bennie Sims,” Joe Red said.
“Come this way,” the attendant said.
He guided them down a narrow hallway past a knot of elderly black women waiting to file into one of the viewing rooms flanking the hall on either side. The hallway reeked of death; the women wept.
They passed three more doors before the attendant led them left at the end of the hall and down a short flight of stairs. A single 60-watt bulb illuminated the lower level. The attendant went past the row of ebony- and silver-colored caskets stacked near the staircase and stopped at a door in the back of the room.
“They’re in there,” he said. He turned and headed back up the stairs. Lennie Jack rapped softly at the door. They stood a few feet back from the doorway to be recognizable in the dim light.
The door cracked.
“This Bennie Lee?” Lennie Jack said.
“Yeah, this it,” said a voice behind the crack.
A man with wavy black hair in a white mink jacket and red knicker boots let them in. He relocked the door.
The room smelled of cigarette smoke. A row of silver metal chairs had been stacked in a neat line on one side, but most of the people come to pay their respects were scattered in the back in tight little clusters, talking and laughing.
At the front of the long room, near a small table of champagne bottles, Bennie Lee Sims’ tuxedo-dad body lay in a silver-colored coffin with a bright satin lining.
His face was dusty with a fine white powder.
Lennie Jack walked over to the coffin. He dipped his fingers in the silver tray of cocaine on top and sprinkled it over Bennie Lee.
Joe Red stepped up behind him and tried to find a spot that wasn’t covered. He finally decided on the lips and scattered a handful of the fine white crystalline powder around Bennie Lee’s mouth and chin.
They moved through the crowd, shaking hands and greeting people. Almost everybody had come to see Bennie Lee off.
The Ware brothers were there: Willie, the oldest at twenty-four; Simmy, who was twenty; and June, who often swaggered as if he were the elder of the clan but still had the baby-smooth face and look of wide- eyed adolescence. He was seventeen.
Pretty Boy Sam was standing in one corner with his right foot resting on one of the metal chairs. He had smooth brown skin and almost girlish features, topped off by a pointed Van Dyke beard. His good looks masked a violent temper.
Pretty Boy Sam had worn his full-length brown mink and brought his woman to pay his respects to Bennie Lee Sims, who had two neat bullet holes right between the eyes and underneath all the cocaine on his face.
Slim Williams was there with his woman. He was a tall, thin dark-skinned man whose left eye had been destroyed by an errant shotgun blast. He now wore a variety of gaily colored eye patches the way he had heard Sammy Davis did when he lost his eye. He had on a patch of bright green and red plaid and stood conversing on one side of the room with Hooker, Woody Woods, and Mack Lee.
Willis McDaniel was not there, but then, he never came. He had probably never considered it, but it was a source of irritation to the others.
Joe Red said, “Hey Jack, he the man. He don’t hafta come see nobody off if he don’t wanta come. Ain’t none of these people thinkin’ bout makin’ him come. Who gon make him come?”
“Why he can’t come like the rest of the people?” Lennie Jack said. “Has anybody ever thought of that, you reckon? He too big now to bring his ass out here to see a dude off? He probably had him ripped anyway. I don’t understand how these chumps let an old man like that just get in there and rule.”
“Now we both know how he got it,” Joe Red said. “He took it. He say, ‘Look, I’m gon be the man on this side of town cause I got my thing together and I got plenty big shit behind me. Now what you motherfuckers say?’ Everybody say, ‘You the man, Mister McDaniel.’ That’s the way he did it.”
“That is the way to take it from him, too.” Lennie Jack said. “We gon get lucky pretty soon. I think he can be had and I know just the way to do it. I got some people working on it. The first thing they teach you in the war is to fight fire with fire, you know?”
He took the tiny gold spoon on the chain around his neck and scooped a pinch of cocaine off the tray Joe Red handed him. He brought the spoon up to his right nostril and sniffed deeply.
The crowd was beginning to drift to the corner of the room where Slim Williams was holding court. Slim was thirty-seven, and much older than most of his audience. Lennie Jack was twenty-six, and Joe Red had just turned twenty-one three days ago.
Slim Williams had diamond rings on three fingers of his left hand, and he was waving them around in a dazzling display and talking about Joe the Grind.
“Joe used to walk into a bar with his dudes with him–he always carried these two dudes with him everywhere he went. He’d walk into a place fulla people and say, ‘I’m Joe the Grind, set up the bar! All pimps and players step up to the bar and bring your whores with you.’”
Slim Williams chuckled. “Then Joe would talk about ‘em. He used to say, ‘You ain’t no pimp, nigger. What you doin’ up here? I ain’t buying no drinks for you. Sit down!’”
Slim Williams laughed; so did everybody else.
“Joe used to rayfield a chump bag dude too,” Slim Williams said. “He used to tell ‘em ‘Just cause you got eight or nine hundred dollars worth of business don’t mean you somebody.’ Then Joe would throw a roll down that’d choke a Goddamn mule and tell the chump: ‘Looka here boy, I just had my man sell forty-two thousand dollars worth of heh-rawn, and I got twenty more joints to hear from fore midnight. Gon sit down somewhere, you don’t belong up here with no big dope men.”
They laughed again and somebody passed the coke tray.
June Ware took his pinch and squared his toes in the eighty-dollar calfskin boots from Australia, via Perrin’s Men’s Shoppe on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
“What happened to Joe, Slim?” June Ware said.
“Oh, somebody shot ‘im in the head in an after-hours joint,” Slim Williams said. “And lemme tell you, youall shoulda been there to see Joe’s wake. It put this thing to shame. Compared to Joe’s, this thing ain’t nothing. This light-weight. They say there was coke in the block wrapped in foil and pure heh-rawn set out on silver trays with diamonds in the sides.
“So they partied all night till twelve the next day, then they all went to Joe’s funeral. After the funeral was over, everybody got on the plane with his woman and went to Jamaica for two days.”
“Say what?” June Ware said.
“Yeah, that’s the truth,” Slim Williams said. “And you shoulda seen that funeral too. They say a broad came over from Chicago in a white-on-white El Dorado, and she was dressed in all white with a bad-ass mink round her shoulders. Then when she came out of the hotel the next day for Joe’s funeral, they say she was in all black. She went to the graveyard and threw one hundred roses on Joe. Then she got in her ride and split. Don’t nobody know who she was. When they had Joe’s funeral march, there was one hundred fifty big pieces lined up for blocks down Madison Boulevard. They pulled a brand new Brough-ham behind the hearse, and when the march was over they took the car out to the trash yard and crushed it.”
“Goddamn Slim!” June Ware said.
Mack Lee, who was twenty-two years old and decked out from the top of his big apple hat to the tip of his leather platforms in bright lavender, came their way with his woman on his arm.
The woman looked about nineteen; she wore diamond-studded earrings and a matching bracelet. She carried a tray of glasses and an unopened bottle of champagne.
“We oughta drink a toast to Bennie Lee,” Mack Lee said, “and ask the Lord how come he made him so stupid.”
The laughter rippled through the room; Mack Lee popped the cork in the champagne bottle and poured the rounds.
A native of Natchez, Miss., Smith is a graduate of San Francisco State University, and the Summer Program for Minority Journalists at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He began his journalism career as a reporter for the Long Beach, Calif. Independent Press-Telegram.
From 1979 until 2002, Smith served as the Atlanta Bureau Chief and as a national correspondent for Newsweek.
Vern Smith’s work as a journalist, author and screenwriter spans four decades.



DAILY POSTINGS BELOW
This is a sticky post for my Read-A-Thon Progress
Hosted by The Book Monsters

08/04 Monday
Book: Eyes Closed Tight by Peter Leonard
Pages read: 71
Review written/posted:
08/05 Tuesday
Book: Eyes Closed Tight by Peter Leonard
Pages read: 55
Review written/posted: Heaven Is For Real by Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent
08/06 Wednesday
Book: Eyes Closed Tight by Peter Leonard
Pages read: 62 ~ finished
Review written/posted: The Insanity Plea by Larry D. Thompson
008/07 Thursday
Book: Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain
Pages read:
Review written/posted:
08/08 Friday
Book:
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Review written/posted:
008/09 Saturday
Book:
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08/10 Sunday
Book:
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08/11 Monday
Wrap up
Book(s):
Total pages read:
Reviews written/posted:

Devil In The Hole by Charles Salzberg
Published by Five Star
Publication Date: August 7, 2013
ISBN-10: 1432826964
ISBN-13: 978-1432826963
Pages: 252
Review Copy from: Author
Edition: HC
My Rating: 4
Synopsis:
In the ballroom of a sparsely furnished Connecticut mansion, police find a shocking sight: four bodies lined up next to each other, three teenagers and a middle-aged woman, each lying on a blanket, each shot once in the head. In an upstairs bedroom: an elderly woman and the family dog, both of them shot as well. The only person missing is the husband, father, son, and prime suspect, John Hartman, who’s got a three-week jump on the police.
Through the eyes of almost two dozen characters, including the neighbor who reports the crime, Hartman’s mistress, a dogged state investigator, the family minister, and some of the characters Hartman meets on his escape route, we piece together not only what happened and how these shocking murders affect the community, but how John Hartman evades capture, where he’s headed, and maybe even why he committed this gruesome crime in the first place.
Based on the notorious John List murders and already compared to works by Norman Mailer and Russell Banks, Devil in the Hole is gripping, literate, and haunting.
My Thoughts and Opinion:
This book was riveting and intriguing right from the start. As the synopsis states, it is based on a horrific true crime murder that went cold for many years. The chapters are short and each one is narrated by a different person as their “take” on the murder.
At first I thought that the amount of more than 20 characters would make this read confusing but after a few chapters I knew that wouldn’t be the case. I was so engrossed in the story that it truly felt that each cast member was talking directly to me with their opinion of this story. So compelling that I had to keep reminding myself that these characters were fictional. So captivating, that by the middle of the book, I had to research the actual murder.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which had me turning the pages, to see what the next voice would reveal. A highly recommended read!!!













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