Book Review: The Woke and the Dead, by Mark S. Bacon

Guest review by: Becki Bayley

Suspicion, distrust, and curiosity tugged Lyle in different directions. He stood at the desert gun range and plucked his wrist rubber band. He had soaked up everything he saw, heard, and smelled during the rapid fire and later. Visions of the child behind the machine gun made him want to smack the father or just hop in his Mustang and put the entire group in the rearview; still he wanted to know more.

Many of the shooters headed to their trucks; a few remained. Lyle pulled out his phone, hoping to take quick, unnoticed photos of the few guys left.

Crack!

One gunshot and a cry of pain grabbed the stragglers’ attention. Lyle spun around and saw a man drop his semi-auto and fall to the ground clutching his leg. Lyle dashed to the middle-aged man and knelt over him. The idiot shot himself.

Lyle Deming and his girlfriend Kate Sorensen are determined to solve the hate crimes at Nostalgia City, especially while the governor is determined to claim they’re random acts of violence instead of targeted murders.

Official synopsis:

A public war between a governor and a theme park lights the fuse on an explosive story of hate, death, corruption, bigotry, and espionage. This Nostalgia City mystery is a stand-alone political thriller.

Lyle Deming finds a body in Nostalgia City's parking lot during an LGBTQ event. The ex-cop turned theme-park cab driver takes a breath and steps away from the bullet-punctured corpse. Was this a hate crime?

Arizona governor Rod Gudgel, running for reelection, calls it a random shooting. He mocks Nostalgia City theme park for its inclusiveness using homophobic and racial slurs.

Kate Sorensen, the park's blonde, 6' 2½" PR director, calls out Gudgel's insensitivity and prejudice. The governor retaliates saying the park's rides are unsafe, then threatening the park's permits.

When Nostalgia City employees demonstrating at a Gudgel campaign office are killed and injured, Kate joins Lyle in a mad scramble to find the killers and shut up or shut down the governor. Lyle hits blind alleys, then he runs afoul of an armed hate group.

At the same time, Kate digs into the governor's long history of malfeasance, enraging Gudgel allies and attracting the menace of state guardsmen. The governor seems to have armed supporters everywhere.

With Lyle's wry humor and Kate's unflappability, the story moves quickly as puzzles and subplots multiply and loop together threatening the park, their relationship, and their lives.

Multiple plot lines make this book quickly engaging. There’s a murder, then a mass shooting, then obvious corruption. A reader is left wondering if it’s all connected, or just a really bad week. A connection with it all, short of just the targeted community, would mean less bad guys.

Lyle, the former police detective (turned cab driver) also fears whether his daughter could be too closely connected with the first target. He wants to continue doing his job, but preferably without having to worry about his family’s safety at the same time.

While this is the fifth book in the Nostalgia City Mysteries, it read all right as a stand alone. More may have been gained from previous engagement with the characters, but the book earned 3 out of 5 stars on its own. It would be recommended for those who enjoyed previous books in the series, and readers who enjoy LGBTQ characters and storylines.

{click here to purchase via Amazon Affiliates link}

Becki Bayley is a wife and mother who enjoys reading, counted-cross-stitch, and doing LEGO. Check out more of what her family is up to on Instagram, where she posts as SweetlyBSquared.

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Book Review and GIVEAWAY: Dear Future Me, by Deborah O'Connor {ends 6/12}

Guest review by: Becki Bayley

MIRANDA

Saltburn, 2023: The morning of…

The day starts with an argument. Whispers that snip at the dawn air. It’s been like this for weeks, a horrible back and forth that feels like we are throwing the same rock at each other, over and over again.

After last night, though, our words have a new intensity, an urgency, like everything is about to come to a head.

In 2023, a class receives letters they wrote to themselves 20 years earlier. Some of the people are where they expected to be, in the life they had planned or expected. One person leaves her home only to die off the sea cliffs nearby, and her best friend wants to untangle what may have happened 20 years before to lead to this unexpected tragedy.

Official synopsis:

In 2003, Mr. Danler's high school class got an assignment to write letters to their future selves. Twenty years later, they receive them in the mail.

Upon opening them, the students are shocked to find that their envelopes contain old secrets that threaten to expose the truth about the tragic death of one of their classmates. And when one letter makes the beautiful and successful Miranda jump off a cliff to her death, the small community is rocked to its core.

Stunned by what has happened and armed with a clue of her own, Miranda's best-friend Audrey decides to track down her old classmates to get to the bottom of Miranda's death. And in doing so, she sets off a chain of events that could expose the truth not just about one untimely death, but two.

Time is moving fast when the classmates originally write letters to their future selves. They start the letters, go on an overnight class trip where one of them dies, and then finish the letters after they return from the trip. Audrey misses out on the trip and some other school when she’s unexpectedly sick. Now that her best friend has died, probably after reading what was written in her letter, she’s determined to find what happened on that trip to cause not only the death of a classmate back then, but creating a lingering conflict to cause Miranda’s death when the letters are delivered.

Entanglements, young love, divorce, affairs—how much of it is part of life, and could some of it have precipitated a murder? Audrey has usually kept to herself and raising her brother, but now she’s on a mission to discover which of her former classmates is hiding something that could have led to her best friend’s death.

While the ending of the book gave it an extra star to bring it to 4 out of 5, the middle got somewhat confusing with multiple character dramas and potential plot lines. The story was told from multiple viewpoints to tell of Audrey’s investigation compared to flashbacks in the content of other student’s letters and memories of the fateful school trip. This entangling mystery could be recommended for those who like school stories, murder mysteries, and complicated relationships.

{click here to purchase via my Amazon Affiliates link}

Becki Bayley loves reading, writing, and having fun with her family and friends. Check out her blog at SweetlyBSquared.com.

GIVEAWAY:

One of my lucky readers will win a copy of Dear Future Me!

Enter via the widget below. Giveaway will end on Thursday, June 12th, at 11:59pm ET, and winner will be notified the next day via email, and must respond within 24 hours, or an alternate winner will be chosen.

U.S. residents only, please.

Good luck!

Dear Future Me, by Deborah O'Connor

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Book Review and GIVEAWAY: When Canaries Die, by Luis Figueredo {ends 6/11}

Guest review by: Becki Bayley

Mo bounced into the room with youthful enthusiasm and plopped onto the long, blue leather couch next to Maggie. With a huge grin spreading across his face, he leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. The more he thought about Asher’s facial contortions when Pierce exposed the major crack in the government’s seemingly perfect defense, the more satisfied he felt. 

Mo’s face broke into a genuine smile. “The look on Asher’s face when she suddenly realized that she was up against one of the best lawyers in the country and he had a smoking gun was priceless.”

Pierce narrowed his eyes because compliments from Mo were rare. Criticism was the norm.

“The canary analogy was a little long winded but effective,” Mo mused. His tone was reminiscent of a time when Pierce was a wet behind the ears lawyer fresh out of law school.

“And there is it,” Pierce said, closing the laptop.

Pierce Evangelista and Moses Black seem to bend the law to their will, when it’s really a beautiful work of art when they interpret and present their cases in parallel to reality.

Official synopsis:

A hotshot Miami attorney, Pierce Evangelista finds himself navigating a world on the brink of collapse as a deadly pandemic sweeps the globe. Amidst the chaos, Pierce is tasked with challenging the U.S. government’s immigration policies that left thousands of asylum-seekers stranded in dire conditions. As the virus spreads uncontrollably and the demand for blood transfusions skyrockets, criminal organizations exploit the situation, turning human blood into a precious commodity. With the border towns of Tijuana, Juarez, and Matamoros descending into chaos, Pierce must confront powerful forces and fight to reopen the border to save lives. Dive into this gripping legal thriller infused with science fiction and suspense, where the line between survival and exploitation blurs in a world plagued by tragedy and greed.

Processing the multiple dilemmas in this story was powerful, especially with the memories of living through COVID quarantines. A new pandemic is especially deadly, but this time, it leaves immigrants at risk from the disease and the cartels, who want to harvest their blood for sale to the highest bidder, to use to treat others already diagnosed. 

Maggie Malone, an attorney for the ACLU, has formed an attachment with a woman and her toddler in a camp at the border, waiting for asylum entry to the U.S. While Maggie wants to help reform immigration law, especially during the virus, she is especially concerned with the young mother and child after losing contact with them during a shut-down of the border. 

The book was a real page-turner with enemies on multiple fronts. People are afraid of anything outside their homes, as an exposure to the pandemic could mean probable death. From the legal front, virtual court changes the playing field immensely. The story earned 3 out of 5 stars. While this is the third book in the Pierce Evangelista political thriller series, it read fine alone, especially with the involvement of Moses Black and Maggie Malone. This would be recommended to readers who enjoy sci-fi medical stories and political/legal thrillers. 

{click here to purchase via my Amazon Affiliates link}

Becki Bayley is a corporate drone and mother who fills her time with well-managed engagements and reading in the moments in between. See what else she’s up to on her blog: SweetlyBSquared.com.

GIVEAWAY:

One of my lucky readers will win a copy of When Canaries Die!

Enter via the widget below. Giveaway will end on Wednesday, June 11th, at 11:59pm ET, and winner will be notified the next day via email, and must respond within 24 hours, or an alternate winner will be chosen.

U.S. residents only, please.

Good luck!

When Canaries Die, by Luis Figueredo

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Book Review - This American Woman: A One-in-a-Billion Memoir, by Zarna Garg

Guest review by: Becki Bayley

“Excuse me,” said one of those early 2000s women whose name could be Brittany or Amber or Tiffany, “but are you even a student here?”

“Me?” I said. “No.”

“Why are you in our group meeting?” said Bramfany.

Everyone stared at me.

“I just think it’s interesting,” I said.

“It is interesting,” said Bramfany. “Don’t you think that if business school is so interesting, you should apply to business school and pay for business school?” 

“Oh, no, I can’t pay for school again. I already have a law degree.”

“Oh, for India?” she said, like I had a degree for a dollhouse.

“No, no, I’m licensed to practice law in the state of New York.”

“So again, why are you, a lawyer, hanging out with business school students?”

What was wrong with me? Was I really this misdirected?

Zarna Garg never imagined that her interesting way of observing the world around her could evolve into a successful career in comedy after moving to the U.S. and getting her law degree.

Official synopsis:

Throughout Zarna’s whole childhood in India, everyone called her “so American” just for reading the newspaper, having deep thoughts, and talking back to anyone over the age of thirty. When Zarna’s dad tried to marry her off at age fourteen, Zarna fled—first to the streets of Mumbai and ultimately to the glittering paradise of Akron, Ohio, where she got to become American for real.

On Zarna’s very American quest to find herself and her calling, she threw herself wholeheartedly into roles like dog-bite lawyer, crazy perfectionist stay-at-home mom, Indian matchmaker, prizewinning screenwriter, and more. It wasn’t until a dare led her to a stand-up comedy open mic that Zarna finally found her spiritual home: getting paid cold hard cash for her big fat mouth.

And as Zarna discovered, after surviving the brutal streets of Mumbai, the cutthroat world of stand-up comedy is nothing.

Zarna is a much later child in her parents’ lives, which doesn’t stand out to her much until her siblings are grown, married, and out of the house,and her mother dies, making her marriage (at age 14) her father’s next goal. While it was certainly more traumatic at the time, her retelling of the story in this amusing memoir gives a great sample of Zarna’s humor, since she obviously survived.

The story of Zarna’s marriage, parenting, and evolution of careers was inspiring and entertaining. The story earned 3 out of 5 stars, and her other books would probably prove equally amusing. This (and most likely her other books) could be recommended to those who enjoy parenting stories, books about realized dreams, and stories about Indian cultures and people.

{click here to purchase via my Amazon Affiliate link - hardcover is 53% off, as of this writing!}

Becki Bayley is a woman whom her husband says is awesome. He questions whether there is anything else. See what they’re up to on her blog, SweetlyBSquared.com.

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