The Ninth Wife by Amy Stolls

Bess is a successful woman with an interesting career living in Washington, D.C. So why is she 35 and unmarried? She wonders the same thing.

And then the man of her dreams appears and the future looks bright and hopeful, even in light of her only living relatives–her grandparents–preparing to move all the way across the country. Rory is talented, funny, smart, and Irish. Unfortunately, he has also been married before. Eight times.

So when he proposes to Bess, she must come to terms with his past as well as her own. Rory’s story sets her on a journey to discover whether or not she can handle being a ninth.

Stolls’ writing is funny and sharp. The strange changes in tense finally made sense to me about halfway through the book. That is the sort of thing that can totally ruin a book for me, normally. All the characters she introduces gain some depth and are believable, even if they are a bit far out.

The book is a lovely exploration of marriage, relationships, and life.

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The Restorer by Amanda Stevens

As I sat down to start reading the brand new book, The Restorer, I checked a few reviews that had come before me and noticed a strong theme of “This book is VERY CREEPY.” Personally, I have never been a huge fan of being creeped out as it brings me very intense dreams that scare the ninny out of me. However, I pressed on, as the subject and setting of the book (ghosts in Charleston) are of a particular interest to me. The idea of a heroine who restores graveyards also intrigued me.

Amelia Gray happens to really enjoy her work restoring cemeteries. It’s solitary and comforting to bring order back to someone’s final resting place. So when she happens upon a rather fresh body in a very old cemetery, her world turns upside down. A mysterious detective arrives in her life and suddenly she is pulled into a rather unconventional murder investigation.

I was really pleased to find that yes, the book was super creepy in parts, but the tension was never dragged out so long that I just couldn’t take it. The heroine is not a typical modern tough female either. She is strong, but not supernaturally so and her weaknesses are clear and real.

The characters are really engaging as well. It blends a lot of what people enjoyed in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with any good secret society story like The DaVinci Code. It shares plot elements of both, but is as well written as “Garden” and as interesting as “Code.” You are never really sure who you can trust.

But a word of caution… if you are like me and detest a cliffhanger ending that makes you impatient for the next book to be published… maybe put this one off until the second book comes out.

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Spirit Dances by C. E. Murphy

Joanne Walker is a cop. She also is a healer… a shaman. Her magical gifts should be an asset to her job, but now that she has come to accept them and begin to understand them, she still needs to master them to make them truly effective. And she has to remember to use them when a split-second decision can save her partner’s life. Or, she can just rely on her gun.

After she saves her partner’s life, she runs into a woman whose life she inadvertently saved while working on a much larger problem. In gratitude, she is given tickets to a Native American dance performance… a performance that transforms her, quite literally. But unfortunately, the performance ends in tragedy and Joanne must find the killer.

Her investigation tests and stretches her powers like never before. And it tests her relationship with her boss like never before as well. The pace of the story is quick and intense and the dialogue is fun and easy. A great leisure read and another fine installment in the Walker Papers series.

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