Till Murder Do Us Part

Till Murder Do Us Part

Imagine kissing your husband goodbye as he leaves for work, only to never see him again. Hours later, detectives show up with questions. His car was found with a bullet hole in the door and animal blood smeared on the seat. In his desk drawer, there is a book detailing how to fake your death......

Eric, now Steve begins a new life in Colorado.

Steve is new to the area, living in a hotel, has no family, and is on the run from the CIA. At least that's what he told Kathi when they started dating. She drank in the mysterious aura that surrounded him. She believed his stories, even when he said he was a hitman for the CIA. But there was some truth to his stories. He was on the run, not from the CIA, but from his wife and three children. But he also may have been trying to escape a murder charge as well.

Kathi started asking questions near their 12th wedding anniversary. She wanted to get him something sentimental as a gift and thought a high school year book would be perfect. Steve claimed everything he owned from his past life burned up in a house fire. So when she called his old high school, she was put in contact with one of his classmates who had never heard of Steve Marcum. She bought the yearbook anyway, and found a picture of young Steve....only his name was Eric Wright. Who on earth was she married to?!

I think the best thing to come from this crazy case, was that Kathi actually solved a 20+ year cold case based on small details Steve had given her over the years. She believed he had actually killed someone. When he described taking a man's life, she could see the truth in his lies.

Ramp Up to Murder

I honestly was not expecting this story to be about a professional skateboarder turned murder.

Mark Rogowski meets his future girlfriend Brandi and her best friend, Jessica at a warehouse party. The two immediately hit it off and quickly become the hottest couple on the scene. Mark is killing it in the vert competitions and Brandi is creating a name for herself in the modeling world. It's the perfect combination of kids with money who have no idea how to spend it.

Mark hits a rough patch when street-skating takes over. There's no money coming in, but hopefully a trip to Germany will help Mark become relevant once again. Instead, a near death experience leads him to Jesus and quickly sours his relationship with Brandi. What no one expected was the threatening calls and stalking that soon followed their break up. Mark was obsessive, possessive, and manipulative. He even managed to sneak into Brandi's gated community and take back all the gifts he gave her.

I know what you're thinking, he really murdered his ex? No, but he did rape and murder her one time bestie, Jessica. In a fraction of a second, Jessica was a stand in for Brandi, and he took out all of his anger on her. He eventually confessed and at this time has been behind bars for 27 years.

Looking for the rest of the Murder is Forever Series?

Murder, Interrupted

Home Sweet Murder

Murder Beyond the Grave

Murder Thy Neighbor

Murder of Innocence

You Should Have Left

What a delightfully, spooky, little read.

I was wandering my local bookstore last week when this cover caught my eye. I saw that it's written in letter format, which is my weakness. So I quickly flipped to the end of the book and was FASCINATED with the ending. A quick Goodreads search showed one of my friends giving it a four star rating.....that's all it took to convince me I needed my own copy.

 

You Should Have Left is a horror novella coming in with a whopping 114 pages.

A screenwriter rents a massive house for his family with the hopes that he'll be able to get some writing done while his wife and child enjoy the vacation. I know you're probably thinking that sounds like The Shining and honestly, you're not wrong. But this was spookier than The Shining to me. It's one of those books that's written so well that the paranoia doesn't set in until you finish reading it.

Told through letter/diary entries, we watch the main character begin losing grip with reality, which is interspersed with ideas for his upcoming movie sequel. He writes of pictures on walls, dreams in foretelling rooms, women with cold black eyes, spirits standing in this child's room. The halls go on forever, doors to the exact same room, reflections that literally scared the crap out of me.

It wasn't scary in the traditional sense, but it definitely was scary enough that I convinced myself someone was standing in my hallway while I was brushing my teeth this morning. The paranoia snuck up on me, but damn this was a good book.

Unacceptable

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & The Making of The College Admissions Scandal gives us a definitive look into the complexity of the scandal. We learn about how Rick Singer gained clients through word of mouth. We see dozens of parents falling into his well scripted trap and agreeing to go along with his lies. Honestly, Singer was only caught because one of his coaches was arrested in relation to a different crime and let his name slip.

Rick Singer has been running the college admission game for the last 20 years. He started small in the early 2000's, telling parents and teens to lie about their race/ethnicity on their applications, they could always feign innocence once they've made it into their interview.

Once Singer realized there was a market for college admissions counselors, he was determined to be the best one out there. He created an organization called "The Key" and quickly began funneling "donations" through his business. He was known for utilizing the side door for college admissions, a sure fire way to guarantee students would get into schools such as USC, UCLA, University of Texas, even Yale and Harvard. He convinced parents that just donating money to the school of their child's dreams wouldn't be enough to get them an acceptance letter. They needed high ACT/SAT scores, which could be guaranteed with the low, low price of $15k. From there Singer and parents would create a donation/payment plan for his services, which often included toting the potential student as an athletic recruit.

It's insane to me how long Rick Singer got away with this scheme of his.

What's even crazier is these infamous parents had given their kids virtually every opportunity and still chose to bribe their way into college. Many of these children would have been fine getting into these schools on their own, their grades and extracurriculars were more than enough to be noticed by the admissions office. Yet their parents still wanted that guarantee, they wanted to know it was a sure thing.

 

My question, in the aftermath of all this.....

What do the schools do with the kids they've already accepted?

Many of these children had no idea of their parents illicit scheme. This book only mentioned the aftermath of one student, who with his non-fraud test scores, they still would have admitted him. Therefore, he was allowed to stay in school there.

 

It just blows my mind that this flew under the radar for so long.

 

Looking for other books on the College Admission Scandal?

Admission

Reputation

I first became obsessed with Sara Shepard when I found the Pretty Little Liars series. Since then, she has gone on to write multiple YA series and a handful of adult fiction books as well. I grabbed a copy of Reputation at Target and headed home to start reading it.

Reputation starts with a computer hack, some has created a server and released all of the student's and staff's private emails for four ivy league schools. Scandals are breaking out everywhere you turn, reputations are getting ruined, rape allegations are coming out, racist teachers are being exposed, oh and the affairs are flowing.

So this book follows five main characters; Kit, Lynn, Willa, Laura, and Raina.

Each of these women have secrets they want to keep but they all come out in the end.

Kit is married to Greg Strasser, a doctor who couldn't save her first husband. When the hack breaks, it turns out Greg had been emailing a character named Lolita about their love affair. But when he turns up dead, all eyes are on Kit.

Lynn is a pining for Kit's job, but she doesn't quite know how to get it. Maybe slip an ambien into her drink, making the donors think she's a sloppy drunk? Then there's Lynn's relationship with her own husband which honestly makes me sick. The facade she wants to keep up makes her look manipulative and it bothers me that she was okay with what her husband was doing on the sidelines.

 

Willa flies in from California to help her sister, Kit, get back on her feet. The two women have never been close, but that's because they're both keeping secrets from each other. But with Kit's go-ahead, Willa begins investigating Greg's death; not for her investigative reporting job at home, but because she wants to help Kit find answers.

 

New mom Laura is married to the head cop over the Greg Strasser murder investigation. But there's no way that her husband can possibly tie her back to Greg, can he?  But when she tries to tell him the truth, the abuse starts. She can only keep so many secrets before she jumps.

Raina, her storyline was weird. She lied about literally everything. She would repeatedly trap men for money. She had nothing, came from nothing, but wanted to be something. That's how she got almost $15k from a generous donor she didn't even have to sleep with.

Now how do all these women tie together?

Honestly, you could probably guess.

But this book still took me on a ride and I would love for this to actually be a television show.

Looking for other fiction books by Sara Shepard?

The Heiresses

 

Looking for YA books by Sara Shepard?

Ali's Pretty Little Lies (PLL Prequel)

The Perfectionists (The Perfectionists #1)

The Good Girls (The Perfectionists #2)

Witch

 

Witch: The True Story of Las Vegas's Most Notorious Female Killer

This story was a whirlwind. I was expecting a female serial killer who dabbled in the dark arts. But what I got instead of this treasure trove of a crime family.

 

There are several people within this family that the book follows.

The mother, Christine Smith, went to prison for shooting her lover. The father, Leroy Smith, was deeply invested in witchcraft and Satanism. His last wife makes an appearance before the book is over too. Then there's the kids, Travis and Brookey. No one has seen of heard from Travis since the early 2000's, to this day he has not been located. Brookey takes up the bulk of the story. She shot one of her husbands in the neck and is suspected to have killed him a few weeks later. She admitted to stuffing her mother in a trashcan and concealing her inside her storage unit for close to four years. She attempted to use a stun gun to immobilize her stepmother towards the end of her father's life. Some investigators even believe Brookey is also responsible for her brother's disappearance.

There are some things that aren't quite as heinous.

Christine and Brookey were involved in multiple theft rings where they would steal high end items, just to steal them. Both received charges for their involvement. They would also frequent a rehab center for Native American men who struggled with alcoholism. Brookey read tarot cards with her mother's Las Vegas neighbors.

But what keeps tickling the back of my mind, Brookey told Christine's friends and neighbors that she was taking her mother to live with Travis, her brother. But we all knew Travis was homeless....that makes me wonder if she was involved with his death as well. In a way, it seems she was stating the obvious. She knew her mother was dead, she knew Travis was dead. So the easiest lie, wasn't really a lie at all. Her mother and brother really were in the same place after all.

All of It Is You

This was word vomit.

 

This was like a misspelled tumblr post that somehow started trending.

 

This was like my high school friends trying to rap.

No flow, no rhythm, just word association. 

To be fair, Nico says in the introduction that they know this isn't a magnificent piece of work. It was almost like stream of consciousness writing. This poetry book is divided up into three main sections: body, earth, and universe. Each section includes poems dedicated to the main topic. It took me FOREVER to grasp one of the main aspects of the book, all of it is you. Since each poem is almost like an ode to the title, when Nico mentions "you" in the poem, they are actually referring to the title. Which literally did not make sense to me until I set the book down for a few hours.

Now the writing does get better as the book goes on, but it is not good by any means. There were a few poems that gave me hope for the rest of the book but that was quickly dashed on the next page. 

While I didn't love Nico's poetry book, I absolutely adored their autobiography, Space Between.

 

Looking for other books by Nico Tortorella?

Space Between

I Would Leave Me If I Could

Halsey wrote a book.

I repeat

HALSEY WROTE A BOOK.

I'm honestly not a big fan of poetry but when I was home for Christmas, I started flipping through my sister's copy of I Would Leave Me If I Could. I made a decision right then and there to buy myself a copy too.

 

Y'all, Halsey has been through some shit. These poems are raw, they're honest, they're real. She tackles topics such as violence, drug abuse, sexual assault, suicide, mental illness, and fame. It blows my mind to think she's barely a year older than me. I could not imagine going through the things she went through and still being able to see the light through all the darkness.

"Memorize" and "Wish You the Best" were two of my favorite poems. There's some that will literally break your heart and there's some that will have you singing it in Halsey's voice. But they all make up a bigger part of her story and that's honestly beautiful.

This collection of poetry really just solidified how much I love Halsey.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll be listening to her entire discography tonight.

The Devil All the Time

Oh my god, this was gritty.

So a few months ago my husband suggested we watch this new Netflix movie starring Robert Pattinson. I was kind of on the fence about it, but that movie stayed true to the name. So when I was walking through my local bookstore, I found a copy of the book. I thought, "Well, if the movie was a huge mind-fuck, I can only imagine how descriptive the book must be." So, obviously, I bought myself a copy.

For those that have seen the movie, you know how rough this story is.

Take that grittiness and multiple it by 10 and that's how rough this book is.

Donald Ray Pollock created the fictional cities of Knockemstiff, Ohio, and Cold Creek, West Virginia. Two cities where bad things are bound to happen. The story follows a few different characters. Arvin, who lost both his parents in horrific ways. Carl who keeps pimping out his wife, Sandy. The town sheriff who happens to be Sandy's brother. Roy and Theodore, the traveling preachers. And of course, Preacher Teagardin who is grossly attracted to the younger girls in his new congregation.

Yeah, there's a lot going on in this book. But somehow, all the story lines intersect in tragic ways. Trouble has a way of following all these characters to their bitter ends. This is not a redemption story. This is a story of murder, suicide, and rape. There is nothing but grit dripping from the pages of this book.

I was also amazed at how closely the movie followed the novel.

But beware, there are some scenes in the book where it made perfect sense as to why they left those scenes out of the movie.

This book was pure tragedy.

But I loved it.

In The Country We Love

Diane Guerrero is an absolutely amazing actress.

If you've ever seen Orange is the New Black, then you know her as Maritza Ramos. If you've ever seen Jane the Virgin, you know her as Lina. But what makes her an amazing actress is watching her in scenes that seem to parallel her own life.

Diane came home from school one day to an empty house.

She knew her parents had been taking.

She knew this day would come.

At 14 years old, Diane's parents were deported.

They were sent back to Colombia, away from Diane.

 

Diane being the only American citizen in their family, stayed stateside with the help of her friends gracious parents. She continued going to her performing art school, she went on to college, she did normal teenager stuff. But she was doing it on her own. She had no one there to guide her. The things that happened in Diane's life were completely out of her control. But being orphaned at such a young age really took its toll on her. By 22 years old, she had developed a drinking problem, a cutting problem, and even contemplated suicide on her darkest days.

Reading Diane's story reminded me that we never know what someone else is going through. I was excited to read her memoir because I knew her as an actress. I was in no way expecting her to write down the darkest moments of her life to use as a way of letting others like her know they are not alone. She is beyond brave. I am so glad she wrote her story.

The Midnight Library

Three days into 2021 and I've officially finished reading my first book.

So there's a few things about this reading experience that I want to talk about in this review. To start, I had my eye on this book for a long while before I found out that Once Upon a Book Club featured this in one of their monthly subscription boxes. Obviously, I ordered it right away.

Once Upon a Book Club is a monthly subscription book box that features a different book + goodies each month. The idea of the box is that each item you receive relates back to something in the book. Each gift is marked with the page number that you're supposed to open it on! They even leave you little reminders of when to open your gift! This immersive experience was the highlight of reading this book.

The book itself is not quite what I was expecting but I ended up loving it anyway. Main character, Nora is having a bad day, a bad week, a bad year. She can't seem to catch a break. Her brother won't speak to her, her ex-fiance is fine without her, her cat just died, and she lost her job. Yeah, that's the textbook definition of a bad day. Nora decides she really has nothing left to live for.

She decides then that the best way for her to keep living, is to not.

She's fully prepared to die, and her medication was the quickest route there.

But she doesn't die.

She finds herself wandering the massive corridor of a library, run by her favorite grade school librarian. Ms. Elm explains this place is The Midnight Library, created by Nora, for Nora. It's a place of endless possibilities, endless lives that Nora can step right into. These parallel lives are all lives Nora could have ended up in with just one small change in decision. She can choose to try on as many lives as she so pleases, as long as she decides she doesn't want to die. She just has to keep jumping from life to life, book to book, until she finds the one that makes her forget about The Midnight Library.

This book was incredible.

The unique concept really drew me in and kept me hooked from the beginning. Once Upon a Book Club also kept me on my toes, wondering when I'd be able to open my next gift.

This was a wonderful book to start my new year.