December Audiobooks

What a weird book month to end 2023! Thanks to The Running Grave it wasn't a total disaster. I only finished 4 books and that's for two reasons. First, The Running Grave is over 30 hours long so it almost counts as 3 books. Secondly, I've spent way too much time in the YouTube rabbit hole the past couple of months. That happens when I am reading books that I don't love so I avoid the books with other distractions. I"m sure that January will be better.

​Let me know the good books that you have read. I may need to revisit my wish list!

DNF
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochiti Gonzales - I thought it was going to be an interesting book about Puerto Rico history and culture. Instead it's a litany of social justice and feminist grievances by people who have had great opportunities and successes.
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The Running Grave
By Robert Galbraith, Read By Robert Glenister

This is #7 in the Cormoran Strike series and, IMHO, it's a huge improvement over the 6th book that had a lot of online chat room conversations. In The Running Grave, Cormoran Strike and his partner, Robin Ellacott, are hired to try to get a man's son out of a cult. This required Robin to go undercover in the cult. There are several side stories with parallel investigations, the agency being stalked and the romantic tension between Strike and Robin,

I really enjoy this series but you have to love a long book to get into these. This book clocked in at 34 hours and I didn't mind a minute of it. Let's face it, JK Rowling can write!

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A Stranger at the Door
By Jason Pinter, Read by Angela Dawe

This is #2 in the Rachel Marin series. I read the first book, Hide Away, in January. I liked the first book. Usually the second book is a series is even better. This one, however, was a let down.

Rachel is sort of a detective. She's not officially a detective but she sure thinks that she's smarter and better than all of the other detective in her town, including her boyfriend. She's also an over-protective and annoying Mom, an unlicensed "doctor" who can assess every medical crisis, heals from concussions overnight, has superhuman strength and throws tantrums when she doesn't get her way. She is massively unlikable.

The story opens when one of her son's teachers is brutally murdered. Soon the 14-year-old son starts coming home late and sneaking out at night. She's uber-security conscious and has the whole house wired with cameras and trackers so she figures out where he is going. She seems to think it's a good idea to confront the man who has recruited him for something that is never really explained.

I should have DNFed this book but I held out to finish it and it never got better. The character is too annoying to read any more if there ever is another in the series. 
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Independence
By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Read By Sneha Mathan

This is the second book that I've read by Divakaruni and she tells another good story about the history of India. This one centers on 3 daughters growing into adulthood around the time of India's independence from Great Britain and the partitioning of Pakistan.

Priya helps her father in his medical clinic and she dreams of being a doctor herself one day. Deepa is beautiful and has fallen in love with a Muslim and Jamini is a quiltmaker with her mother and is the sister often left out. When India and Pakistan are partitioned the sisters find themselves separated and fear that the separation might be permanent.

I didn't love this one as much as I loved The Last Queen but it was still a very good book with richly developed characters that seem real for the time. I would definitely read more by this author.

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Hope on the Inside
By Marie Bostwick, Read By Hillary Huber

I'll be honest, I didn't enjoy this book. I'm not even sure why I bought it. It's definitely not my genre. I must have picked it because there's a quilt theme.

Hope and her husband, Rick are empty nesters and Rick has suddenly lost the job that he's loved. This sends them into a bit of an emotional and financial tailspin. Hope eventually gets a part time job teaching crafts at a women's prison to help make ends meet. Through a quilting project she starts to bond with some of the inmates.

It's a fine book if you like a good easy read where dramas aren't too bad and everything works out in the end.  But the characters are kind of flat and totally predictable.

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