July 2024 Reading List

 First of all - how did July go by so fast?! Next - eight books read this month - all of them good.

The Truth About The Devlins is Lisa Scottoline's latest offering. It is about a family all of whom are successful lawyers except one. I have always liked this author's books. This one was especially satisfying.

The Watchmaker's Hand is #16 in Jeffery Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme series. An old nemesis is back to taunt the team. These books hardly ever end the way you think they will.   

A Calamity of Souls is the newest book by David Baldacci, one of my favorite authors. This book is set in 1968 in southern Virginia. With some parallels to Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, it is a harrowing story about a white lawyer defending a black man accused of murder. If you've forgotten what the 60's were like, this excellent read will take you right back there.

Peter Nichols is a new author for me. Granite Harbor, about a serial killer in a small town in coastal Maine, is a well written, satisfactory mystery if you like trying to figure out whodunits.

Switchboard Soldiers by Jennifer Chiaverini is another of her novels based on facts. I love history and I really like learning about the roles women played during the times of war. 

An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin is about the political roles she and her husband played in Washington in the 1960's. Kearns is one of my favorite people and authors. This memoir brought back so many memories of those years - JFK, LBJ, Vietnam, Kent State, the Democratic convention in Chicago, protests, the threat of nuclear war.... - turbulent times during my formative years.

What Happens in Paradise and Troubles in Paradise are the last two books in the Paradise trilogy by Elin Hilderbrand. I wrote last month, after reading the first in the series, of how I was reminded of my own experience on St. John and the other US Virgin Islands. And these two books did somewhat the same except that I was more caught up in the story lines than memories. At the end of the last book a category five hurricane decimates much of the islands. It was based on the real hurricanes, Irma and then Maria, both cat 5's, that struck in 2017.

I have enjoyed Hilderbrand's books in her Nantucket series, but I liked this trilogy more. I will read her newest, Swan Song, which, as the title suggests is her last in the Nantucket series.

My son Douglas and his wife Shelly visit St. John as often as they can. After the hurricanes, he went to help rebuild as much as possible in the limited time he had there. This photo of him was taken after they had cleared debris and began construction.