The Eight Heartbreaks of Hannukah

 Jean Meltzer has made writing Jewish romance novels a genre all its own.  She is becoming prolific in her writing and has also started promoting and encouraging other writers who write Jewish related romance to come together and share in her limelight.  She has created a community of writers and readers.  The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukah is her latest novel. 

The Eight Breakups of Hanukah is a clever take-off on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  Dickens brings Ebenezer Scrooge three ghosts, past, present and future to helpl cure him of his negative attitude toward Christmas and the people in his life.

Evelyn Schwartz uses work to escape any personal relationships because they make her uncomfortable.  She is a work-a-holic and her marriage with David, a doctor, ended two years ago.  But now the week before her Christmas special is supposed to air, the most important work event of her life, David shows up at the studio as the doctor on call.  As Evelyn negociates between her need to excel at work and her growing feelings of love toward David returning she is visited by eight ghosts, one for each night of Hanukah,  They each take her on a trip back to relive different moments in her relationship with David.  

This is an entertaining plot with lots of secrets revealed with each ghost's visit.  A clever way to tell the back story of David and Evelyn's relationship and what led to the  breakup.  Can the eight heartbreaks teach Evelyn a lesson in time?

This is Not a Game

 This is Not A Game a new locked room mystery by Kelly Mullen.  Very entertaining and lighthearted mystery with a fun plot and good twist ending.

Creating a grandmother and granddaughter detection team, as an unexpected winter storm captures a party of suspects in a mansion after a murder occurs.  Grandmother, Mimi is invited to an unusual party at her neighbors with a threat of extortion.  Mimi does not want to go alone so she invites her granddaughter, Addie to accompany her.  Addie fresh from a breakup with her boyfriend and work partner after he takes the rights to the video game they created together decides to join her grandmother at the party.

People start getting murdered,  the house is snowed in and police cannot get there until the storm ends.  In the meantime Mimi and Addie start searching the house for clues and interviewing the other guests. Mimi wants to encourage Addie to see the talnt she has that has been squashed by her ex.  Addie wants to help Mimi avoid being accused of being the killer.  This is a great chance for Addie to use her great deduction skills in real life, not just in a video game.  

The Case of the Missing Maid

 The Case of the Missing Maid is an interesting book written by Robert Osler.  This was an unusual mystery novel.  In 1898 Harriet Morrow is looking for new employment.  She is a young woman of twenty living with her school age brother.  Her parents are both dead.  She is leaving the bookkeeping job she had and applying to work for a detective agency as a female operative.  She is hired by the Prescott Detective Agency on a trial basis.  Dressed in a skirt with men's shoes and a bowler hat, she rides a bicycle as she searches for a missing maid.  This is her first assignment and she is determined to show her prowess at finding the maid.  

This is an entertaining book with some interesting character traits for the protagonist, Harriet.  At a time in history when being different was not looked on favorably, Harriet dresses different, and wants a more exciting job than most women are able to obtain.

She travels in new circles as she looks for the missing maid and learns some things about herself she was not sure of,  She also overcomes some of her naivety, and finds other people who are feeling similarly.

This mystery was a fun novel to read and I liked the way the author brought in other lifestyles that were not truly accepted in the early 19th century.

Typewriter Beach

 Typewriter Beach is the newest book in the Meg Waite Clayton collection.  What a wonderful historical novel.  This is another time stamped novel with paralllel plots taking the reader back and forth between 1957 and 2018.  In '57 Isabella Giori arrives in Carmel in the dead of night to quietly wait out a mistake she made while filming her first movie picture.  As she waits in the cottage owned by the studio so they will keep her under contract and loan her out to Alfred Hitchcock she meets Leon Chazen who is a writer.  He has been blacklisted accused by others in the  McCarthy Senator and his communist surveillance of the movie industry.  

2018 Gemma Chazen comes back to Carmel to spread her grandfather's ashes and empty his cottage.  She meets Sam who is living across the way.  He is working on creating computer games and was friendly with Leon.  Also living in the cottage next door is Isabella an aging movie star.  As their lives all start to interconnect we learn the back story that brings us to the three characters in Carmel now.

Secrets are revealed,  friendships are made, love develops and is recognized. A beautifully told story that captures the views and beliefs of the time period.  The seriousness of the red scare and the unfair way women were treated in Hollywood.  The characters are especially well developed.

The Stolen Queen

 The Stolen Queen by Fiona Davis is the latest of this author's fabulous historical novels. 

Taking the historical story of the rediscovery of Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh of ancient Egypt.  Using some of the real facts about the mummy of Hatshepsut and her discovery by mummy by Egyptologists Elizabeth Thomas and Christiane Deroche, Davis creates a wonderful novel around the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Also incorporated is the fashion icon Diana Vreeland, editor in chief of Vogue magazine, who also was known for creating the Met Gala between 1973-1989.

Using those historical tidbits as background Davis builds her novel around 1939 when anthropology student Charlotte Cross goes on a coveted dig in Egypt and falls in love and the all experince ends in tragedy.  Then in 1978 as Cross is working for the Met as the associate curator of the Department of Egyptian Art a an artifact comes across her desk that brings all her memories back from her time in Egpyt.

Also young Annie Jenkins a 19 year old is so excited when she lands a job working as Diana Vreeland's assistant for the Meet Gala.  When things go wrong, Annie must find a way to save her job, the event and recover the stolen queen, a valuable artifact stolen from the museum.

Annie and Charlotte team up to find the stolen statuette and find themselves helping each other.  Charlotte will have Annie by her side to help her face the demons of her past and Annie will have Charlotte there to help Annie clear her name and help her start over working at the Met. 

Such an entertaining novel, you can just picture hot desert sun, the hush of the tomb as the archeologists uncover Hatshepsut and other important finds.  Also the glamour of the Met Gala and the nononsense attitude of Diana Vreeland is palpable.

How to Share an Egg

 How to Share an Egg was a delightful memoir written by Bonny Reichert.  

Though there were no recipes in the book, which I was hoping for, I always find them an added bonus, this was an interesting memoir about what it is like to grow up the child of a Holocaust survivor.  We each grow up through both nature and nurture and it is always fascinating to try and figure out what the combination is that makes us who we are.  

Bonny is the child of a father who was a Holocaust survivor. He escaped the war and tries to down play the experience he went through to his children.  He always tries to have a very positive outlook on life.  He looks for the good in every situation.  He tells his children to be happy and not take things too seriously, not to work too hard.  

But Bonny takes on the guilt of having a wonderful, safe and happy life knowing that her father suffered in his early years.  She has trouble enjoying the present and feels guilty about her father's past.

This is the story of how she and her father relate to each other through food.  There is a family restaurant business and Bonny finds the way to communicate with her father best is through recipes of foods he remembers from his childhood before the atrocities of the war.  This is the unfolding of Bonny's life and where se finds herself fitting in.  We hear parts of her father's story and the family does go back to Poland and taste some memorable foods together.  

The reader will have to find their own recipes so they can taste the foods recreated in the book.  But you can always share an egg.

All This Could Be Yours

 Wow, what a fun look behind the scenes at the life of an author on the road. As author Tesse Calloway becomes an overnight sensation with her new novel, her life becomes a nightmare, of feeling stalked by someone from her past.  

Tesse leaves her corporate job behind to support her husband and two young children as a successful book author.  But she finds out life on the road publicizing your book from bookstore to bookstore is a hard life.  Away from home, missing the routine family adventures takes a toll.  Then add in a person who may know the secrets you are hiding from your past and the pressure intensifies. 

All these ingredients make for a twisting and mind bending psychological thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat and reading late into the night.  It also makes a reader wonder what secrets this author Hank Phillippi Ryan may be hiding from her readers.?  Should we be following her social media and trying to suss out some secrets?