Tag Archive for Random House

Book Review: The Expats by Chris Pavone

  • Title: The Expats
  • Author: Chris Pavone
  • Hardcover: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Crown (March 6, 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0307956350
  • ISBN-13: 978-0307956354

ABOUT THE BOOK

Kate Moore is a working mother, struggling to make ends meet, to raise children, to keep a spark in her marriage . . . and to maintain an increasingly unbearable life-defining secret. So when her husband is offered a lucrative job in Luxembourg, she jumps at the chance to leave behind her double-life, to start anew.

She begins to reinvent herself as an expat, finding her way in a language she doesn’t speak, doing the housewifely things she’s never before done—playdates and coffee mornings, daily cooking and never-ending laundry. Meanwhile, her husband works incessantly, at a job Kate has never understood, for a banking client she’s not allowed to know. He’s becoming distant and evasive; she’s getting lonely and bored.

Then another American couple arrives. Kate soon becomes suspicious that these people are not who they say they are, and she’s terrified that her own past is catching up to her. So Kate begins to dig, to peel back the layers of deception that surround her. She discovers fake offices and shell corporations and a hidden gun, a mysterious farmhouse and numbered accounts with bewildering sums of money, and finally unravels the mind-boggling long-play con that threatens her family, her marriage, and her life.
Stylish and sophisticated, fiercely intelligent and expertly crafted, The Expats proves Chris Pavone to be a writer of tremendous talent.

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Faith and Fangs

In celebration of the movie release of New Moon, the sequel to the Twilight saga by Stephanie Meyer, I offer you the Faith and Fangs blog tour.

For concerned parents who worry that their kids may be obsessing a little too much about vampires, they will find Touched by a Vampire: Discovering Hidden Messages in the Twilight Saga by Beth Felker Jones and Thirsty by Tracey Bateman, an excellent Christian alternative to the mainstream vampire novels.

I am a parent and I am vampire obsessed. In fact, I am going to watch New Moon with my daughters and their friends tomorrow. The proliferation of the vampire genre doesn’t really bother me but I can see how it can be a concern for some people especially the ones who are religious. Me, I worry more about how to burn fat than how to keep myself from burning in hell. However, I found these books to be very informative and a refreshing change to the genre.

I received copies of these books from Multnomah Books, a division of Random House.
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Two More Great Fall Reads

Here are two more books in this Fall Reads Book Tour. I had hoped to be finished reading these two by now, but you know how it goes sometimes, so I ended up making a separate review post for What Matters Most which I’ve finished reading and this post is just to tell you about two more books that I will be reading and maybe you’d like to read along with me. I will update this post with My Thoughts as I finish reading the books.

Book: Leaving Carolina
Author: Tamara Leigh
Release Date: Sep 15, 2009
ISBN: 9781601421661

Summary:

Piper Wick left her hometown of Pickwick, North Carolina, twelve years ago, shook the dust off her feet, ditched her drawl and her family name, and made a new life for herself as a high-powered public relations consultant in LA. She’s even “engaged to be engaged” to the picture-perfect U.S. Congressman Grant Spangler.

Now all of Piper’s hard-won happiness is threatened by a reclusive uncle’s bout of conscience. In the wake of a health scare, Uncle Obadiah Pickwick has decided to change his will, leaving money to make amends for four generations’ worth of family misdeeds. But that will reveal all the Pickwicks’ secrets, including Piper’s.

Though Piper arrives in Pickwick primed for battle, she is unprepared for Uncle Obe’s rugged, blue-eyed gardener. So just who is Axel Smith? Why does he think making amends is more than just making restitution? And why, oh why, can’t she stay on task? With the Lord’s help, Piper is about to discover that although good PR might smooth things over, only the truth will set her free.

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