Reviews + Articles

Sweet Pepper Hero by J.J. Cook

Sweet Pepper, Tennessee is known for its peppers, its ghosts, and the secrets kept in a small mountain community. When author J.J. Cook thrusts fire chief Stella Griffin into the middle of local whiskey wars in Sweet Pepper Hero, Stella and the reader discover...

A Thousand Falling Crows by Larry D. Sweazy

Larry D. Sweazy's See Also Murder was one of my favorite books of 2015. Now, he returns with a story that's even grittier, an atmospheric, richly detailed book out of the violent Depression years. A Thousand Falling Crows features lonely, lost people, in...

Anne Cleeland’s Acton & Doyle Giveaway

As promised, I have a terrific giveaway to kick off 2016. Anne Cleeland has offered to give away one set of her New Scotland Yard mysteries featuring Kathleen Doyle and Chief Inspector Michael Sinclair, Lord Acton. She's a rookie, a Constable, and he's "the...

Happy Anniversary

Missed it! Well, that might be the first time ever that I missed the anniversary. Well, I didn't really miss it. I realized at 10:00 PM that it was Jan. 6. Eleven years ago I wrote the first post for the blog that would eventually become Lesa's Book Critiques....

Born in Ice by Nora Roberts

Is there anything quite as satisfying as a book in a Nora Roberts trilogy? As much as I love mysteries, there's just something about her characters and her descriptions of their lives, their homes, and, in the case of the Irish Born books, the descriptions of Irish...

Murder in Hindsight by Anne Cleeland

When I told Kaye Wilkinson Barley that I had just finished Anne Cleeland's Murder in Hindsight, I said, "sigh", and she agreed. I've finished all three of the novels about Doyle and Acton, and it's going to be hard to let the characters go. Make no mistake about...