Here are some books and authors you need to add to your reading list. These are very different genres and writing styles, but all of these books kept us riveted!  Enjoy.

You know that proverbial fly on wall?

Well that’s exactly what the reader is in this totally absorbing, shockingly honest, often funny, lessons to be learned book by celebrated psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb.  In her book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed she takes us through her own therapy sessions after being dumped by the “Boyfriend”, and then inside her sessions with four of her patients – an obnoxious highly successful TV series writer/producer; a young woman dying of cancer; an older women who contemplates suicide; a twenty-something who keeps making all the wrong choices. It’s one of the BEST books we’ve read in a while and it’s being turned into a TV series with Eva Longoria. Get the book.

Lost Roses – A Gripping Historical Novel

Martha Hall Kelly has done it again.  Her million-copy bestseller “The Lilac Girls” was a stunning debut novel with World War II and the Holocaust as it’s backdrop, that introduced us to the real-life heroine Caroline Ferriday. And Lost Roses, which goes back a generation to Caroline’s mother, takes us from the Hamptons, New York City, Paris, and St. Petersburgh the intertwining of the Ferriday’s with a family of Russian aristocrats who are relatives of the Romanovs.  It’s a beautifully written novel, that’s poignant, heartbreaking, and hopeful. Get the book.

Two Thrillers that Thrill

We recently discovered crime novelist Libby Fisher Hellmann and we stayed up way too late at night reading two of her page turning thrillers.  Fortunately, she has several others that we’ll be reading late into the night too.

Set the Night on Fire, starts off with the introduction of Dar, who has recently been released after serving a nearly 40-year prison term and is tracking down people from his past.  And what’s his connection to Lila Hilliard who has returned to her family home for the Christmas holidays and while she was out running errands house goes up in flames killing her father and brother. Later, she is attacked by a mysterious man on a motorcycle. As she sets out to uncover who is after her and why,  she discovers shocking information about her father’s past in Chicago as this thrilled brings us back to the turbulent late ‘60s –  the riots at the Democratic Convention… the struggle for power between the Black Panthers and SDS… and a group of young idealists who tried to change the world. Get the book.

In High Crimes, you’ll meet Chicago Chicago PI Georgia Davis, in this fifth in a series of crimes featuring her. Her latest assignment is solving the assassination of Resistance leader Dena Baldwin at a demonstration fourteen months after the 2016 election. The gunman, on a nearby hotel rooftop, dies within minutes of the shooting. As Georgia sifts through Dena’s 42,000 Facebook followers, she discovers that unknown enemies hiding behind fake profiles have infiltrated the group. She finds others who will do whatever it takes—including murder—to shield right-wing, wealthy elites. Get the book.