Bark At The Ghouls

This was a fun change of pace. My 2 Cents for Free! The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Philip Fracassi Released September 2025 Source: Netgalley Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads If you like a well plotted mystery/thriller/serial killer story with some moments of dark humor and attention to characterization (no one here is a faceless throwaway character) you might want to add this one to your fall reading list. Everyone seems to love a slasher but sometimes they get a little cheesy or too formulaic for me and I think I overdosed on them, so now when I see everyone raving about a book because it’s a “slasher” I usually stay away until the honest reader reviews start coming in. I’m super picky about them now and I need characters I can care about as well as an interesting plot or I doze off pretty quickly. This one caught my attention at Netgalley because it takes place in an old folk's retirement village and the characters are in their 70’s and 80’s a...

Unique and timely. This is a good one! My 2 Cents for Free! Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker Released January 2025 Source: Purchased @  Aardvark Book Club Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads A little mystery, a little tragedy and a whole lot of horrors await a small group of crime scene cleaners as they wield their way through the early days of the Covid pandemic. A world that often feels overtaken by hatefulness and prejudice. As of this day (sometime in November of 2025), we are still dealing with Covid mutations and all of the mess and selfishness it has wrought out into the open, so I was a little wary of reading a novel about a time that still feels like a festering open wound. I feared it would be too depressing and turns out it was but yet it really wasn't, and I credit that to the storytelling and characterization. Cora Zeng is the main character and she's lonely and closed off and dealing with trauma but as the story moves a...

If anyone has some patience to spare, I am in desperate need. My 2 Cents for Free! The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark Released June 2025 Source: Purchased @ Gibson's Bookstore Get it at your local library or see more @  Goodreads The Ghost Writer is a book for people who have endless patience. I’ve discovered that person is not me. This story is about Olivia who is a ghost writer who has changed her name because her father is a famous writer with murder accusations from the past that surround him like a haze. She doesn’t want anything to do with him because he was a terrible father. Can’t say as I blame her really. Anyhow, now he is penning his last book, suffering from Lewy Body Dementia and needs her assistance to bring it all together. She accepts because she needs money. Can’t blame her for that either. The book then bounces back and forth between the present day and the past as she attempts to make sense of his scribblings and clues that may or may not reveal the murderer of the u...