The Literate Kitty

An aimless but likeable twenty-nine-year-old, currently crashing in someone’s garage during another sweltering Texas summer.   (And not a pimped-out one, either; he’s crammed in with a bunch of stuff the owner stores there.) The problem is, jobs have never really stuck with him, so for years he’s just been floating from one situation to the next, smoking blunt after blunt and hooking up with other attractive men and beautiful women at every opportunity. But one day his casual, wake-and-bake lifestyle is thrown for a loop by a stranger’s arrival... a lawyer, who brusquely informs him that he’s the sole heir to his uncle’s fortune.  And that he needs to go to Austin (a place he’s never been)  right now , to claim it. Full of questions without answers, Peter Key can’t begin to imagine the dangers awaiting him, in the debut of Jack Friday’s new unlikely-sleuth series,  Killer Vibes .   The first question Peter has is why him? He’d only met Uncle Forrest a handful of...

A whirlwind courtship—followed by a lavish wedding in Beverly Hills, with a handsome, successful groom and his younger, beautiful blonde bride. It sounds like a fairy tale. But—as with many things that appear picture-perfect on first glance—something much darker lies just beneath the surface of this glamorous marriage... and is about to shatter the beautiful illusion, in Natalie Barelli’s twisted tale of marital bliss,  The Housewife . ____________________________________________________________________ Many women want a fabulous career... followed later by marriage and perhaps a family. Not Jodie. With chef-level culinary skills and housekeeping wizardry, she’s always longed to become a housewife... the mistress of her own carefully-curated home, adored by her doting husband and the envy of their friends. And, following a chance meet-cute with hunky Dr. Roy Davies—a psychologist, best-selling author, and esteemed resident of his tony Beverly Hills neighborhood—it seems she’s set t...

Breakups suck, there’s no way around it. Even if you’re the initiator, relieved to be free of a relationship that’s no longer working, there could also be some regret or bitterness mixed in.  And if you’re on the other end of a breakup—the one being left behind—it’s so much worse. Shock, loss, confusion, depression... you might feel those things, keenly. But what if you learned of a place specializing in helping people get over devastating breakups... and healing broken hearts?  Such a place is the setting for Camilla Sten’s latest thriller,  The Break-Up Retreat .   Dr. Martina Hastings is something of a Renaissance woman. Charismatic psychologist and best-selling author of multiple relationship books, she’s also the founder of an exclusive wellness clinic catering to women stuck in relationship hell. Whether someone has endured an excruciating breakup or is caught in a repetitive cycle of making terrible choices, Dr. Martina claims she can help, via her intimate, o...

When Olivia Blunt—assistant to the World’s Greatest Detective—spies a reunion invitation in boss Aubrey Merritt’s office mail, she’s ecstatic. Surely her stern boss will jump at the chance to hang out—and maybe even let loose a little—with the sorority sisters she hasn’t seen in four decades... right? Instead, the older woman promptly dashes Olivia’s hopes, declaring she most definitely does  not  plan to attend such annoying silliness. Several days later—after a visit from the husband of an old sorority friend—Merritt has changed her tune, though... and expects Olivia to accompany her. Why? Because the man’s wife—a retired Brigadier General who surely made many enemies during her career—is hosting the reunion at their New Mexico ranch... and has received a death threat. Handwritten, on the back of one of the invitations. And just like that, the unlikely detective and her (still frequently-disappointing) assistant are desert-bound, in Liza Tully’s follow-up to last year’s firs...

  A newly-orphaned girl finds her happy life upended when she’s unceremoniously shipped off to an irritable aunt whom she’s never met.   Both are relieved when the young woman is old enough to get a job as governess to another unwanted girl... and when she winds up falling in love with her boss, it feels like a fairy tale come true. The fairy tale takes a nasty turn, though, when she discovers that the man has been keeping a very big secret from her... and once again, she’s all alone. And it’s there, in the void, that she finally finds herself. Sound familiar?  (Hopefully that’s a rhetorical question, and you instantly recognized the plot of Charlotte Brontë’s  Jane Eyre .) But it’s also the basic premise of a clever reimagining of the Gothic classic, in Natasha Lester’s mesmerizing novel,  The Chateau on Sunset .   When young Aria Jones finds herself abruptly dumped on the sidewalk outside of an imposing hotel on L.A.’s Sunset Boulevard in 1957—so foreign ...

There are many “constants” in life—things you can rely on to happen or to be true.   One is that whenever there’s a widespread emergency—courtesy of either man or Mother Nature—two types of people will show up. The first are those there to help. Doesn’t matter if they’ve personally been affected or not, they want to do good. The second type are those solely there to take advantage of a bad situation.  Both play their parts in Joshua Moehling’s latest mystery,  Beneath a Broken Sky .   If you’ve ever had the terrible misfortune to be  in  a tornado—or even just to be  near  one—then you  know . You know the unbelievable sight of roofs blown off, outbuildings and lawn furniture sent pinwheeling who knows where... or whole buildings blown to smithereens. You understand the devastation of downed power lines everywhere you want to go... and of decades’—or  centuries’ —old trees, shattered and broken beyond what your heart can comprehend. When...