Anne Hart

Have you ever called in an anonymous tip to the police?  If you read The Monsters We Make by Kali White, you would be calling in every slow vehicle that drives by your house, anyone who ever offered your kid candy, and any house with an attic or basement.  I’m not sure my kids will ever be let out of the house again after reading it.  Sammy and Crystal Cox are siblings growing up in the 1980s.  They live with their Mom who works two jobs and is a bit clueless.  Crystal has a vision disability where she is legally blind but she writes for the school yearbook and newspaper.  Following the disappearances of two paperboys from their small Midwestern town, Crystal decides it’s the perfect story to win a writing contest for a scholarship. Officer Dale Goodkind is the detective on the case who is haunted by his past.  This book is gut-wrenching!  We are given two possible men who are the potential monsters kidnapping the boys.  Sammy and Crys...

Can you imagine being the child of a serial killer?  In Stacy Willingham’s A Flicker in the Dark Chloe Davis is a psychologist in Baton Rouge.  She became a psychologist to deal with the trauma of being the daughter of a serial killer.  She has a loving, doting fiancé, Daniel.  Then one of Chloe’s patients is murdered and she’s once again haunted by her past when six teenage girls were killed.  Chloe is determined to not let the past repeat itself which makes her quite the heroine with compelling vulnerability. Her brother, Coop, disagrees with Chloe’s choice of fiancé and is quite vocal about it.  Chloe’s mother is in a semiconscious state in a nursing home but has answers Chloe needs not just to the past murders but also to the current ones.  Chloe resorts to denial and abusing prescription drugs when she can’t cope.  It doesn’t help when a reporter calls because he’s doing a 20th-anniversary story of her father going to prison for the or...

What would your stage name be if you were a stripper?  I’m going with Aquamarine since colors seems to be popular.  In Marie Rutkoski’s Real Easy we get to know the inner world of a strip club.  Samantha aka Ruby is a stripper in 1999 at the Lovely Lady.  She’s such an awesome person.  An amazing stepmom, loving girlfriend, adored daughter, and a caring coworker.  She also suffers from a medical condition in which she doesn’t have female hormones, so she takes medications to keep her more feminine qualities.  We get to know a handful of strippers who all have colorful lives which we get to appreciate through the chapters they narrate.  One of the strippers gets killed and another is missing.  In the investigation into the murder and disappearance, we also get to know, Detective Holly Meylin, an investigator whose son died when her husband leaves him in a hot car.  She’s traumatized but keeps going the best she can.  Holly see...