Here are two quick posts on some mysteries I’ve read and highly recommend.

“It was nearly an hour since the car had coughed and jerked and rolled to a crunch halt on the hard should of the southbound M5 motorway. That made it over half an hour since their mother had left them here to walk to an emergency phone.”

Snap by Belinda Bauer
Source: Advance review copy

Jack is left to tend to his little sisters while his mother goes to get help but their mother doesn’t come back. Three years have passed and Jack is still in charge of his sisters trying to keep them together which is increasingly getting more difficult as neighbors start to pay attention and he’s caught making bad decisions. Still he thinks that he may be on to finally finding out what happened to his mom.

DCI John Marvel, is not a team player but he is effective. He is determined to catch the burglar who is involved in home invasions. I think what I particularly liked about these book was that sometimes the results were not due to effective police work but just coincidences.

It is this, that I think sets this story apart from other typical mystery novels. I felt like felt more real and makes you wonder how often solving a crime is just a matter of a lucky break.

“The problem was, none of us ever agreed on the exact beginning. Was it when Fat Gal got the bucket of chalks for his birthday? Was it when we started drawing the chalk figures or when they started to appear on their own?

The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor
Source: Advance review copy

Eddie and his friends like any other teenage boys spend their days trying to find adventure. They start using chalk figures to communicate but one day they find themselves in the woods and discover the body of a young girl.

Now adults, their paths have taken them in different directions but for Ed, the past keeps coming back and he decides it’s time to find out what happened and were any of his friends or community members involved.

I thought the author did a great job with the way the story is told in alternating chapters between 1986 and 2016. While the kids lived in a small town, there seemed to be a lot of evil around them. I would love to see what this author comes up with next.

Hope you all had a happy weekend. We went to EAST event on Saturday and had a wonderful time. I think I’ve missed this even the last couple of years due to conflicts in schedule but you may have heard me talk about it before because it’s one of my most favorite events around town.

Now in it’s 18th year, the East Austin Studio Tour features more than 400 studios that are free and open to the public over the course of two weekends. It is so much fun! Honestly I could have gone back again today.

I loved that there were installations or art work that was interactive. So if you had time or wanted to, you can take part in the art. We also saw a studio where some students were drawing and painting. In one studio a weaver was working on a piece so that looked amazing.

I love the variety of art. We saw embroidery, prints, pottery, photography, watercolors, you name it. Some of my favorite works were college works of course. I also found several pieced that had either books or references to books as part of the artwork.

Anyway, this was a ton of fun and I still dream about being part of this one day. Actually I was a bit involved with EAST several years ago when I sold my journals at one of the studios but I would love to actually have an open studio and share my love of bookbinding.

Speaking of bookbinding, I’ve been doing a bit of that this weekend and looking forward to doing a lot more crafting over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Now to catch up on some of my reading. I’m telling myself no new books until I can finish some with the exception of my mystery book group pick for December. Hope you have a great start of the week and more book talk soon.