Friday Finds (November 21) A change to the norm

Hosted by Should be Reading

FRIDAY FINDS showcases the books you ‘found’ and added to your To Be Read (TBR) list… whether you found them online, or in a bookstore, or in the library — wherever! (they aren’t necessarily books you purchased).

This week I don’t have any new finds instead this is a plea for you to help me out.

As those who regularly visit my blog know I schedule my reading well in advance but I have deliberately not picked any books due out in December, instead I decided to catch up on the TBR which normally gets added to each week.  All fine in theory but as the December approaches I don’t feel at all comfortable with no books on my excel spreadsheet so I’m going to employ different methods of choosing which books to read.  Yes, I am that sad that I can’t simply pick one of a huge number available and say I’ll read that next!

I have four books on my physical bookshelf and I’ll read the one who gets the highest marks for one of my December reads. Which one do you like the sound of? Even better have you read any of these and would recommend that I do?

Please take the poll at the end of this post!

The Missing One by Lucy Atkins

Blurb

The loss of her mother has left Kali McKenzie with too many unanswered questions. But while clearing out Elena’s art studio, she finds a drawer packed with postcards, each bearing an identical one-line message a Canadian gallery owner called Susannah Gillespie: thinking of you. Who is this woman and what does she know about Elena’s hidden past?
Desperate to find out, Kali travels with her toddler, Finn, to Susannah’s isolated home on a remote British Columbian island, a place of killer whales and storms. But as bad weather closes in, Kali quickly realises she has made a big mistake. The handsome and enigmatic Susannah refuses to talk about the past, and as Kali struggles to piece together what happened back in the 1970s, Susannah’s behaviour grows more and more erratic. Most worrying of all, Susannah is becoming increasingly preoccupied with little Finn . . .
A tense, thrilling novel about a family divided by secrets, and the lengths a mother will go to protect her child. Amazon

Every Contact Leaves A Trace by Elanor Dymott

Blurb

Alex is in his thirties, a solitary man who has finally found love in the form of his beautiful and vivacious wife, Rachel. When Rachel is brutally murdered one Midsummer Night by the lake in the grounds of their alma mater, Worcester College, Oxford, Alex’s life as he knew it vanishes. He returns to Oxford that winter, and through the shroud of his shock and grief, begins to try to piece together the mystery surrounding his wife’s death. Playing host to Alex’s winter visit is Harry, Rachel’s former tutor and trusted mentor, who turns out to have been involved in some way in almost every significant development of their relationship throughout their undergraduate years. In his exploration of Rachel’s history, Alex also turns to Evie, Rachel’s self-centred and difficult godmother, whose jealousy of her charge has waxed and waned over the years. And then there are her university friends, Anthony and Cissy, who shared with Rachel her love of Browning and a taste for the illicit. Goodreads

Before The Poison by Peter Robinson

Blurb

Through years of success in Hollywood composing music for Oscar-winning films, Chris Lowndes always imagined he would come full circle, home to Yorkshire with his beloved wife Laura.
Now he’s back in the Yorkshire Dales, but Laura is dead, and Chris needs to make a new life for himself. The isolated house he buys sight unseen should give him the space to come to terms with his grief and the quiet to allow him to work.
Kilnsgate House turns out to be rather more than he expected, however. A man died there, sixty years ago. His wife was convicted of murder. And something is pulling Chris deeper and deeper into the story of Grace Elizabeth Fox, who was hanged by the neck until she was dead . . .Goodreads

Unhallowed Ground by Gillian White

Blurb

A single woman living alone in the middle of nowhere, amid a handful of peculiar neighbours and with a past that continues to haunt her–what more is needed as the basis for a thriller? Only things that go bump in the night and a mysterious figure that appears in the fields. White delivers all this and more to produce a classic that tingles the spine, just as it promises.
When a child under her jurisdiction is murdered at the hands of an abusive family, social worker Georgina Jefferson suffers an inevitable, and unbearable backlash. Desperate to escape the adverse media attention, she moves to the cottage of her recently deceased brother. Not only does she believe this to be a good way to discover more about a brother she never knew, she also feels a winter spent on her own in the country will help her get her life back on track. Foolish sentiments indeed, as it transpires, especially when a burnt doll is discovered in the woodshed….Amazon

Thank you so much for your help.

What have you found to read this week?