April has been an odd month for me.  It started out with me not being well thanks to a throat and ear infection.  The whole thing knocked me sideways and I’ve struggled to get back in the groove ever since.  I have no reading mojo it seems and blogging has felt blah.  I am finally starting to feel myself again now (thankfully!) and recently have found myself wanting to pick up books again and write some posts.  So, here’s hoping May will be brighter than April for me.  In the meantime, here’s a look at the books I read (it won’t take long…)

 

The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni was a different kind of book from one of my favourite authors.  This is the of a young boy who grows up to be an amazing older man despite being born with red eyes, setting him apart from everyone else. What I liked about this book was that it showed that you don’t have to climb mountains to be considered extraordinary, you just need to live a good and honest life.

Deadly Secrets by Robert Bryndza was another great outing for Detective Erika Foster, a great character and a great series.  Here, she is looking for the killer of a young woman who everyone seems to have a different view on and a man in a mask who is attacking people at random.

 

Skin Deep by Liz Nugent was my first book by Nugent but it won’t be my last.  This was so not the book I was expecting and in such a good way.  It follows one woman, pulled away from her family as a young child, and unable to make her way in the world without making mistakes.  A fascinating study of why what is what is on the inside is so much more important than what is on the outside.

The Good Liar by Catherine McKenzie was a book I couldn’t wait to read and felt like I had to wait forever to post my review on.  I loved this book, as I do all McKenzie’s (so I might be a bit biased).  This is another story that is different from any she’s written before (they all are) other than it looks at how complex life is and how hard it is to live an honest life.  Nothing here is as it seems and I think that’s great.

Such good books here but I think I have to go with The Good Liar as my Book of the Month.

 

The Feather Thief by Kirk W. Johnson was one of my more recent reads and presented a fascinating story of a young man so obsessed with the art of salmon fishing fly-tying that he committed an extraordinary crime, stealing hundreds of bird specimens from the Natural History Museum.

The Burgas Affair by Ellis Shuman is based on the true story of a terrorist attack that took place in Bulgaria a few years ago.  It looks at what might have happened had two Bulgarian and Israeli detectives been forced to work together to track down the bombers.  It’s a good read but was a bit too slow for me.  

 

Macbeth by Jo Nesbo was one of those books I just couldn’t get away with, despite Nesbo being one of my favourite authors.  It was too dark and too hard for my current reading mood and just too long.

The Half Sister by Catherine Chanter was a book I was really excited to read after enjoying Chanter’s previous book, The Well.  I just couldn’t get away with it though.  It looked at a woman who can’t cope with her half-sister’s death and her relationship with her nephew who she takes in.  I found it wandered too much and I had no sympathy for the characters.  A shame.

And that’s it for me for April, a real mixed bad – I either seemed to love what I was reading of felt flat when I was done. How was your month, reading and otherwise? What books should I be adding to my TBR?

Emma x

This month, I’m linking with Kathryn at Book Date and Nicole at Feed Your Fiction Addiction with their monthly round-up posts (clicking on the images will take you to the posts to check out what others have been reading).