Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer

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Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer

Katie Alender

Scholastic Press: 2013, 296 pages

Reviewed by Jessie Park

Colette Iselin is going back to her French roots!  A junior at a private school in Ohio, Colette leaps at the chance to spend nine days in France for a school trip.  But Paris is on alert right now: there's a serial killer targeting the young and beautiful and the killing method of choice is decapitation.  Colette isn't worried until she starts seeing visions of a pale woman in a pink ball gown and large white wig, like Marie Antoinette herself. Colette starts to investigate and teams up with a local French boy since her self-obsessed "friends" don't seem that interested.  Colette learns that her father's family may have been a part of something and now it seems that Colette is also involved and in danger! Can she solve the mystery and keep her head connected to her body before the trip is over?

Spotless

Cover retrieved from Goodreads

Spotless

Camilla Monk

Montlake Romance: 2015, 332 pages

Reviewed by Jessie Park

Island Chaptal is a 25-year-old IT engineer who loves escaping into romance novels to distract her from the fact that she is also a 25-year-old virgin.  Her rather humdrum life takes a drastic turn when she comes home early from work one day to find a very attractive but very OCD hit man cleaning her apartment.  March isn't there to kill her but he wants the diamond that Island's late mother stole from a crime organization called the Board; apparently Island's mother wasn't a French diplomat as she was led to believe her whole life.  Island has no choice but to work with March whilst also avoiding all the other baddies who also want the diamond and want to dismember her.  This is an actiony-romance novel with none of the cheesy explicit scenes that are too often found in other contemporary romance novels.  

A Star for Mrs. Blake

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A Star for Mrs. Blake

April Smith

Knopf: 2014, 352 pages

Read by Michelle Croy

A Star for Mrs. Blake is a novel set in the 1930's about five American women - Gold Star Mothers - who travel to France to visit the graves of their sons who fought in World War I: a pilgrimage that will change their lives in unforeseeable and indelible ways.  The women meet for the first time just before their journey begins: Katie, an Irish maid from Dorchester, Massachusetts; Minnie, wife of an immigrant Russian Jewish chicken farmer; Bobbie, a wealthy Boston socialite; Wilhelmina, a former tennis star in precarious mental health; and Cora Blake, a single mother and librarian from coastal Maine.  In Paris, Cora meets a journalist whose drug habit helps him hide from his own war-time fate: facial wounds so grievous he's forced to wear a metal mask.  This man will change Cora's life in wholly unexpected ways.

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