FTWBooks2023

Cate desperately wants to have a baby, but is unable.  She has been accepted as  the adoptive mother to a newborn, only to have the mother have second thoughts after giving birth. Jada is a recovering drug addict who experiences tremendous pains after lunch at a Mexican restaurant and assumes it's food poisoning, only to discover after hours of painful cramps that she is giving birth -- having no clue that she was pregnant.  How is she going to care for a newborn she didn't know she was expecting. Cate receives a phone call on her way to the hospital to pick up the second baby she is about to adopt, letting her know that this mother too has changed her mind.  She is devastated. After a about a week, Jada can't seem to deal with her new baby and she contacts her dealer and takes heroin again.  She realizes she will be a terrible mother and she remembers seeing Cate at the doctor's office, so she drives to her house and leaves her newborn at the front door, with a...

I tried to read James Patterson's latest, which he (and his co-author) says was the best book he ever wrote. I was terribly disappointed and then found a Harlan Coben book I had not yet read and knew from page 3 that this was the page turner I had hoped Patterson's book would be. Grace Lawson picks up a newly developed set of family photographs, and finds a picture that doesn't belong-a photo from at least twenty years ago with a man in it who looks strikingly like her husband, Jack. Jack denies it's him but he disappears that night, taking the photo with him. Grace tries to find Jack and in the process encounters killers, torturers, and memories of her past that she had lost due to a terrible accident. The tension starts in the first chapter and doesn't stop until the end. Like many of Coben's books we are introduced to many characters who seem to have nothing to do with each other, but as the story progresses, they get closer and closer. Coben is also famous f...

Well, that will teach me not to listen to advertising. I have kind of stopped reading Patterson since he started writing with co-authors.  Some books are better than others, depending on who the co-author is.  Patterson says he likes developing plots but likes others to write them. Patterson and co-author Lupica (and later their wives) have made ads where they talk about how this is the best book they have ever written.  Their enthusiasm is so intense that I broke down and got the book. They are wrong. This is an OK book, but definitely nothing like the earlier books that Patterson wrote by himself.  I only give it 2-1/2 stars. Jane is a defense attorney who has been hired to defend a guy she is pretty sure killed a family of 3, but who says he's innocent.  As she is about to defend him in court, she learns that she has Stage 4 cancer and is given 12 months to live.  (Patterson says the other two books in the series will be called "6 months to live" and "3 ...