Five Months, Six Men, One Harbor

I finished The Dragon's Embrace on a Tuesday and started it again on the Wednesday. Elena writes the kind of sentence you read twice — once for the story and once because you cannot believe she got away with it.

I have run a book club for eleven years and I have never seen a novel split a room so happily. We argued about the ending for two hours and everybody was right.

The research never shows, which is how you know how much of it there was. The city in these books feels older than the plot that walks around in it.

My teenager took The Enchanted Realm off my nightstand and I did not see it again for a week. That has never happened with anything I recommended out loud.

I came for the mystery and stayed for the two people arguing in the kitchen on page ninety. Nobody writes a small scene better.

I read a lot of thrillers for work. This is the only one this year where I did not guess the turn, and I went back afterwards and found it had been signposted three times.

Whispers of the Forgotten is the book I hand to people who tell me they have stopped reading. It has a ninety percent success rate.

I saw Elena read at Northgate last spring. She read the chapter nobody likes, on purpose, and by the end the room liked it.

The craft book is worth it for the chapter on revision alone. It is the first time anyone has described what cutting actually feels like.