The Whimsy Bookworm: A Book Blog from India

  Book: Nine Lives  Author: Peter Swanson  Publisher: Faber Books  Pages: 305 Read On: Kindle  How Long it Took Me To Read: 1 day  Plot Summary:   Nine strangers receive a list with their names on it in the mail. Nothing else, just a list of names on a single sheet of paper. None of the nine people know or have ever met the others on the list. They dismiss it as junk mail, a fluke—until very, very bad things begin happening to people on the list. First, a well-liked old man is drowned on a beach in the small town of Kennewick, Maine. Then, a father is shot in the back while running through his quiet neighborhood in suburban Massachusetts. A frightening pattern is emerging, but what do these nine people have in common? Their professions range from oncology nurse to aspiring actor, and they’re located all over the country. So why are they all on the list, and who sent it? FBI agent Jessica Winslow, who is on the list herself, is determined to find ...

  Book: Honor   Author: Thrity Umrigar  Pages: 336  Read On: Kindle  How Long it Took Me To Read: 2 days  Plot Summary:   When Indian American journalist Smita returns to India to write the story of a young widow Meena and the murder of her husband, it’s Smita’s first time back since her family left when she was a child. Both Smita and Meena were raised in a culture where a woman exercising a basic human right―the right to love and marry whoever she chooses―is met with brutal punishment. While Meena’s fate hangs in the balance, Smita must reckon with the privilege that becoming an American has given her, as well as face the trauma that shaped her as a child and led to her family leaving. Dual love stories propel the narrative, as different as the cultures from which they emanate. We follow how Meena fell headfast in love with a person forbidden to her due to his religion and faced the violent consequences of her choice; and Smita's freed...

  Book: The Lost Girls  Author: Jessica Chiarella  Pages: 336 Read on: Kindle  Read in: ~4 hours  Plot Summary:  When her true-crime podcast becomes an overnight sensation, a young woman is pulled into the web of a case that may offer a surprising connection to her own sister's disappearance years earlier. It's been more than twenty years since Marti Reese's sister, Maggie, disappeared. Only eight-years-old at the time, Marti can't remember what happened, just that Maggie got into a car and never returned. After years of grief and countless false leads, Marti is coping as best she can: abandoning her marriage, drinking to forget, and documenting her never-ending search via a true-crime podcast. But when the podcast becomes an unexpected hit and Marti thinks she's finally ready to put it all behind her, a mysterious woman calls with new information that could lead her down a dangerous path.  For years, Ava Vreeland has been fighting to overturn her brot...

Hello!  I have been sharing my favourite reads of the year in the last week and also mulling over all sorts of favourites. I have read some 170 books in 2018 and while some were ones I simply adored, some made me smile, some scared me and others moved me. Most of the books I read were good. Some though were less than stellar. Others were down right horrible.  Very often on the blog I prefer to talk about the books I loved and want to share and shout about the books I loved and want you to read. Most of the time I tend to shy away from mentioning or talking about the books I didn't love. I may mention them in passing but I feel sorta bad bitching about a bad book.  :(  But...I felt with all the favourites lists, it was only fair that I mention the books that were my least favourite or if I am being honest, the ones I utterly despised!  Now if any book on this list is one you loved, I mean no offence. We are all different and have different taste...

Book: Genuine Fraud Author: E. Lockhart Pages: 288 Read: Friend's Hardcover edition Read in: 2.5 hours Plot Summary:  Imogen is a runaway heiress, an orphan, a cook, and a cheat. Jule is a fighter, a social chameleon, and an athlete.  An intense friendship.  A disappearance.  A murder, or maybe two.  A bad romance, or maybe three. Blunt objects, disguises, blood, and chocolate.  The American dream, superheroes, spies, and villains.  A girl who refuses to give people what they want from her. A girl who refuses to be the person she once was. General Thoughts: I read and reviewed E. Lockhart's When We Were Liars in June 2014 and was thoroughly disappointed with the book. I have no idea why that book was so hyped up because it was bad! So, obviously, I wasn't going to go buy another book by this author! Like DUH! Fool me once! But, since a friend, who was visiting had the hardcopy and it was under 300 pages, I borrowed and read it...

Book: The Breakdown Author: B.A. Paris Pages: 336 Read: The paperback pictured above Read in: 3 hours Publisher: St. Martin's Press Plot Summary:  Cass is having a hard time since the night she saw the car in the woods, on the winding rural road, in the middle of a downpour, with the woman sitting inside―the woman who was killed. She’s been trying to put the crime out of her mind; what could she have done, really? It’s a dangerous road to be on in the middle of a storm. Her husband would be furious if he knew she’d broken her promise not to take that shortcut home. And she probably would only have been hurt herself if she’d stopped. But since then, she’s been forgetting every little thing: where she left the car, if she took her pills, the alarm code, why she ordered a pram when she doesn’t have a baby. The only thing she can’t forget is that woman, the woman she might have saved, and the terrible nagging guilt. Or the silent calls she’s receiving, or the feeling ...

Book : Patang Author: Bhaskar Chattopadhyay Publisher: Hachette Pages: 226 Read On: Kindle How Long it Took Me To Read: 3 hours Plot Summary:   ‘I HATE THE RAIN…I HATE IT, HATE IT, HATE IT. BUT THE RAIN CAN’T STOP ME. NO ONE CAN…I’LL GO OUT AND PLAY TONIGHT…I WILL KILL ONLY FOUR. NO MORE, NO LESS. JUST FOUR.’ In the midst of one of the worst monsoons in Mumbai, a man is found brutally murdered, his body posed like a kite on the tallest cell tower in the city. As one corpse after another turns up in the unlikeliest of places, each gruesomely killed and carefully arranged in a grotesque manner, the Mumbai Police realize they have more on their hands than they can deal with. Enter Chandrakant Rathod, a maverick investigator the police turn to in times of need, who plays by his own rules and lives for the thrill of the chase. Pitting his sharp instincts against the machinations of the sadistic, ruthless killer, the detective succeeds in nabbing the psychopath...

Book: The Optician's Wife Author: Betsey Reavley  Pages: 225  Read on: Kindle via my Kindle Unlimited subscription  Read in: 2 hours  Plot Summary:  Can you ever really know someone? When Deborah, an unpopular seventeen-year-old, meets the charming and handsome Larry, he sweeps her off her feet. The trouble is Larry has a secret. Then a series of grisly murders cast a shadow over everything. As Deborah’s world starts to fall apart she begins to suspect the man she loves of a terrible betrayal. And to keep their marriage alive, sacrifices must be made. Things I Liked:  1. The premise was interesting. It hinted that secrets people kept, even within a relationship as intimate as marriage is. It also  hinted at one of the two people- Deb or Larry- being a serial killer or being involved in some way with serial killings. So, I thought this book would be quite interesting.. perhaps some kind of a spin on how t...

Book: The Mystery of Hollow Places Author: Rebecca Podos Pages: 304 Read on: Kindle Read in: 2 hours Plot Summary:  All Imogene Scott knows of her mother is the bedtime story her father told her as a child. It’s the story of how her parents met: he, a forensic pathologist, she, a mysterious woman who came to identify a body. A woman who left Imogene and her father when Imogene was a baby, a woman who was always possessed by a powerful loneliness, a woman who many referred to as “troubled waters.” Now Imogene is seventeen, and her father, a famous author of medical mysteries, has struck out in the middle of the night and hasn’t come back. Neither Imogene’s stepmother nor the police know where he could’ve gone, but Imogene is convinced he’s looking for her mother. And she decides it’s up to her to put to use the skills she’s gleaned from a lifetime of reading her father’s books to track down a woman she’s only known in stories in order to find him and,...