March 2025 Book Marks
Over the years, with multiple moves, my current book collection has been whittled down to absolute favorites. There’s also a smattering of older books, playing a more decorative role on the shelves, with their leather spines and gold embossed letters. None of them have much intrinsic value, but it’s the sentimentality that ensures they always make the cut.
This little “Wisecracks” book, pictured in the masthead, was probably purchased by a great-grandparent. In my memory, it connects to my father, and by extension, to my sisters. Every so often, we’d open this little book and quiz each other with the quaint quips, and knee-slapping ones liners, quotes or riddles that seem so anachronistic now. The book is a reminder of my past, as all books connect us to past, present and future. And since a riddle in this book taught me long ago that March is the only month of the year with a command…. (March Forth – get it?) Take a look at these March reads and you might find something to “tickle your fancy.” I’m full of ‘em today.
Fiction:
Lucky Night by Eliza Kennedy
You’re a 46-year old successful and handsome male lawyer, married with a gorgeous wife and daughter, but you have the unfulfilled sense that something in your life is “missing.” Imagine now that you’ve been carrying on a secret affair with a neighbor for the past six years. Your neighbor is 40, with two sons and a devoted husband. She’s also recently become a hugely successful novelist of a “Twilight”-type series. You don’t know this, but the idea for the books was borne out of her obsession with you, and she never wants to tell you that. For the past six years, you’ve met once a month for the pure pleasure of sex. Neither one of you has spoken much about your relationships or your interior lives. But tonight, intense planning has gone into a romantic, overnight rendezvous. You’ve booked the newest luxury high-rise hotel in New York that just opened to much media fanfare. Both of you have lied to your spouses in order to experience a delicious, surreptitious night away. But then the unexpected happens. There’s a fire in the hotel. At first, you are told to stay in place, it’s under control, nothing to worry about. But as events spiral and the situation reverses, the couple begins to unspool, revealing things about themselves to one another in the intimacy of the hotel room. The beauty of this story is both the interior monologues of the couple and their own conversation, not to mention the sex scenes, which are as hot as the fire. You’ll want to read this in one sitting. Fan and icepacks not included.
Fiction:
Twist by Colum McCann
Fans of “Let the Great World Spin” will be excited that this storyteller is back with another deep look at the way worlds, people and information intersect. Irish journalist and playwright, Anthony Fennell, takes a boat to West Africa to cover a story of underwater cables that transmit all the worlds information, images and data through fiber optic cables. And when those cables break, at huge depth, that’s where the problems begin. That’s why John Conway’s chief mission on the ship is as a free diver who can reach amazing depths and repair the breaks. When the boat is sent to fix a series of underwater breaks, both men are forced to confront the basic questions of life, love absence, belonging and danger in a fractured world.
Fiction:
Counting Backwards by Jacqueline Friedland
Like so many young professionals, Jessa Gidney has it all going on, a legal career, a marriage and the desire to start a family. But when Jessa receives tough news at work, she decides to take her career in another direction, using her pro bono skills at an ICE detention center. It’s there that her life intersects with a young mother trying to hang on to her daughter, which leads to the horrifying truth about medical malpractice in the facility that has ties to her own family past. The book toggles between the present and 1927 in the American South, where an ordinary young woman, poor and uneducated, is at the center of a legal battle in the nation’s eugenics conversation. Jessa’s journey to connect past and present leads her down a path to fight for women and their rights, regardless of the cost.
Thriller:
Nobody’s Fool by Harlan Coben
What happens when a college secret comes back to haunt you? In true Coben fashion, this thriller begins with a jolt from the past. College student Sami Kierce is backpacking in Spain with friends when he wakes up one morning covered in blood, holding a knife. When he turns to check on his girlfriend Anna, she is lying next to him…dead. Twenty-two years later, Kierce is a private investigator and a new father, working off his debts with low-level surveillance jobs and teaching night school. One day, out of nowhere, he sees Anna in the back of his classroom. When he looks up again, she is gone. What follows is his single-minded quest to find this elusive woman and solve the horrible mystery that has haunted his entire life. Everything that happens after this one pivotal night will bring him face to face with the past, and Coben keeps the pedal down on the pace!
Thriller:
Name Not Taken by Madeleine Henry
Devon Farrell can’t believe her good fortune when she gets engaged to Richard Belmont, the perfect, loving boyfriend. What’s more, his background is the opposite of her own traumatic upbringing. The Belmonts are two perfect parents, with an estate in Greenwich and a tightknit family life that keeps all three siblings coming back home. But as Devon is brought into the fold, things begin to feel unbalanced and she can’t shake the sense of being gaslit. It’s not just the weird stares from Richard’s brother, or the whisper campaign from Mrs. Belmont about how Devon might be “too thin.” As the mind games begin, Devon begins to the undercurrent working against her and it eventually effects her moods and health. As the truth gets a little darker, Devon decides to wake up the fighter inside.
Thriller/Mystery:
The Hunter by Tana French
If you love mysteries and thrillers, I hope Tana French’s books have been on your list. I’m late to read this one from last year, and scooped it up in paperback at the airport, determined for something that would take my mind off the present-day air travel situation. This did the trick. Set in Ireland, like all her books, it’s an unusually sweltering summer in a small, Western Irish town. Two men arrive, one a native son and the other a stranger, who is hoping to get rich with a scheme to pull the wool over the local’s eyes. One of the men is the truant, absent father of a scrapping teenager Trey Reddy, who has befriended retired Chicago PD officer Cal Hooper, who moved to the town for a quiet life. Trey is bent on revenge, for reasons that have to do with her childhood, and she must follow her heart, while also trying to keep the town safe, no matter what it takes. French’s stories are rich in setting and dialogue and always weave an engrossing tale.
These are books I genuinely love and am thrilled to recommend to my friends. These are Bookshop.org affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I get a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. Alternately, if you prefer to rent books at your local library or buy from your local bookstore, I very much support that!
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