August Reading List

August Reading List

It was a good month for finding books I enjoyed. While I started and discarded the usual dozen or more, I found twenty liked enough to finish. Some of the highlights below.

Love Lettering by Kate Clayborn 2020

NYC woman famous for her lettering designs leaves a message hidden on wedding invitations. She stuck and uninspired with deadlines to meet. Months after the wedding was supposed to take place, the groom––who hates NYC––approaches her and asks why she left the message. She uses him to help her rekindle her love for lettering while setting out to change his mind about the city. along the way, she becomes a better, stronger person. 5 stars

Legend by Jude Devereaux 1996

I like a good time travel romance and this one grabbed me. A popular chef with self -image issues travels back in time to a small Colorado mining town in the 1800s. There are multiple layers to this story. What is happening in the chef’s present life with her work and the man she is engaged to, what she experiences in the past and how it affects the way she sees herself, what really happened in the past, how the past affected the present––and more. Entertaining even though the book is nearly thirty years old. 5 star.

Honeysuckle and Bone by Trisha Tobias 2025

I don’t read much Young Adult fiction and especially not horror, and I’m not sure how I ended up with this, but I enjoyed it.

A teen girl is looking to reinvent herself after the death of her best friend, and takes a nanny job in Jamaica, posing as her dead friend. She makes friends with a few staff members, but it isn’t easy living a lie. When inexplicable things start happening to her she realizes someone or something is out to get her. Is it the people she works for, the mansion, or is her past catching up with her? I gave this 4 stars.

Beginner’s Luck by Kate Clayborn 2017

First in a trilogy about three female friends who win the lottery. A high profile and very successful recruiter tries to woo one of the friends, a highly respected scientist, to signing on with his company while’s in town caring for his father after his father took a fall and broke a leg and arm. Like all of the books I’ve read by Ms. Clayborn so far, this deals with the individuals getting to understand themselves and what it is they really want out of life and love. I loved this book, gave it 5 stars.

Rules For Ruin by Mimi Matthews 2025

Another new author for me. I’m on a roll! Rules For Ruin is a historical romance set in Victorian England during a time when women had zero rights and men ruled everything they owned and did.

A woman raised in an orphanage with the goal that she will fight for women’s rights meets up with a self-made man from the slums. Her goal is to bring down a lord who stole everything from the orphanage’s proprietress. His, to protect that same lord in order to improve living conditions in the slums. Of course they fall in love, but their goals keep them apart. Nice little romance and I enjoyed the historical aspects. 5 stars.

The Belle of Belgrave Square by Mimi Matthews 2022

Captain Jasper Blunt, a notorious ex-military man with dark secrets is in London for the Season, in desperate need of a wealthy wife to restore his crumbling estate. He meets Julia, a lovely miss cursed with crippling social anxiety, and an avid reader of novels.

Julia needs to get out from under her parents––both hypochondriacs who expect their daughter to devote her life to nursing them. An incurable romantic, Julia needs rescuing, but perhaps she’s the one doing the rescuing when she proposes to the captain.

Another romance set in Victorian England with all its pomp and glamour and ridiculous rules set by society. thoroughly enjoyable. 5 stars.

Haunted by Kat Martin 2024

Kat based this contemporary romance on a real town, Jerome, AZ, an old mining town with a history for wickedness. Most of the town is haunted, and Kat played on that with her locations and characters in a way that caught my interest.

Jenny inherited a saloon/hotel that’s been in her family for several generations. Tourists come for the ghosts, but get more than they bargained for when she opens the newly remodeled section of the hotel that’s been closed for years.

Cain was a bad boy from Jerome who got his act together and made his fortune. Raised by his grandmother, he undertakes to fulfill her wish to spend her final years in her hometown of Jerome by turning the old hospital into a five star hotel.

Sparks fly between Jenny and Cain. When bad things begin to happen to them, they need to figure out whose past is responsible. I gave this 5 stars.

Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny 2018

This book is my first in the Quebec-based Armand Gamache police procedural series. It won’t be my last. Kingdom is a dozen books into the series so I was missing some back story, but the tale is interesting, layered,  and held me.

Gamache is on suspension and about to be held out dry for political reasons for allowing a shipment of a new, lethal form of fentanyl to get through. While he searches for the drugs, he’s named as liquidator, along with two others, for the will of a woman they’d never met. The two plots run concurrently, with secrets and layers of games being played. I’ll be starting this series from the beginning, it’s that good. 5 enthusiastic stars.

The Stolen Queen by Fiona Davis 2025

A young woman joins an archaeological dig in Egypt in the 30s. She falls in love, marries, has a baby, and loses them both in a tragic accident. Forty years later, she lives a quiet life as a curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When one of the museum’s most valuable artifacts goes missing, she teams up with an awkward, but intelligent, young woman to retrieve the object. 5 stars

Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins 2021

A woman semi-adrift after her mother’s death hooks up with a rich man and follows him to Maui where he works in a boatyard. He meets two women looking to charter a boat to a deserted island and the four of them take off for a two week trip.

The island is beautiful, two more people show up, and they all become friends until one person goes missing and another ends up dead. Good gothic tale set on a beautiful tropical island with an unexpected ending. 5 stars

The Magnolia Palace by Fiona Davis 2022

A famous model down on her lucks falls into a job at the wealthy Frick mansion in 1919 NYC as a personal secretary to the daughter, Helen Frick. As her life becomes intertwined with the family’s, she gets pulled into a tangled web of family drama.

Fifty years later, in 1966, an aspiring model on her first photo shoot in NYC at the Frick mansion, now an art museum, gets left behind and locked in with an intern during a two day blizzard. She finds hidden messages that take them on a scavenger hunt with a surprising prize at the end.

The book alternates between the two time lines before it converges. It paints a compelling picture of the Henry Frick and his family, his collection of art, and the social mores of the time. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. 5 stars