While this was billed as a hilariously bad dinner date in which the entire restaurant ends up being taken hostage, I never found it particularly hilarious or engaging. I did not find the main characters to be original or interesting and the twists were too coincidental to be "wow, I didn't see that coming" moments.

The book is light reading so if you're looking for something not very deep that has a few chuckles you might enjoy it.

This book starts off with a bang -- a murder that appears to be by a mythological creature, as if a Bigfoot had turned violent. Morgan Carter, a "cryptozoologist" is brought in to solve the mystery because of her knowledge of creatures like this one and apparently she has been brought in to solve crimes involving similar suspects.

What follows is an entertaining mystery as Morgan meets a large cast of characters from the small town where the murder takes place, but unlike many "small town" murder books, this one has realistic people and it is not played for laughs but is a serious mystery. The book doesn't shy away from violence but it isn't dark enough to turn off sensitive readers. I enjoyed it and my tastes often run towards dark Scandinavian mysteries.

While I had not read the previous books in the series I didn't find that I needed to since enough background information was given that I could easily follow this story. I would consider reading one of the earlier books based on this one.

I got 200 pages into the 500 page book and found it to be uninteresting throughout my read. For the first hundred pages or so it kept jumping genres so I couldn't tell where it was going. Mystical British children's world like "Peter Pan" or "Harry Potter"? Victorian mystery? A fantastical world like "Night Circus"?

Then by about page 100 It became apparent that this was yet another vampire book perhaps with a few werewolves thrown in. I've read lots of them, so I often like the genre. But if an author is going to tackle this exceptionally well-worn genre she needs to have some new and interesting take on the legends, e.g., the first few Sookie Stackhouse books, Salem's Lot, etc.

I'm afraid that this standard vampire story in Victorian England just didn't cut it for me. Maybe I missed something really different that happens in the last 300 pages but I feel that 40 of the way through it I didn't anticipate any drastic revelations.

A Libyan-American desk agent with the CIA realizes that someone has been implementing a plan to topple the Libyan government that he developed several years earlier. He starts to investigate. This leads to a string of murders and disappearances.

If you like spy novels, you'll love this one. I found it to be extremely well-written. The narrative unfolds from the point of view of several different characters. What makes it so interesting is that each person knows only a piece of what is going on-- or thinks they do. Often their information is incorrect, or they lie to others about what they know. No one has the entire picture. This creates a very effective mystery, where even the reader isn't sure which information is correct, or is led to believe that one scenario is correct only to find that the person relaying the information didn't know what was going on.

Highly recommended.

This is a book where the less you know about it the better it is. I knew nothing when I started, and won't put spoilers in this review.

All the reader knows at the beginning of the book is that Matt's brother dies. The book is told from Matt's point of view, and jumps around in time and reflects different versions of his perspective. I wondered whether the book was a mystery, a coming of age story, or something else. I also really wondered whether the payoff would be worth it once it was clear what was going on.

I'm happy to report that it was a very satisfying explanation, and that the book was very well done. The author did a great job of getting inside Matt's head and unfolding the story by leading you in different directions, but only by the end do you really know what was going on.

I still don't want to characterize this book by pigeon-holing it into a particular genre. I would just say that it is worth picking it up, and it is a quick read that doesn't take long to really hook you.

I very much enjoyed "Bitter River" when I started reading it. The mystery started immediately, with a dead girl pulled from a car found in the river. The main character, prosecutor Bell Elkins was also interesting, living in the small town of Ackers Gap where she grew up. When the book first starts she is looking for her sister Shirley who was just released from prison but who disappeared. I also liked that Keller went into the background of other people in town so that it wasn't just a mystery where you only get to know the key characters.

But then Keller went overboard with explaining the backgrounds of every single person in town. I felt like hundreds of pages in, I knew everyone but the mystery wasn't any closer to being resolved and the plotline with the sister seemed to have vanished altogether. Finally things were resolved, but I didn't feel that the rationale behind the murder was particularly imaginative and unraveling it wasn't handled in a suspenseful or intriguing way.

I thought initially that I'd give this five stars based on my first impression of the book, but by the end was just ready to finish, so I've downgraded my rating to four stars instead.

I have read other books by Dennis Lehane and have enjoyed them very much, but those have been his modern day detective stories. I knew that this book was going to take place during Prohibition, and assumed that Lehane would find a way to do the same sort of thriller in a different backdrop.

Instead this was a pretty standard run-of-the-mill "my adventures as a gangster" story. It has the 1920s setting-- Prohibition, racial tensions in Boston and elsewhere, Ku Klux Klan, anarchists. However, it is a story that you've read and seen lots of times before, and it lacks any of the edginess that you might see on "Boardwalk Empire" or read/see in the "Godfather".

Lehane knows how to write so it wasn't a difficult read, but I'll be sticking to his modern day crime stories from now on. While I do read historical novels from time to time, I prefer ones that have a unique twist or are a bit edgier. If you like historical noves in general you would probably enjoy this more than I did.

3.5 stars would be more accurate for me. I enjoy these types of dystopian novels, perhaps too much, since I read a nearly identical book about six months ago, "Life As We Knew It." in "The Age of Miracles" the earth's rotation slows down and causes all sorts of problems with animals, crops, and humans' living and work cycles. We see things unravel from the perspective of a young teen girl. In the other book, the earth's weather patterns are messed up when the moon moves too close to the earth after an asteroid hits it, and the main character is a high school age girl. So "Age of Miracles" does not get points fom me for originality.

That being said, I read it in an afternoon. It was well written and I thought that the main character was believable and real. I'm not sure if the book is characterized as young adult (the other one was) but it should be. The story didn't drag, and kept me engaged.

My main complaints were that not all that much happened-- it was a short book and I think the author could have kept it going for longer-- and that instead of trying to come up with a scientific cause for the slowdown, the author just decided that "we don't know why it happened." I think the book would have worked better for me if it were a bit more complex.

I'm giving it four stars instead of three because it kept my interest, even though ultimately it could have been more satisfying with a few more plot points added.

It is hard to read this book without thinking of "The Lovely Bones", but I thought that this book worked very well even though some elements are similar.

In this book a mother and her daughter are hurt in a fire at a school, and while their bodies are in the hospital the mother follows her friends and relatives around to figure out what happened to them. While this is an unusual way to solve a mystery (although it has some common elements with "The Lovely Bones"), I found it to a compelling read. I very much enjoyed the solving of the mystery and by the end of the book I thought that the emotional twists also worked well without getting maudlin or sappy.

I thought the author did a good job of getting inside the thoughts of her main character. I was particularly impressed that unlike most books about teens that either have them talk and act like adults or like children, this one seems to really have captured that age (17) of being close to a young adult but not quite there. The character alternates insightful thought and considerate actions with thoughtlessness and stupidity.

This isn't a book where a lot happens, but I thought that it captured the atmosphere of a Massachusetts prep school and a kid from a dysfunctional family in New York. It kept me engaged.

A good thriller moves quickly, taking its characters through lots of twists and turns and keeping the reader second guessing. The author gives enough backstory to each character to make them interesting. Unfortunately, this book has none of these elements.

Almost nothing happens in this book, which is about a woman who may or may not have been murdered and who may or may not have done it. The characters were so uninteresting that I didn't really care who did it, and so few characters were in this book that it had absolutely no suspense. Saying that the plot was thin would be an understatement.

The author also had an annoying habit of having each character think through what previously happened to them instead of actually putting the characters in present tense and making them move around and do something, or finding more subtle and varied ways to insert some backstory.

Skip this book.

Most mysteries seem to either have a great story with stereotypical characters or good characters but a weak plot. This book reads like a novel, not like most mysteries. I haven't read Paul Doiron's first book, "The Poacher's Son", but I ordered it as soon as I finished this book.

Mike Bowditch is a young game warden in Maine, who is called to an accident site in which a woman collided with a deer--- only to find no woman and no deer, only an empty car. The state trooper who shows up a short time later is convinced that the woman got a ride from someone she called, that someone else came and took the deer for food, and that everything is fine. Somehow Mike has the (correct) feeling that this wasn't the case.

Doiron does an excellent job of populating the book with a variety of real people (or at least they feel real) living in rural Maine. With just a few sentences he seems to give each character an identity and just enough back story to make everyone come alive without bogging down the mystery. The story moves, and related story lines such as the other cases that Bowditch is handling, his family history, and his relationship with his girlfriend all are covered without ever feeling like the book is going off into tangents or dragging on. This is a very well written, tightly constructed book that I very much enjoyed.

I often get bored of mysteries about two thirds of the way through, but this book held my attention to the very end. I'd definitely recommend it.