Past Reads Saturday

Goodreads Description

What’s real in a marriage built on sand and how do you abandon a man you’ve loved since the age of fifteen?

Phoebe sees the fire in Jake Pierce’s belly from the moment they meet as teenagers in Brooklyn. Eventually he creates a financial dynasty and she trusts him without hesitation—unaware his hunger for success hides a dark talent for deception.

When Phoebe learns—along with the rest of the world—that her husband’s triumphs are the result of an elaborate Ponzi scheme her world unravels. Lies underpin her life and marriage. As Jake’s crime is uncovered, the world obsesses about Phoebe. Did she know her life was fabricated by fraud? Did she partner with her husband in hustling billions from pensioners, charities, and CEOs? Was she his accomplice in stealing from their family and neighbors?

Debate rages as to whether love and loyalty blinded her to his crimes or if she chose to live in denial. While Jake is trapped in the web of his own deceit, Phoebe is faced with an unbearable choice. Her children refuse to see her if she remains at their father’s side, but abandoning Jake, a man she’s known since childhood, feels cruel and impossible.

From Brooklyn to Greenwich to Manhattan, from penthouse to prison, with tragic consequences rippling well beyond Wall Street, The Widow of Wall Street exposes a woman struggling to redefine her life and marriage as everything she thought she knew crumbles around her.

My Thoughts

I have read or listened to everything Randy Susan Meyers has written. I have enjoyed all of her books. The Widow of Wall Street reminded me of the Madoff case in that it follows a husband who is exposed for a Ponzi scheme and the wife’s life literally falls apart around her. It was very good and the audio is narrated by Susan Bennett who I enjoy listening to. Due to be published February 1 of next year Randy Susan Meyers and M.J. Rose have a book coming out called The Fashion Orphans. What could be better than a book by two authors one loves! Can’t wait to read it!

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Goodreads Description

Julie Prentice and her family move across the country to the idyllic Mount Adams district of Cincinnati, hoping to evade the stalker who’s been terrorizing them ever since the publication of her bestselling novel, The Murder Game. Since Julie doesn’t know anyone in her new town, when she meets her neighbor John Dunbar, their instant connection brings measured hope for a new beginning. But she never imagines that a simple, benign conversation with him could set her life spinning so far off course.

After a series of misunderstandings, Julie and her family become the target of increasingly unsettling harassment. Has Julie’s stalker found her, or are her neighbors out to get her, too? As tension in the neighborhood rises, new friends turn into enemies, and the results are deadly.

My Thoughts

Catherine McKenzie is a fellow Canadian and was one of the first authors I read when I started blogging and I loved her writing style right off. As I was looking through her list of books I see I have several to catch up on. I can still remember this book and being pulled fully into the characters lives which is something Catherine McKenzie excels at. If you haven’t read any of her books yet, you should. You won’t regret it!

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My second selection in Past Reads Saturday is All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

Goodreads Description

Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

My Thoughts

This was a much loved book for me. I wish I had reviewed it when I listened to it but alas I did not. It is one I still, to this day, will recommend to those who like historical fiction or historical fiction based on WWII. Stay tuned as I will be reviewing Anthony Doerr’s newest novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, which releases on September 28!

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