The Utter Catastrophe

The Utter Catastrophe by Sandra Hutchison (Book 3 in the Lawson Trilogy) 400 pages

Hutchison has done it again; she has written a book that sweeps the reader into its fictional world!

In the third and final book (much to my dismay) of the Lawson Trilogy, the topics are much, much heavier—the opioid crisis, drug addiction and recovery—yet it is tempered by a romance.

It’s the summer of 2016. Winslow Jennings is now Lawson’s Chief of Police. He and the other chiefs in the nearby small towns are overwhelmed with drug-related deaths. Winslow doesn’t realize it, but the crisis is about to hit home.

Everyone in Lawson has noted that Winslow’s cousin, Dave Cantwell, and Dave’s wife, Peggy, have been acting strange. They seldom leave the house anymore, don’t interact with their old friends or their extended family. It’s been a bad year for them with Dave hurting his back at work. But they still manage to make it work. Or so they thought.

The Cantwell’s have three children: Megan, Mike and Zach. Megan, twenty-one and just home from college, has noticed that her parents were acting stranger than usual, but she shrugged it off as to her being away. When they overdose in a nearby town after making a buy, it is up to Megan to become the adult. Mike is in Afghanistan and Zach is a middle-schooler.

As Megan tries to sort out her parents’ financial affairs and save their farm, there is another problem looming on the horizon. Seems her first, and only so far, love, Noah, is back in Lawson. He has recently been discharged from a rehab center and is home to bury his wife and raise his daughter. But can Noah say clean? Megan still has feelings for him, but it would not be smart to get involved with a drug addict.

At times, “The Utter Catastrophe” was a tough book to read, but Hutchison managed it with compassion. I really liked that Hutchison focused on those left behind to clean up the mess(es) and muddle their way through life instead on the addicts themselves, and how they could not get off that road.

I also like that Winslow and Mary did not take center stage in this chapter, but they were strong supporting characters. The Somali refugee family (whose names I can no longer recall) are also supporting characters who help to frame the story of a small town in big trouble,

“The Utter Catastrophe” is another 5-star read in Julie’s world!

 

Haunting the Deep

Haunting the Deep by Adriana Mather   352 pages

I was so excited when I saw Haunted the Deep in the fiction section of Blogging for Books. I love stories about the sea, and especially,stories about the Titanic. I’ve seen just about every special was has aired regarding all aspects of the luxury liner.

In this story, Samantha (Sam) Mather lives with her father in Salem, Massachusetts. It’s time for the school’s Spring Fling. The theme this year is the Titanic. Chosen not by the students or most of the faculty, Mr. Wardell, an AP history teacher, chooses it because the rest of the faculty can build lesson plans around it, thereby giving students an immersive experience. It seems, to me, odd that a theme would be chose that ends in tragedy rather than something light hearted.

A mysterious box containing a green velvet dress arrives at Sam’s home. When Sam tries it on, she is immediately transported to the ship’s desk. Sure a curse has been put upon her, Sam turns to a goth clique called the Descendants, all direct descendants of witches that hanged in Salem in the 1600s.

While not too deep, the book is confusing in that there the reader must have read author Mather’s first book, How to Hang a Witch, especially when a Revolutionary War-era ghost from the first book keeps popping up. The reader also needed to know the relationship between Sam and Jan, his mother and her father, Vivian the stepmother and others---but those are fond in the first book.

The story lacked tension. While it is labeled horror, there wasn’t much to be scared of. I was also disappointed that there was far less of the Titanic than I had anticipated. For these reasons Haunting the Deep gets 2 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

The Fifth Petal

The Fifth Petal by Brunonia Barry      488 pages

Salem, Massachusetts, police chief John Rafferty has his hands full as bestselling author Brunonia Barry’s novel opens. It’s Halloween in the town known for its witch trials back in the late 1680s. Lot of weird things, and people, are out and about, but the evening is going rather smoothly. It was fun to read about how the town went all out to bring tourists into the town.

Then the night does a complete one-eighty. A teenage boy is found dead at witches’ hanging site. A mentally unstable Rose Whelan, is the prime suspect. 

Rose, once a noted Salem witch-trial historian and scholar, has a history with the town, the witches, and murder. Twenty-five years ago, she was involved with what became known as “The Goddess Murders,” all descendants of some of those accused where three young women were viciously murdered and thrown into a mass grave on another Halloween. The only survivors were Rose and one of the young women’s’ daughter, five-year-old Callie.

Callie did not come out of the event unscathed. Hiding in the bushes where Rose pushed her, Callie clung to a rose rosary, one that Rose shoved into her hands, so hard that the imprint of the rose burned itself into her little palm. Twenty-five years later that scar and still there and sometimes hurts.

After the murders, Callie was told that Rose was also dead and she was sent to a convent. Upon learning that Rose is indeed alive, Callie returns to Salem.

Many believe that Rose is guilt of the teenage boy’s death, and of “The Goddess Murders.” But proving it is another story. Chief Rafferty reopens the cold case and tries to solve those murders and well as the current one.

I won’t lie, The Fifth Petal is a slow read. The story is filled with the history of the Salem Witch Trials. It’s fascinating, but not all of it is relative to the story. In the end, I’m not sure that the teenage boy’s murder was ever solved.  For these reasons, The Fifth Petal receives 4 stars out of 5 in Julie’s world.

Bardwell's Folly

Bardwell’s Folly by Sandra Hutchison   342 pages

I’ve read Sandra Hutchison’s first two novels (The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire and The Awful Mess) and loved them both. Now there is a third novel for me to love and tell all my reader friends to grab a copy.

In this story, Eudora “Dori” Bardwell and her stoner brother, Salinger, are living in a small town in upper Massachusetts. The house is a replica of a southern plantation home her father, Bedford Bardwell, built as a living legacy to himself and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tea and Slavery, which was considered the most important work of fiction about slavery since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The house, known as Bardwell House, is a historical landmark in town, and the townspeople are very, very fond of it. A board of trustees runs the house, but thanks to her father’s will, Dori and Salinger are allowed to live there. Unfortunately they aren’t allowed to make any changes, so the summer heat is stifling. In other words, no air conditioning.

The air conditioning is only one symbol of how out-of-touch Dori is with the modern world. She doesn’t have an answering machine, a computer, or a mobile phone. Now 26, Dori had to leave college when her father flew his plane with her mother and four other siblings into the ocean (aka John Kennedy, Jr.) years earlier. She barely makes ends meet working at as a nursing home aide and a part-time grocery clerk. She may live in what seems like a mansion, but the cupboards are bare. Many nights she goes to bed hungry.

When the trustees decide to hire a service to keep up the lawn, to keep up appearances, Dori comes face-to-face with her high school sweetheart, a man whose marriage proposal she refused in front of the whole high school. Sparks fly.

Thanks to an insensitive racial joke, which blew up on social media, Dori’s family in once again in the spotlight. For years, there had been rumors of an unfinished manuscript that her father left behind. When a reporter comes snooping around, interest in finding the manuscript becomes important to the board and leads Dori’s to uncover deep family secrets.

A mixture of romance, intrigue, family secrets, past lives, and a house that is as much a character as Tara was in Gone With the Wind, create a spell-binding read that you won’t want to put down. I give Bardwell’s Folly 6 out of 5 stars.