Darling Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobel

Darling Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobel - 320 pages

"Mothers never forget.  Daughters never forgive"

This book will be released in March 2020 and I was fortunate enough to get an advanced reader copy from NetGalley.  Fans of Gone Girl and The Act will find much to love in this compulsively suspenseful read. 

For the first eighteen years of her life Rose Gold Watts thought she was seriously ill.  She suffered from allergies to most everything, used a wheel chair and a feeding tube but no one could isolate and treat whatever was wrong with her.  It turned out that her problem was that her mother Peggy was a very good liar.  Peggy is sentenced to prison for what she did to Rose and then is released after five years with nowhere to go.  Everyone is shocked when Rose Gold takes her in.  Is it altruism, forgiveness or something far darker?  I stayed up late reading this one and highly recommend it.  It's one of the best psychological suspense books I've read in a very long time. 

The Liar by Nora Roberts

The Liar by Nora Roberts - 501 pages

Shelby was shocked to learn after her husband's death that nearly everything about him was a lie.  He's left her with millions in debt to repay.  He was a thief and conman.  And ultimately, they weren't even married.  So she moves back home to Tennessee to try to make a life with her daughter in her hometown and with her family.  There she meets Griff, a contractor new to town.  While she wasn't looking for romance, she just might have found it . . . along with a lot more trouble leftover from her husband's lies.

I didn't think this was Nora Robert's best book or her worst.  It was a fairly average romantic suspense novel.  I thought the big reveal at the end was pretty obvious from the start of the book -- after all if the character is a liar, why wouldn't the big reveal be a lie also.  I also thought Shelby's constant fear she would be sent to prison and that she needed to pay back all of her husband's debts was unrealistic.  If she was never actually  married to him she would not be responsible for his debt -- especially as she could prove several times that he had forged her name on documents.

January First by Michael Schofield

January First: A Child's Descent into Madness and Her Father's Struggle to Save Her by Michael Schofield, 304 pages

When his daughter January has imaginary friends Michael doesn't think too much of it, but then those imaginary friends turn out to be the first symptom of a huge struggle facing their family.  At first he sees Jani as just a misunderstood genius but then is forced to come to grips with the realization that his daughter is suffering from severe mental illness and spends most of her time in a world only she can see.  It's stunning to think that a child doesn't know the voices and people she sees aren't real since they've been there all her life.    

Battles with the insurance company, the school system and even his wife soon take over Michael's life.  I feared the worst for how this story would end but there is a resolution that leaves the reader believing that there is a place in the world for those who may have two feet firmly in a world of their own making.