Rachael Herron

This poignant, funny story reveals the complex relationships between sisters. As teenagers they sang in harmony as the Darling Songbirds, reaching for their shared musical career. When the group broke up, the sisters relationships fell apart as well. When Adele returns to their hometown of Darling Bay, her longing for her lost family is palpable. She hopes to rebuild the past through the inheritance of Uncle Hugh's saloon, to lure her sisters to return. Complications mount when Adele learns that charming bartender Nate Houston believes he is entitled to the saloon.
Rachel Herron weaves a beautiful story with depth and heart in The Darling Songbirds.… (mere)

As you might deduce from the title, this is a romance with a strong secondary plot about knitting.

Specifically, when Owen Bancroft returns to a small California coastal town to get his mother settled in a memory-care facility, dragging his former bad-boy reputation behind him, it stirs up a lot of memories for Lucy Harrison, who harbored a secret crush on him in high school. True to the romance formula, they meet under heightened (but not cute) circumstances (for which Herron gets props), and things go along about as the reader expects, with various small-town characters and members of Lucy’s family providing color and depth.

Things get hotter as the pair flirt and draw away, both reluctant at first to get involved with what looks to be a really bad idea, but of course finally get together, right on romance-novel schedule with a sizzling sexual encounter which is followed (again, right on romance-novel schedule) by a high-stakes argument that ends with bruised pride and I-never-want-to-see-you-again all around. Until, of course, they do, and have to join forces to find Owen’s mother, who has wandered away from the memory-care facility under maximum dramatic circumstances.

What lifts this one out of the ordinary is a well-developed subplot involving some lost writings by a late knitting guru who called the town home, and how threads from the past wind through the future (pun intended), eventually connecting many of these characters.

Overall, this was an enjoying read.… (mere)

Laurie is a dispatcher with the San Bernal PD. She is working one night and gets a call from her daughter, JoJo, and knows that her daughter is in dire trouble. Laurie immediately gets to work to try to find her daughter, involving her husband, who is the chief of police.
When they get to the scene, JoJo has been raped and there is a murder victim found in the bathroom. Kevin, a pro football player, is at the scene (in his own home) and is arrested for both crimes.
There is a person missing, though. That is Harper, JoJo's best friend. This becomes a search for that missing girl.

This is not usually my type of genre, but there were many twists and turns to the story that made it
quite interesting.… (mere)