December - Jan - The Fire and the Ore by Olivia Hawker

 The Fire and the Ore by Olivia Hawker

Based in part on author Olivia Hawker’s own family history, The Fire and the Ore is the compelling story of three courageous women who were forced to endure great sacrifice during the Utah War. Combining a heartrending narrative with richly detailed historical accuracy, this novel reminded me of both Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds and Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.

Drawn together by a man who had secretly embraced polygamy, Tamar, Jane, and Tabitha have little power and few choices within the patriarchal leadership of the Mormon church. All three women need their marriage for reasons of their own, and yet they can’t reconcile themselves to their circumstances.

But when the United States Army marches on Utah Territory, the women and children must retreat into the hostile desert wilderness. The three wives must cooperate if they hope to keep themselves and their children alive—and in the process, each finds a new definition of family, one that unites her with her sister-wives in a bond stronger than the ties of faith and marriage

October - Frances and November - Linda

OCTOBER - Frances

Beautiful Day by Elin Hilderbrand

The Carmichaels and the Grahams have gathered on Nantucket for a wedding. Plans are being made according to the wishes of the bride's late mother, who left behind The Notebook: specific instructions for every detail of her youngest daughter's future nuptials. Everything should be falling into place for the beautiful event - but in reality, things are far from perfect.

While the couple-to-be are quite happy, their loved ones find their own lives crumbling. In the days leading up to the wedding, love will be questioned, scandals will arise, and hearts will be broken and healed. Elin Hilderbrand takes readers on a touching journey in Beautiful Day - into the heart of marriage, what it means to be faithful, and how we choose to honor our commitments.

NOVEMBER - Linda

The Ones We Leave Behind by Deanna Lynn Sletten

Diane picked up her mother’s phone. “How do you feel about your mother being let out of prison today after sixty-five years?” the reporter asked. Diane stared at her mother. “My grandmother is alive?” That one phone call hurled shock waves throughout the entire family.

1955 – Anna Bergman Craine’s life changes in an instant when she commits a crime of passion and is sentenced to life in prison. Leaving behind two young children, she is left alone in the world, never to hear from family or friends again. Decades later, she is set free and finds she has a family that has chosen to forget her. What caused this beautiful, intelligent, young woman to commit such a drastic deed that would pull her away from everyone she loved?

2020 – Diane Martin is shocked to learn that not only is her maternal grandmother alive, but she’s just been released after decades in prison. Against her aging mother’s wishes, she visits the older woman and soon hears a tale of the events that led up to that tragic day in 1955. Diane realizes that her own life has mirrored that of her grandmother’s and, had circumstances gone differently that fateful day, she might have experienced the same fate.

A heart-wrenching story of a family torn apart because of a moment in time and trying to put the pieces back together after being separated for decades.

September - Nancy - The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

August - Diana - Sara Dane: The Sweeping Australian Family Saga by Catherine Gaskin

The international bestselling rags to riches saga of a convict woman's ambition and courage in colonial Australia. A gripping page-turner - over 2 million copies sold worldwide.

Sara Dane is an eighteenth-century young Englishwoman, unjustly sentenced and transported to the penal colony of Australia. Follow Sara's struggle to raise herself from the status of a convict to a position of wealth and power.

"A grand story." Yorkshire Evening Post

Sara faces many challenges, from the savage voyage aboard a convict ship to the corruption and prejudice rife in New South Wales. Life in the Colony is harsh, and Sara has to contend with natural disasters and convict outbreaks, as well as the snobbery of the high society she wishes to enter.

Sara's life is also influenced in often surprising ways by the men who love her, childhood sweetheart Richard Barwell, ship's officer-turned-landowner Andrew Maclay, Frenchman Louis de Bourget and the Irish political prisoner Jeremy Hogan.

A compelling historical novel full of adventure, romance, rivalries, tragedies and triumphs, also broadcast as a popular TV mini-series and radio series.

Meeting Date:   Monday, September 19th at Round Table at 11:30 A.M.

July - 16 Souls by John J. Nance - Linda

 The Latest Aviation Thriller From New York Times Bestselling Author John Nance!

On takeoff from Denver during a winter blizzard, an airliner piloted by veteran Captain Marty Mitchell overruns a commuter plane from behind. Bizarrely, the fuselage of the smaller aircraft is tenuously wedged onto the huge right wing of his Boeing 757, leading Mitchell to an impossible life-or-death choice.

Mitchell’s decision will land the former military pilot in the cross-hairs of a viciously ambitious district attorney determined to send him to prison for doing his job. Despondent and deeply wounded by what he sees as betrayal by the system, Mitchell at first refuses to defend himself or even assist the corporate lawyer forced against her will to represent him.

Pitted against the prosecutorial prowess of flamboyant Denver DA Grant Richardson, who is using Mitchell’s case to audition for a presidential appointment as a U.S. attorney, is young defense attorney Judith Winston. Her lack of experience in criminal cases could mean the end of Mitchell’s freedom, if he doesn’t end his own life first. However, a rising level of gritty determination even her law partners have never witnessed before, propels Winston to lay it all on the table to save Mitchell and expose Richardson as a fraud.

16 SOULS takes the reader for a wild ride in a heart-stopping aviation and legal thriller propelled by irresistible characters, an agonizingly possible airborne dilemma, and a desperate refusal both in the air and in the courtroom to give up in the face of devastating odds.

June - Frances - Ink Shadows by Ellery Adams

 Ink Shadows by Ellery Adams

Controversy erupts in Miracle Springs, North Carolina, when the owner of the local bookstore tries to play peacekeeper—but winds up playing detective instead...

Nora Pennington is known for her window displays, and as Halloween approaches, she decides to showcase fictional heroines like Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Madeline Miller’s Circe. A family-values group disapproves of the magical themes, though, and wastes no time launching a modern-day witch hunt. Suddenly, former friends and customers are targeting not only Nora and Miracle Books, but a new shopkeeper, Celeste, who’s been selling CBD oil products.

Nora and her friends in the Secret, Book, and Scone Society are doing their best to put an end to the strife—but then someone puts an end to a life. Though the death is declared an accident, the ruling can’t explain the old book page covered with strange symbols and disturbing drawings left under Nora’s doormat, a postcard from an anonymous stalker, or multiple cases of vandalism.

The only hope is that Nora can be a heroine herself and lead the Secret, Book, and Scone Society in a successful investigation—before more bodies turn up and the secrets from Celeste’s past come back to haunt them all .

May -Jan - In Her Tracks by Robert Dugoni

In Her Tracks by Robert Dugoni

What family secrets are behind two disappearances? Seattle detective Tracy Crosswhite is determined to uncover the truth in the latest installment of New York Times bestselling author Robert Dugoni’s heart-stopping series.

Returning from an extended leave in her hometown of Cedar Grove, Detective Tracy Crosswhite finds herself reassigned to the Seattle PD’s cold case unit. As the protective mother of an infant daughter, Tracy is immediately drawn to her first file: the abduction of a five-year-old girl whose parents, embattled in a poisonous divorce, were once prime suspects.

While reconstructing the days leading up to the girl’s disappearance, Tracy is brought into an active investigation with former partner Kinsington Rowe. A young woman has vanished on an isolated jogging trail in North Seattle. Divided between two critical cases, Tracy has little to go on except the treacherous deceptions behind a broken marriage—and now, the secrets hiding behind the closed doors of a deceptively quiet middle-class neighborhood.

To find two missing persons, Tracy will have to follow more than clues, which are both long cold and unsettlingly fresh. Given her own traumatic past, Tracy must also follow her instincts—to whatever dark and dangerous places they may lead.

March - Diana (The Woman in White) & April - Nancy (Seven Perfect Things)

March - Diana

The Woman in White

by 

Wilkie Collins,

 

Matthew Sweet (Annotations)

really liked it 4.00  ·   Rating details ·  142,405 ratings  ·  8,580 reviews

'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop... There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth, stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter becomes embroiled in the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons, and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

Matthew Sweet's introduction explores the phenomenon of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, and discusses Wilkie Collins's biographical and societal influences. Included in this edition are appendices on theatrical adaptations of the novel and its serialisation history. 

April - Nancy

Seven Perfect Things 

by 

Catherine Ryan Hyde (Goodreads Author)

 4.37  ·   Rating details ·  22,924 ratings  ·  1,492 reviews

Thirteen-year-old Abby Hubble lives in an unhappy home in the Sierra Nevada foothills where her father makes life miserable for her and her mother, Mary. One day Abby witnesses a man dump a litter of puppies into the nearby river. Diving in to rescue all seven, she knows she won’t be able to bring them home. Afraid for their fate at the pound, she takes them to an abandoned cabin, where all she can offer is a promise that she’ll be back the next day.

To grieving widower Elliot Colvin, life has lost meaning. Looking for solace, he retreats to the hunting cabin he last visited years ago, before his wife’s illness. What he discovers is not at all what he expected: seven puppies and one determined girl with an indomitable heart.

As Abby and Elliot’s friendship deepens, Abby imagines how much better her life—and the puppies’ lives—would be if her mother were married to Elliot instead of her father. But when Abby’s father moves the family hundreds of miles away, Abby and her mother must decide how long they’re willing to defer happiness.

February - TAHOE JADE by Todd Borg - Janice

 February

A Letter From Abe Lincoln

In the fall of 1861, President Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to the new governor of California, Leland Stanford. Lincoln sent the letter by Pony Express, which went through Tahoe. The letter from Lincoln was intercepted, and it never reached Stanford.

An Assault, A Fire, A Kidnapping

160 years later, Firefighter Jade Jaso was assaulted in Sacramento. The next day she nearly died in a warehouse fire. A short time later, her rancher father was killed in a fall at Lake Tahoe. Then Jade disappeared.

A Coded Message

When Detective Owen McKenna is brought on the case, he finds Lincoln’s letter hidden in the personal effects of Jade Jaso’s father, who was a collector of historical memorabilia. The letter contains a coded message. McKenna learns that the message refers to a treasure Stanford had mentioned to Lincoln. Unfortunately, Jade’s father made the deadly mistake of talking about the letter. The information came to a brute of a man who would kill and torture anyone who got in the way of finding that treasure, including Jade and her father, as well as Owen McKenna and McKenna’s girlfriend Street Casey

2022 BOOK CLUB ROTATION

January:  Erin - Path of Bones (Cassie Quinn Series, Book 1) by P. T. Ryan (mtg 2/22/22)
February:  Janice - Tahoe Jade by Todd Borg (mtg 3/21/22)
March:  Diana - The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
April:  Nancy - Seven Perfect Things by Catherine Ryan Hyde
May:  Jan - In Her Tracks by Robert Dugoni
June:  Frances - Ink Shadows by Ellery Adams
July:  Linda - 16 Souls by John J. Nance
August: Diana - Sara Dane: The sweeping Australian family saga - Catherine Gaskin
September: Nancy - The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
October: Frances - Beautiful Day by Elin Hildebrand
November: Linda - The Ones We Leave Behind by Deanna Lynn Sletten
December: Jan - YEAR-END MEETING - The Fire and the Ore by Olivia Hawker

 *Rachelle opted out of the rotation, but I told her we’ll keep her updated on the book choices and meeting dates just in case her schedule allows time.  She may want to come if/when we have a year-end meeting as it would be fun to see her again.

Welcome Diana!

Rocklin Rollers Book Club welcomes Diana to our group.  Diana retired from the City of Rocklin and has attended the last few meetings as a guest.  During our meeting on messenger this month she became an official member by those attending.   Welcome Diana!!!

JANUARY - ERIN - Path of Bones by P. T. Ryan and K.M. Rought - February 22nd at 1 pm

Tuesday, February 22nd at 1 pm (location or on line to be determined)

PATH OF BONES: A Cassie Quinn Mystery by L. T. Ryan and K. M. Rought

The debut novel in the Cassie Quinn Series from Wall Street Journal & USA Today bestselling author L.T. Ryan & K.M. Rought!   A mystery thriller with a hint of paranormal that'll keep you guessing until the last page!

"Fans of paranormal mystery will find a lot to sink their teeth into here!"

Cassie didn't ask to be a medium. But she shouldered the daunting task of easing the suffering of the tormented souls who came to her. For over a decade the FBI, police departments across the country, and dozens of private investigators sought her out for her special abilities. Then one day, the spirit world disconnected.

A fresh start proves harder than she thought when the ghost of a murdered woman appears in Cassie's home. With her gift returned, Cassie sets out to discover the meaning of the dead woman's message.

A killer who removes his victim's hearts is still on the loose. As Cassie races to stop him, she finds, hers may be the next one he takes. Her gift and grit are the only things separating her from crossing over the thin line between life and death.

OUR FIRST BOOKCLUB IN A RESTAURANT SINCE COVID....