MORTON:

Oh, come! Why should four distinguished members of the Council—(He enumerates them with a wave of his hand)— The Archbishop of York, Lord Hastings, Lord Stanley, and the Bishop of Ely, be held to require supervision?

You fret, Hastings, you fret.

We should be thankful that things go so smoothly.

 

HASTINGS:

You think so? When you have campaigned as long as I have, you can smell trouble.

Many a time I have looked at a countryside where not a leaf was stirring, and smelt the ambush in it.

LoL. In my head, I may have read Moreton's lines, and especially the line "You fret, Hastings, you fret." in a Belgian accent. 

That's very inappropriate of course, but I guess some books have left an impact.

Book: A Thorn Among The Lilies

Author: Michael Hiebert

Genre: Fiction/Mystery

Summary: Detective Leah Teal is privy to most of the secrets in her hometown of Alvin, but there are always surprises to be had. Like the day she agrees to take her daughter, Caroline, to see a psychic for a reading. The psychic hones in on Leah instead, hinting at a string of gruesome killings and insisting that she intervene to prevent more deaths. When you go looking for trouble, you never know how much you'll find. Sure enough, the psychic's scant clues lead Leah to a cold case from six years ago, when a young woman was found shot to death, her eyelids sewn shut. As Leah digs deeper into old files, a second unsolved case surfaces with the same grisly pattern. While her shrewd young son, Abe, observes from the sidelines, Leah races to prevent another horrific murder, unaware of just how deep the roots of evil can go. Taut, suspenseful, and rich in Southern atmosphere, A Thorn Among The Lilies is a mesmerizing novel of loss and vengeance, and the lengths some will go to out of loyalty and love. -Kensington Books, 2015.

Niamh is a good wife. She learned early on that crossing her husband had consequences. Living quietly in the shadowed cage he has formed around her, Niamh suffers his secrets and bares the scars they leave behind.

On the night of her biggest humiliation Caleb enters the ballroom changing Niamh’s course forever. He brings safety to her dark world and introduces her to the possibility of escape. Will Niamh’s love for Caleb be the key to her freedom or will it be her undoing?

@GoddessFish, @hotchoc84 (Charlotte), @liliththorn, #Paranormal, #Romance, #Erotica, 4 out of 5 (very good)

Finally starting the library ebook.

I've always been meaning to read this long fantasy epic.

At the time it was being published, I just didn't have a lot of bookstore access (and the internet was not like today) -- just never managed to get the books in order so never read. 

Plus it was an era with so many Tolkien wanna-be fantasies that I was a bit burned out.  The rest of this series has apparently withstood the test of time and steered away from the wanna-be mess.

It's been a while since The Thorn and the Sinking Stone was added to my shelves, so the details of the blurb were a bit blurry at the start but it became clear very quickly it was based on Romeo and Juliet. Now, I like Shakespeare, but have always been unable to like that insta-romance between two teenagers.

The book has a dystopian setting, but it's good you're reminded about it every now and then, since the world building is so sparse that you would completely forget. Apparently a Final War has raged and the survivors go about as warring gangs. What happened with the rest of the world remains unclear, though they would have enough means of transportation to figure it out. Another consequence of this war, at least that was what was claimed by the dystopian government, was the introduction of the Cursed, people with enhanced abilities. Which you can test for with a blood sample and which, as good old dystopian governments are wont to do with everything they don't fully understand/control, needs to be exterminated. It is a shame, because I for one would have liked to read more about the world and how it came to be.

Instead, the book is filled with the (blooming) romance between the children of two of the warring gangs, who immediately feel, after a kind of Peeta-and-the-bread moment, that the other is so special that they would die for each other. Luckily both are both Cursed with some useful abilities, or they wouldn't have lasted long. It was insta-love, and overall I felt the romance played too big a role in the story.

With a bit more world building and a lot less insta-love, I think I really would have liked the story. Now, unfortunately, it wasn't for me.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! 

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This was my read for square 1 of Snakes and Ladders, since the author is female, I get to roll two dice:

This brings me to square 12. Author's last name begins with the letters T, U, V, W, X, Y, or Z. I'm currently reading Vivatera by Candace J. Thomas, so that fits.