Vesper by Jeff Sampson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Emily Webb is a geek. Well, that's how it starts out.  Hmmm.  Actually, it starts with her half in and out of a window all dressed up and uncharacteristically tarted up for a night on the town that her usual 16-year-old self would be mortified she was considering having.


What is going on with Emily Webb?  In fact, what is going on in her town?  Emily Cooke is murdered, and a chain of events is kicked off that has the reader racing through pages trying to figure out what is happening before something either kills Emily Webb from the outside or from inside her own body (what are these strange changes that come over her?  Are they getting worse?).


And what about the chapters that are interspersed in between her story where it appears Emily Webb has been captured and is being held prisoner?  What is going on?  What are those noises? I think something wicked is coming down the road.  Something delightfully wicked. Something for which I need to turn the page and read on.


Please, let there be more in this series!  I just can't stand the wait.


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The Glass Demon by Helen Grant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I finished her first book, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, in a day.  I could not put it down.  It was smart, funny and uber-frightening.  This one ratchets the fright down and isn't funny at all, but is a speeding train of mystery and teen angst and murder!

Lin Fox is yanked off to Germany right when she should be in her last year of high school in England.  Her older sister is in the middle of a crisis, her mother and their younger brother Ru are something of an odd pair of ducks.  It is the father, a medieval scholar trying to get his professorship, who is the one who puts his family in danger with his obsessive need to find the Allerheiligen stained glass.  Glass so storied that many believe it to be cursed if not lost or destroyed hundreds of years earlier.

Faced with mounting bodies, all surrounded by pieces of glass, Lin and her new found (boy)friend Michel try to put it all together before something horrible happens closer to home.  Will she be able to find the Allerheiligen stained glass?  Will she find love?  Will she find the demon?

Read on!


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