My reading goal this year is five books. I realize this is laughable to the big readers out there but I read like one book per year in the years 2013-2021, and honestly, I’m not even sure I read any books some of those years lol. Last year, I beat my goal of three books (one per quarter) by reading five books, so I figure I set my baseline as five books in 2023 and hopefully blow that out of the water. I have a ton of books stacked up from the past few years that I want to read, and to hopefully make it easier to fulfill my goal, I borrowed Jay’s Kindle and decided to try it out.
The book I selected was a murder mystery called Hide by Tracy Clark. I picked it blindly from a list of books on the Kindle Unlimited library and am really glad that I did! Hide was released on January 1, 2023, and follows Detective Harriet Foster, a Chicago detective who is hunting down a serial killer who’s targeting redheaded women while simultaneously trying to come to terms with the loss of her teenage son and late partner.
I really liked Hide. I did guess who the killer was somewhat early on, sometime within the first half of the book, and I guessed the first twist a little more than halfway through. There’s a second twist that I didn’t see coming until the information was presented and I liked this second twist a good deal. I really liked Det. Foster and the way the book was paced. There wasn’t a lot of “fat” nor did Clark do that thing that some authors do to up the word count by getting overly descriptive about situations and characters for pages upon pages. The mystery and overall story were both straight and to the point and it picked up steam as it went along. A few nitpicks aside, I did genuinely enjoy this book.
Speaking of nitpicks, here are my slight criticisms: The first one is that I still have no idea why it’s called Hide! I don’t think I missed anything, lol. Another one is that it was a bit too predictable, but I was okay with that and looked forward to seeing how it played out. Finally, I found some of the characters, while probably accurately written, were annoying – and if these types of people annoy me in real life, they’re gonna annoy me in fiction. One character was purposefully written to be a “dark gray” and I’m still not quite sure how I felt about her, while another character was just so unlikeable – with a touch of mysterious – that you kept waiting for an explanation to make them more relatable, but it never came. To be clear: I don’t think mysterious assholes need to be redeemed but I did keep waiting to find out the explanation behind one plot point. I bet we get it in Book 2 and I hope it’s not as generic as they’re sneaking out to AA meetings or couples therapy.
This is the first book I’ve read by Tracy Clark, but it won’t be the last. I need to check out some of her other books while I’m waiting for the second Detective Harriet Foster book, Fall, to come out in December 2023. Overall, I give it a 3.8/5 and recommend you add it to your reading list if murder mysteries are your jam.
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I have this memory of you from (I think) 5th grade. Our music teacher was working with you for a chorus solo. Maybe we were doing Grease, maybe it was just random. Anyway, she said something like, “It’s in this key” or “It’s these notes” and without hesitation, you went, “So like this?” and adjusted your singing on the spot. I was so impressed that you just knew how to do that. You were so cool and kind. 
Woot, I made it back for week 2. I’m still trying to get my creative writing groove back, so to gently ease myself back into that mode, I went with a simple yet fun writing prompt. This prompt comes from the sequel to my beloved 
Over the past decade, I’ve amassed quite a few more writing prompt books. I tried doing another challenge again in 2016 but gave it up after one week. This time, I’m going to rotate between a few different books because the challenge is to do a post per week.
