Hamm Court Book Club – Page 8 – For the enjoyment of friends, books and wine …

The Pilots Daughter by Audrey J Cole

Cora is scared to fly again after her husband died in a recent helicopter crash in Pago Pago.

A thousand times she has told herself to turn around, not get on the flight, go back to her young children.

But now, she’s seated in first class across the aisle from the girlfriend of a famous billionaire pharmaceutical entrepreneur.

Halfway across the Pacific, the flight is hijacked. Six people are dead—including the pilots.

Cora is a young widow, mother, and emergency room nurse…but as the world closes in around her, she’s also a pilot’s daughter. Lost off radar in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, the motive behind the hijacking remains a mystery. Not knowing who to trust, Cora works with the man seated beside her, Seattle Homicide Detective Kyle Adams, to save herself along with the remaining one hundred and fifty-four souls on board.

Jane 6, Janet 6, June 6, Sally 5, Christine 7, Trude 5, Elaine 7

I have something to tell you by Susan Lewis

A terrible secret

When Jessica’s husband comes home one night and says he has something to tell her, her world is turned upside down.

A case too close to home

With secrets unravelling at home, Jessica has to carry on. As a lawyer, she must protect the innocent, and she’s defending a man accused of killing his wife.

An ending you won’t see coming

As her two worlds collide, Jessica no longer knows who to trust.

E5, S 7, Jane 6, C6,Janet 8, June 6, Trude 6

The Taxidermist’s daughter by Kate Mosse

The enthralling new Sunday Times bestselling gothic novel from the author of THE WINTER GHOSTS, LABYRINTH and THE CITY OF LIES

The clock strikes twelve. Beneath the wind and the remorseless tolling of the bell, no one can hear the scream . . .

1912. A Sussex churchyard. Villagers gather on the night when the ghosts of those who will not survive the coming year are thought to walk. And in the shadows, a woman lies dead.

As the flood waters rise, Connie Gifford is marooned in a decaying house with her increasingly tormented father. He drinks to escape the past, but an accident has robbed her of her most significant childhood memories. Until the disturbance at the church awakens fragments of those vanished years . . .

Elaine 6, Janet 7, Jane 6, Trude 6, Sally 8, June 7, Christine 8

The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities.

Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ story lines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

Elaine 8, Christine 8, Trude 7, Pauline 8, janet 8, June 9, Jane 9,

A ladder to the sky by John Boyne

A psychological drama of cat and mouse, A Ladder to the Sky shows how easy it is to achieve the world if you are prepared to sacrifice your soul.

If you look hard enough, you can find stories pretty much anywhere. They don’t even have to be your own. Or so would-be writer Maurice Swift decides very early on in his career.

A chance encounter in a Berlin hotel with celebrated novelist Erich Ackermann gives him an opportunity to ingratiate himself with someone more powerful than him. For Erich is lonely, and he has a story to tell. Whether or not he should do so is another matter entirely.

Once Maurice has made his name, he sets off in pursuit of other people’s stories. He doesn’t care where he finds them – or to whom they belong – as long as they help him rise to the top.

Stories will make him famous, but they will also make him beg, borrow and steal. They may even make him do worse.

christine 7, Jane 9, June 9, sally 8, Janet 7, Pauline 9, Trude 8, Elaine 5