Thinner/ Richard Bachman/ 423 pages/ Horror

             Billy Halleck is living a good life as a wealthy family man. He has all that he wants in life plus some extra weight that he is constantly being warned about. One day while out driving he accidentally hits a woman who was jaywalking. Because of Billy's connections he gets off without punishment for the accident. The woman's magical father doesn't care for this and curses Billy. Soon Halleck is rapidly losing weight no matter how much he eats and begins to worry for his life.
              After reading the description for this one I wasn't really sure about it. Seemed like one I would start and lose interest in but I couldn't stop reading this book. I had to know how he was going to get his weight loss to stop and even though this doesn't sound like a scary idea for a novel it really was gripping. I loved the ending because it was not what I was expecting at all. Definitely a book that had me holding my breathe at times.

After Anna / Lisa Scottoline / 388 pages

Maggie is a woman who developed postpartum psychosis, a severe form of postpartum depression , after the birth of her daughter Anna.  As a result she and her husband divorced when Anna was six months old and Anna's husband got sole custody of Anna.  Anna and her father moved to his native country France to live.  Anna got better after years of therapy.  Now she is happily remarried to Nathan, a widowed single father of a young boy named Caleb.  Suddenly out of the blue Maggie receives a phone call from Anna, now sixteen years old.  Anna is attending a boarding school in the United States.  Her father and his new family have just died in a private airplane crash.  Maggie and Anna set up a meeting and soon Anna leaves school to come live with Maggie, Nathan, and Caleb.  Things do not go smoothly and a few weeks later Anna is found dead and Nathan is arrested for her murder.  The story is filled with many twists.  It kept me guessing until the end!

Watch Me Disappear/ Janelle Brown / 358 pgs

This is a suspense novel about a family of three. Mother Billie is a free spirit, do-her-own-thing kind of woman. Father Jonathan is a workaholic who loves his wife and daughter but has become somewhat disconnected over the years. Daughter Olive is 15 and finding her way. The story opens with a day at the beach, one of the last happy days for this family. Then we fast forward a year and realize that Billie died not long after that day, while hiking in the mountains on her own. Because Billie's body was never found, she has not been declared dead yet. Olive begins to wonder if her mother might be alive when she starts having visions of her mother talking to her. Soon Jonathan is pulled into this theory, reluctantly, and the two travel down a path of discovering what happened to Billie and who she really was. I have to admit I did not like this one. It was slow to get going and even once it did, I found Jonathan and his lack of common sense and poor decision-making to be annoying. In addition, each and every revelation in the book is a cliche. There's the wife's best friend, the shadowy figure from Billie's past, was she or wasn't having an affair. Even the ending was telegraphed about halfway through the story. There was nothing new or different here and I didn't feel like Jonathon earned his happy ending, but he got it anyway. To top it off, the last chapter goes back to the day Billie disappeared and she reiterates everything her husband and daughter just learned about her over the course of the book. I would rather have just read that chapter and not the whole book:(