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Minimal fall decor. Good morning! How’s it going? I am still plugging along and doing okay but as the holidays approach it feels a little weird. Thanksgiving will be really strange for us this year without the kids here. Still looking forward to the time off though.

Today is a full day of work and then the Halloween Party for student ministry is tonight. It is 80’s themed and will be a good time.

I reviewed The Stowaway this past Monday. It was quite enjoyable given that it’s a about a serial killer running amok on a ship. A killer who targets children, no less. That book put a little hiccup in my reading because once you fly through a book like that, you want to keep the train going and I picked up Dune. Hard stop. My plan was to read it “quickly” so I can then watch the movie. Most of you have told me to just watch the movie. I will continue on for a bit to see how it goes.

We are anxiously awaiting our turn for the booster shot. We are due in November. I believe the Moderna booster was just approved for the under 65 age bracket. Trying to get my daughter and son to schedule theirs. Have you gotten yours?

This Friday night we will watch the original Halloween movie and then Saturday night Halloween II. Last Friday we saw the new one, Halloween Kills. I liked it! It has some surprises in it but out of all the movies this one has the highest kill count. It was almost comical how many are killed in this one. Michael was not happy.

Do you have plans for this weekend? Any Halloween parties? We will hand out candy for Halloween and that’s about it. I bought less candy this year. If we run out, I will just turn the lights off. Thirty dollars for a bag of candy is a bit ridiculous. In pre-Covid years we would go through five giant bags. This year, I bought two.

Have a great rest of the week!

The Stowaway
By James S. Murray & Darren Wearmouth
St. Martin’s Press, 9781250263650, September 2021, 320pp.

The Short of It:

Gruesome, but oddly entertaining.

The Rest of It:

Two years ago, Maria Fontana, the head of the Psychology Department at Columbia University, sat on a jury for one of the most depraved cases ever to pass through the hallowed halls of City Hall. ~ Indiebound

The set-up is very good. Maria’s role on that jury comes back to haunt her and her family as they are vacationing on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean. Maria and her fiancé are trying to put the events of the past behind them while getting a little R&R with Maria’s young children in tow. But things suddenly take a dangerous turn on the ship when people turn up dead. People, mostly, young children. How can this be? Could the man on trial, Wyatt Butler have a copycat?

Maria spent a lot of time reviewing the evidence of that case. All the gruesome photos of Butler’s young victims. Plus, her background in Psychology gives her enough info to know how these serial killers work, but could there really be a copycat on board? Why? What is he after?

This book is a classic example of being trapped with no place to run. It’s a ship but there are only so many places to hide and Maria’s knowledge of the case and what this killer is capable of keeps the story flowing at a breakneck pace. I really enjoyed this one. I read it in one sitting and could not put it down for long.

But…

It’s gruesome. The crime scenes are very graphic. It seemed somewhat tolerable only because the killings are not in real time. As readers, we only hear of the aftermath but it’s children, which is a bit hard to swallow. Many of you warned me about how graphic it was but it was done well-enough that it didn’t keep me from frantically turning those pages.

If you need something a little different, something that is hard to put down and you don’t mind the graphic nature of these killings, then I highly recommend it.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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