Mailbox Monday - May 7th

Just when it looked like the physical mailbox was drying up, the UPS guy started making big tracks through the mud again this past week. Several good ones arrived.

More than You Know by Penny Vincenzi.

In this world of Social Media, I'm often filling out forms, liking pages on Facebook, and opening emails telling me to enter to win a copy.  And....I won!  Many thanks for this great read which I won in a giveaway from Great Thoughts.

A privileged girl from a privileged class, Eliza has a dazzling career in the magazine world of the 1960s. But when she falls deeply in love with Matt, an edgy working-class boy, she gives up her ritzy, fast-paced lifestyle to get married.     
By the end of the decade, however, their marriage has suffered a harrowing breakdown, culminating in divorce and a dramatic courtroom custody battle over their little girl. Also at risk is Eliza's gorgeous family home, a pawn in the game, which she can't bear to give up.     
True to form, Penny Vincenzi introduces a devious cast of characters seemingly plucked from the pages of sixties- and seventies-era magazines, as she deftly maneuvers between the glamorous, moneyed worlds of fashion and advertising, and a heart-wrenching custody battle going on in the courtroom where the social mores of the time are on full display.

I think this one is going to get a guest review from one of my readers at the library.  She's already bugging me for it.
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I also received two books from Maine Authors Publishing.  Normally, I'm not too keen on self-published books, but this company appears to be a class act (OK they're right up the road from my hometown) - they even have real live editors to help these authors.  So I've agreed to read and review a few of them.  Besides, one of my 2012 reading goals was to read more Maine authors.  These looked especially inviting.

Beloved Captain: A Nantucket Love Story. by JoAnn Simon

Just in time for summer...

In this novel, Catherine Sternwood retreats from her busy life in California to the Nantucket home she inherited from her grandparents. The 200-year-old house brings her the serenity she craves—and something more. Catherine soon learns she is sharing the house with Lucien Blythe, a wealthy merchant captain who had lived there a century and a half earlier—and had vanished without a trace. Yet here he is, seemingly a man of flesh and blood, turning Catherine's measured world upside down with both fear and attraction. The ghostly love story straddles the Nantucket that Catherine knows and loves and the much older island where Lucien lived and worked.

And Just in time for May Murder and Mayhem reading:

 
Matinicus: An Island Mystery by Darcy Scott.

 A century-spanning double mystery pitting a renegade fishing community against an unhappy child-bride of the 1820s, a defiant twenty-first-century teen, and a hard-drinking botanist—Dr. Gil Hodges—who escapes to the island of Matinicus to avoid a crazed ex-lover and verify a rumored 22 species of wild orchid only to find himself hounded by the ghost of a child some two-hundred years dead.
If Gil’s hoping for peace and quiet, he’s clearly come to the wrong place. Generations of infighting among loose-knit lobstering clans have left them openly hostile to outsiders. When a beautiful, bed-hopping stranger sails into the harbor, old resentments re-ignite and people begin to die—murders linked, through centuries of violence, to a diary whose secrets threaten to tear the island apart.

 I've not yet been to Matinicus, but that trip is on our bucket list. In the meantime, this mystery seems to have it all....murder, ghosts, lobsters and orchids! Maybe this will give me the incentive to go sooner rather than later.

So, hurry on over to Marcia's place at Monday Mailbox to see what everyone else got this week.  And be sure to leave a link to your mailbox in your comments below.  Happy Reading!