Nightmares; Little Pretty Things; The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes

Yes, it's a children's book, but it was fun and well written. A quick read for sure. HIMYM's Jason Segel has teamed up with Kirsten Miller to write these books (there is at least one more). Charlie's mom passed away a few years earlier, and he's convinced his new stepmom is a witch. His family has had to move to her family's creepy ancestral mansion, and Charlie is having issues with insomnia and nightmares. He soon learns that his fear has opened a portal between the nightmare world and the waking world, and as a result nightmares are able to pass through to his side even when he's awake and torture him and his classmates. Charlie has to be brave and face his fears in order to close the portal and save his friends.

This is one of those books that made me sad to finish it, because it was really good, and it's one of those books no one will ever read. So I'm going to promote the heck out of it at work :) Juliet is stuck in the same small town she grew up in, in a dead end job cleaning rooms at a crappy motel. Once, she'd dreamed of escaping, of a bigger life, not living hand to mouth, but those dreams seem old and stale now. Then her old friend and rival from her high school track days, Maddy Bell, walks in the door at the motel. She wants to talk to Juliet, but Juliet feels snubbed by her expensive airs and dismisses her. She regrets it and vows to talk to her the next morning, but before she can, Maddy is found murdered. Now Juliet is determined to find out who killed her and why, and see if she can determine where her own life went so wrong. It was truly a page turner, I couldn't put it down. A great book that deserves more recognition.

Lawrence Block's latest, "The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes", kind of surprised me. Doak is a retired from the NYPD and living in Florida, occasionally doing private detective work. The local sheriff asks him to go undercover: he's gotten a report that the young wife of a wealthy local businessman has been asking around about how to knock off her husband. Doak poses as a hitman and tells the sheriff that Lisa has changed her mind and called it off. What really happened, though, is that Doak fell for Lisa, tipped her off, and the two of them conspire together to get rid of her husband and run away together. But now that Lisa is on the sheriff's radar, any accident that befalls her husband will throw suspicion directly on her, so Doak has to come up with an ingenious plan so they can get away with murder.