BOOK BITES | Tara M Stringfellow, Hayley Campbell, Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

Memphis ★★★★
Tara M Stringfellow
John Murray

Stringfellow celebrates three generations of black women between the civil rights movement and 9/11. Men come and go, bringing love and wrecking tragedy, as these women survive and thrive. Readers watch dreams get packed away while others bloom, as sisters uphold each other even when they disagree. Meanwhile, history keeps knocking on the door with the same old excuses, violence, and insults. Stringfellow has produced a family saga that sings. — Tiah Beautement 

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All the Living And The Dead ★★★★
Hayley Campbell
Raven Books

Journalist Hayley Campbell has put together a compelling read where she speaks to peopleinvolved in the industry of death. Why? Well, we’ve been raised to fear death — but how do you fear something without speaking to the people who face it every day. From embalmers, to former executioners, murder investigators and gravediggers, Campbell has done an extraordinary job of meeting people who are daily in the face of death. History meets first-hand experience in this gripping collection of interviews bound to keep you hooked. And yes, you’ll reread a few chapters just to make sure you fully grasped what it was like to be an executioner who took the lives of more than 60 people. — Jessica Levitt 

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The Golden Couple ★★★
Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
St Martin’s Press

The Golden Couple by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen is their latest soapie thriller. Set in Washington DC, it features Avery, a therapist who lost her professional licence, but  which hasn’t stopped her practising. Thanks to an article, she now has more clients than she can handle. It’s all because of her unorthodox 10 session programme which she has developed. Marissa and her husband Matthew are her new clients. Wealthy, with marital issues galore, they hire Avery to help them. But her methods are unconventional (she literally stalks them to see what they are hiding) and she thinks she is being stalked as well; worried that because of a whistle-blowing incident with one of her former clients she might be targeted by big pharma. It is an entertaining read but not what I would call “gripping” and the characters feel a bit too one dimensional. — Jennifer Platt

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