"Plain Jane" Review

Cristyn West captured the art of suspense when she wrote Plain Jane. To give you a little indication, I began reading the novel after dark one evening. Just reading the prologue made me check the locks on my front door. Plain Jane is a crime fiction novel with a compelling story that deserves a read. The main characters irritate and intrigue you all at the same time. Plain Jane definitely takes you on an emotional roller coaster and at the same time it makes you feel like you could quit your day job, join some CSI unit and go on the hunt for serial killers. West's nack for description makes that feel possible. In the midst of the action scenes, you are transplanted into that world. Only when you are being told and not shown do you emerge. The abundance of fragmented sentences, at times took you away from the flow of the story but the description, suspense, characters, and twists in the story line brought you back. It manages to satisfy both chicklit and crime fiction lovers but you'll have to read it to find out why. No spoilers here. Plain Jane gets 4 out of 5 stars.

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" review: From a chicklit lover perspective

I recently read "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by the late Stieg Larsson and here are a few of my thoughts on it. The beginning of the novel took me much longer to read than I anticipated due to my lack of knowledge of all the author's Swedish references to parliament, cities and the like. I have traveled abroad but the only thing I can tell you about Sweden is 1)Stockholm is the capital and 2)Elin Nordegren was born there. However, once I got hooked on the lives of the characters and the story, I was hooked. By the last three hundred pages of the 600+ page novel I could not put it down. I had at least one sleepless night during the reading of this novel. I had to know who the killer was and why, which I did not guess by the way. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" was a very good read as you have probably heard a thousand times before already.

The part of the novel that affected me the most as an avid chicklit reader and lover was the ending. Not to give it away but as a chicklit lover I need a happy ending, the happily ever after, but the end of this novel ripped my heart out. I sat there reading the final paragraph without so much as taking in a breath. In all the reviews I have read regarding this novel no one even mentions the ending. For a true chicklit reader, I should have been warned. I'll have to see what the next novel brings for Lisbeth. For now, I am off to pick up "The Girl who Played with Fire" and "The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" since I mistakenly did not buy all of his novels at once.

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" definitely deserves all of the much publicized hype--4 3/4 stars out of 5!