Independent publisher of award-winning books by Kelly Brakenhoff
Libby Ballard is the director of the museum in the small town of Dogwood Springs, currently in the happy chaos of planning her wedding to Sam, with her golden retriever Bella as loyal sidekick and general emotional support animal. Life is good.
I feel strange admitting this, but I don’t have time to follow celebrity book lists. Or bestseller lists. Or award lists. By the time a book like The Correspondent finds its way to my TBR, it’s usually already famous everywhere else and I’m just catching up. After reading this with my in-person book club, I now see what all the fuss was about.
If you wondered what became of Lydia and Wickham after the elopement in Pride and Prejudice, this book has ideas. Spoiler: it is not a happily ever after.
If you’ve ever watched a dinner party go sideways, you understand the energy of this book. Except Kitty Goring’s party goes considerably more sideways than most.
The premise sold me before I even turned the first page: four strangers happen to be sitting at the same table in the Boston Public Library when they hear a scream, and then find out a woman has been killed. What follows is everything that brought those four people to that table, everything they’re hiding, and a tangle of crimes that keeps expanding the longer you pull on the thread.
If you’ve read Death 101: Extra Credit, you already know this story. Cassandra Sato has told it so many times, she knows it by heart. But in case you haven’t met Michiko Sato yet, let me introduce you.
Charlie Kingsley agrees to be the plus-one for her friend Claire for what sounds like a cozy weekend house party. That alone already feels like a commitment, but it turns out it is not actually a party at all. It is a gathering to read Claire’s grandmother’s will, which is the kind of situation that practically guarantees tension.
Every good pilgrimage ends with the journey home. No surprise, ours required a little extra patience. Our group left Cuatro Ciénegas before sunrise on Sunday morning for the long drive back to Monterrey. The bus was quiet at first, some still sleepy, some waiting for the caffeine to kick in, and many of us were still processing the past few days.
By the time Saturday arrived, it felt like we had been in Cuatro Ciénegas much longer than a few days. No complaints from me. I love those trips where one moment leads naturally into the next. We began at dawn with Fr. Brandenburg leading a small group hiking up a rocky ridge near the Tierra Maria vineyard. The trail involved a fair amount of bouldering over large rocks and a steep ascent.
One of the things I was most looking forward to on this trip was walking the Camino de San José. The pilgrimage follows a series of stations across the desert, each one reflecting on a different moment in the life of St. Joseph. Our group had spent several mornings walking stretches of the route, stopping along the way to read reflections from a guidebook written by Fr. Daniel Brandenburg called The Way of St. Joseph.
