The Geekish Reader

Title:   Monkey Wrench Author:   Terri Thayer Genre:   Cozy Mystery Pages:   288 Published:   May 2012 Publisher:   Midnight Ink Source:   NetGalley Where to buy:   Amazon Synopsis: A new pattern in our popular quilting mystery series With two weeks left before the annual Quilters Crawl, Dewey Pellicano is excited to showcase her quilt shop after a four-year absence from the crawl. Quilters from all over visit as many quilting shops as they can within a short time. But Dewey's giveaway planning and Twitter promotion are cut short when her assistant manager, Vangie, is implicated in her boyfriend's untimely demise following a protest against a campus drug bust.  I have to admit, I’m a total sucker for a quilting or knitting based novel.  Especially those that are part of a series – after all I own every one of the Elm Creek Quilter’s novels – so this for me wasn’t a question of whether I’d like the book but rather how much was I going to love it.  And I was right, I did l

Title:   The Union Quilters (Elm Creek Quilts Book #17) Author:   Jennifer Chiaverini Genre:   Historical Fiction, Fiction Published:   February 2011 ISBN:   0525952039   Publisher:   Dutton Adult Source:   Purchased Synopsis: With The Union Quilters , Chiaverini delivers a powerful story of a remarkable group of women coping with changing roles and the extraordinary experiences of the Civil War. In 1862 Water's Ford, Pennsylvania, abolitionism is prevalent, even passionate, so the local men rally to answer Mr. Lincoln's call to arms. Thus the women of Elm Creek Valley's quilting bee are propelled into the unknown. Constance Wright, married to Abel, a skilled sharpshooter courageous enough to have ventured south to buy his wife's freedom from a Virginia plantation, knows well her husband's certainty that all people, enslaved and free, North and South, need colored men like him to fight for a greater purpose. Sisters-in-law Dorothea Nelson and Charl