*SANCTUARY* by Norah Roberts

Twenty years after her mother's disappearance, Jo Ellen gets photographs in the mail. They are photographs of her mother: some candid, some close-up, and some of her naked, beautiful, and dead.
Jo Ellen hasn't been back in years. She thought that she had left that house a long time ago. Left the darkness that came over the island off the coast of Georgia and her family's lives when her mother, Annabelle, disappeared. But that island, Sanctuary, is a part of her. It haunts her dreams, and Jo realizes that it is time to go home, back to the island inn run by her family. Upon her return, Jo finds tragedy and loss still heavy and looming, and she is enmeshed once again in the troubled relationships she has struggled so long and hard to forget. With the help of one man, she learns the truth about who is stalking her and about the sordid past. But the threat that drove Jo back to the island in the first place has followed her there. And Sanctuary proves to be a more dangerous place than anyone had ever thought.
Nora Roberts's latest novel, Sanctuary is a story of dangerous liaisons and family betrayals. Roberts's characters are right there, real and honest. These characters are the plot. They bring you into a different world for a time and keep you there with their story, their words.

****Rate this 4 out of 5. I have never read Norah Roberts before, but I did enjoy the mystery associated with this one. Quite a good read overall, kept my interest and I liked the characters.

*CUTTING FOR STONE* by Abraham Verghese

A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel — an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics — their passion for the same woman — that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him — nearly destroying him — Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.

***Rate this 3/5. All in all, this could have been a much better book if there were less words. Reading 533 pages in a story that could have been told in a more concise way was disturbing to me. I really wanted to love this book, but I couldn't.

*THE TEA ROSE* by Jennifer Donnelly

East London, 1888 - a city apart. A place of shadow and light where thieves, whores, and dreamers mingle, where children play in the cobbled streets by day and a killer stalks at night, where bright hopes meet the darkest truths. Here, by the whispering waters of the Thames, Fiona Finnegan, a worker in a tea factory, hopes to own a shop one day, together with her lifelong love, Joe Bristow, a costermonger's son. With nothing but their faith in each other to spur them on, Fiona and Joe struggle, save, and sacrifice to achieve their dreams.But Fiona's life is shattered when the actions of a dark and brutal man take from her nearly everything-and everyone-she holds dear. Fearing her own death, she is forced to flee London for New York. There, her indomitable spirit propels her rise from a modest West Side shop-front to the top of Manhattan's tea trade. But Fiona's old ghosts do not rest quietly, and to silence them, she must venture back to the London of her childhood, where a deadly confrontation with her past becomes the key to her future.

****A 4/5. A very good historical novel which I enjoyed reading even though it was 534 pages long. This is a new author for me, but I will read her novels from now on.