Suzanne Chazin's A Blossom of Bright Light

If I didn't trust Kensington books as much as I did I may not have read past the first dead body discovery of Suzanne Chazin's A Blossom of Bright Light.
It was more than I can usual bring myself to handle. It was a newborn.

However, since I have come to trust Kensington (who gave me the book through NetGalley to read ahead of its October 27th release), and since I loved the first in the series so much, I had to keep reading.

Even after I had accurately figured out "whodunnit" well before the 50% mark,  I had to keep reading.

I don't always like Jimmy Vega ... or his girlfriend ... or his co-workers ... or his daughter ... but I had to keep reading.

Suzanne Chazin's Lake Holly isn't some place that I would ever want to visit, even though I probably wouldn't have to travel outside of my own county to find someplace similar. It's too uncomfortable -- too uncozy. At the same time, though, I had to keep reading.

I can't seem to be able to pull myself away once I start reading one of the books. Although it's "fiction" I know from reading the notes at the end of the first book that a lot of the side stories came from actual immigrants (documented and otherwise) Chazin has encountered and interviewed. The characters even feel more like mere characters in a book -- they feel like people. Real people with real angst and real hopes.

Part of the whole inability to pull myself away from their stories results in the books being fairly quick reads. According to Amazon, A Blossom of Bright Light is going to be 368 pages long when it's released in a few weeks. I added it to my "Currently Reading" shelf on Goodreads at 6:33am yesterday morning (according to the auto-update to my Facebook wall). It is now just around 5:30am so it took less than 24 hours WITH sleeping, working, grocery shopping, and mommying (including some 4th grade homework help). And now all I can do is sit and stew and wonder/worry about what's happening with all of these people I've grown so attached to until the next book gets written!