D. M. Pulley

The Buried Book is told through the eyes of 9-year-old Jasper who has just been abandoned by his mother on his uncle’s farm outside Detroit. Jasper doesn’t understand why his mom has run off. Snippets of conversations he overhears in the barn or in town lead him to believe his mother might be dead. While adapting to farm life and trying to glean more hints about his mother’s disappearance, Jasper discovers his mother’s teenage diary in an abandoned house on his uncle’s property. show more This book only raises more questions than it answers, and Jasper is determined to find out what happened to his mother. He finds that his mom has gotten mixed up with some bad people (drug smugglers, gamblers, and bootleggers), and now the bad guys are after him, too.



Pulley has done her research. Set in the rural 1950s, many stories of farm life are interspersed into Jasper’s adventures. This made for an extremely entertaining but tense story, as everywhere Jasper turned he was running into trouble. This book is not just a linear mystery tale - this is a family saga, a story of fugitives, a story of the mistreatment of Native Americans at the hand of shady law enforcement, and the tale of a little boy trying to understand the world of adults. I appreciated how deftly Pulley was able to use historical fact in her story without being pedantic or heavy-handed. There are so many elements at work, and yet, Pulley weaves them into a cohesive narrative that left me flipping the pages to find out what happened next. The chapter titles are written as police investigator interrogatives, which hints at what’s to come.


This story was engrossing with just enough breaks in the story to allow the reader to catch a breath. Recommended.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Lake Union Publishing for providing this advance copy. show less

D.M. Pulley knows how to write a scary, creepy, hold your breath, the hair is standing up on the back of my neck ghost story. Rawlingswood is not kind to its inhabitants, actually it is downright nasty and perverse.

The story follows five families, from the days just prior to the stock market crash of 1929 to the summer of 2018, encompassing the tragedies that plague their tenancies in this house. Can a new occupant change the oppressive bad luck that has fallen upon all the other residents? show more Well maybe, but the larger question is do you even care what happens to such unlikeable, narcissistic, selfish, whining people? And that was my problem – most of the adults in each section were unsympathetic characters. The plight of the children and their respective predicaments reinforced that abuse is not new, the young and helpless are often marginalized by those they know best. Having a few more likeable characters would have strengthened the story for me.

I enjoyed the mystery, the clue dropping, but admit to some confusion in the back and forth and had to keep returning to previous chapters to remind myself who did what and when.

Thank you NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer for a copy. show less

4.5

*Book source ~ Kindle First

In 1978, in the month before the First Bank of Cleveland closed its doors in the middle of the night, Beatrice Baker is hired on as a secretary. Relived that her fake papers have landed her the job, all she wants is to do her work and keep her head down. But an immediate friendship with Maxine “Max” McDonnell pulls Beatrice into a web of lies, deceit, theft and murder. How in the world is she going to survive?

In 1998, twenty years after the First Bank of show more Cleveland was locked and abandoned, Iris Latch from the firm Wheeler Reese Elliot Architects, has been given the job of measuring and drawing up floor plans of the old building for the owners due to a potential sale. What Iris finds is a creepy building frozen in time and a huge mystery of why everything was left behind for so many years. As Iris draws floorplan after floorplan she finds things that make no sense and the mystery begins to consume her. Does curiosity kill the cat? Iris is about to find out.

This alternate historical story of a factual time in 1978 Cleveland and the black eye the city acquired by defaulting on their loans is a fascinating tale of suspense and mystery to this NE Ohio native. Obviously the First bank of Cleveland did not mysteriously close up shop in the middle of the night, but what if it had? The alternating viewpoints from Beatrice in 1978 and Iris in 1998 are well done. However, I do not like Iris at all while I love Beatrice. Iris is a crappy employee. She’s a chain smoking drunk who thinks nothing of being late to work to a job she hates and doing half-assed work. Also, what a fucking whiner. Beatrice, on the other hand, is a sweet girl that life has put the screws to and yet she gets up every morning and does her best. I can’t help but love her. I didn’t care what happened to Iris, but I was cheering for Beatrice the whole way. Especially as poor Beatrice is pulled into something sinister and way over her head. The suspense kept me on the edge of my seat and I had a hard time figuring out the big picture. What the hell was going on?! Each puzzle piece that dropped into place helped and I had several wild ideas, but the end result was a bit more mundane than I was expecting. Even so, what a ride! show less

No One’s Home by D.M. Pulley is a dark tale of a house haunted by it’s past history of tragedy and the family currently living there. The Spielmans have moved to Cleveland looking for a fresh start and to escape from the secrets of their own past. They purchase and renovate Rawlingswood, ignoring the rumors of hauntings, but once they move in strange things start to happen.

This is a story of murder with supernatural elements. It seems like the house feeds on people’s troubles and the show more Spielmans have a history of guilt, addiction and dark secrets. The story delves into the past and the readers learn of the various tragedies that have occurred to all five families that have lived in the house.

I found No One’s Home to be both chilling and spooky, and I admired the way the author kept control of the story and didn’t let it become too far-fetched. Instead she allows the creepy atmosphere and an ominous sense of foreboding to propel the story and keep the reader on edge. Personally I find that flicker of movement seen from the corner of one’s eye or a dark shadow that moves across a window much more scary that in-your-face details. Overall, I found No One’s Home to be a good ghost story that kept me involved. show less