Pixi Reads

The scene in the West Village studio appears to be classic crime-of-passion: two wineglasses by the bed, music playing, and a young sculptor named Ariel Byrd with the back of her head bashed in. But when Dallas tracks down the wealthy Upper East Side woman who called 911, the details don’t add up. Gwen Huffman is wealthy, elegant, comforted by her handsome fiancé as she sheds tears over the trauma of finding the body―but why did it take an hour to report it? And why is she lying about little things?

As Eve and her team look into Gwen, her past, and the people around her, they find that the lies are about more than murder. As with sculpture, they need to chip away at the layers of deception to find the shape within―and soon they’re getting the FBI involved in a case that involves a sinister, fanatical group and a stunning criminal conspiracy.

Basen and his father are still blamed for a war they had nothing to do with. Basen is the nephew of an evil King, and him and his father were thrown out of the country. Now though, everyone knows their family name. His Uncle is, after all, possibly the most hated King ever.

Basen and his father are doing what they can to survive, and meet with seemingly a string of luck. Basen gets into a school and learns magic and how to fight. Although he already knows much of how to fight. He’s smart, and can make the best of a situation. When he first goes to the school to tryout, his father wants him to be a soldier. However, there are already way more who want to be soldiers than will be excepted. He sees the magician line is shorter, much shorter, and he would have much better odds of getting in as a magician. So, working things to his favor, he quickly goes to make a trade for a wand to try out to be a magician.

When he gets accepted into the school though things start becoming serious. He manages to make a few friends, and meets up with a girl he used to know growing up. He didn’t like her then, she was always on a short fuse. Now he is surprised to find she seems to have grown a longer fuse, and they soon become friends again.

Things in the book seem to work out, and things just really start going right for Basem and his father. They make a key friend with one of the people who was watching the trials, and turns out to be a key person and family relation to the king. If you can manage to get past these miraculous strokes of good luck in the beginning, the book gets much better. And the last lines of the book involve something happening I certainly didn’t see coming. Now I’m curious to see how things play out and will be trying to pick up the next book soon.