Knives as Bookmarks

   On May 4, 1932, Lilly Lindestrom, a 32-year-old sex worker, was found murdered in her apartment in the Atlas area of Stockholm. She had been dead for a couple of days prior to the police finding her body and she was found completely naked, face-down on her bed. She had suffered from blunt force trauma to her head, saliva on her neck and body, and there were signs of sexual activity, although not sure whether it was consensual. A condom was found protruding from her and a bloodstained gravy ladle was found at the scene. The oddest part was that Lindestrom's body was drained of all her blood and the police suspected that the ladle was used by the perpetrator to drink her blood.    There were at least nine men suspected by the police, however, none of the names were ever released, and they were let go. There is a theory, however, that the man who killed Lindestrom was actually a cop, who left a bizarre crime scene to send his peers off on a wild goose chase.

   GUYS! I'm super excited to be reviewing Laura Dean because one I don't get many arcs (and I've never received a physical one until this one), but I also won it in  a Goodreads giveaway so thanks to them and MacMillan, but I just wanted to get that out of my system before I get into the actual review. Now, since this is a graphic novel, I'll try to show a couple of the pages so you can get an idea for the art style, so let's get into it.  I thoroughly enjoyed this overall, the story is about a Frederica Riley, aka Freddy, is on and off with the most popular girl in her high school Laura Dean, however, they keep breaking up and getting back together, so Freddy ends up writing to an online advice column Anna Vice. This book has SO MUCH REPRESENTATION in it: Freddy is an Asian American lesbian (or maybe bisexual, it's never explicitly stated), two of her close friends Eric and Buddy are a non-white gay couple (since it's a black and white graphic nove

        Elsie Sigel born in 1888 and was the granddaughter of General Franz Sigel. She did missionary work at the Chinatown Rescue Settlement and Recreation Room while her mother taught at a Chinese Sunday school class in St. Andrew's Church. On June 9, 1909, Elsie was last seen leaving her parents' apartment to visit her grandmother and was never seen again until June 18. On June 18, Elsie was found strangled inside of a trunk in  Leon Ling's apartment, a waiter in a Chinese restaurant. Sigel and her mother had met Ling at his chop suey restaurant years prior to her death. In his apartment,  police found 35 love letters signed by Sigel in his apartment, along with numerous letters from other women. However, Sigel also had sent love letters to Chu Gain, the manager of the Port Arthur Restaurant, and Chu also reported that he received an anonymous letter threatening Sigel's life if they didn't end their relationship, leading the police to believe that the mot

  Mary Phagan was born on June 1, 1899, in Georgia. Her father passed away before she was born and not long after her birth, her mother moved the family back to their hometown of Marietta, Georgia, then around 1907, they relocated to East Point, Georgia. Mary left school at the age of 10 to work part-time in a textile mill. In 1912, the family moved to Atlanta, when her mother married John William Coleman and Mary took a job at the National Pencil Company, where she earned ten cents an hour, working 55 hours per week. Her job was to operate a knurling machine that would insert rubber erasers into the metal tips of pencils, which was across the hall from Leo Frank's office. On April 21, 1913, Mary was laid off due to a shortage of brass sheet metal and on the 26th she went to the factory to claim her final paycheck of $1.20.     In the middle of the night the next day, Newt Lee, the factory's night watchman, went to the factory basement when he found Mary's body near t

   Finally, we're out of the backstock and I can now talk about books that I've read recently, for me recently means like a couple of days ago. To be honest, I had a lot of hope going into this book (thanks One Piece) and this book didn't fail, but it didn't exactly meet my expectations. So this book is about Alosa, the daughter of the pirate king, who allows herself to get captured in order to search the ship for a certain map. However, the ship's first mate, Riden, is making it much more complicated. What I loved was that Alosa was definitely a BAMF, and it definitely had a unique storyline to it. However, while Alosa is a BAMF it's almost stereotypical, she's incredibly brash about it, almost verging on the line of annoying and honestly you can see the romance plot coming from several miles away. This is definitely a book that isn't going to throw a complete curveball slam into your face, but it still has some twists in it. I would say if you enjo

    Janet Smith was born on June 25, 1902, in Perth, Scotland. In January 1923, she started taking care of Fredrick and Doreen Baker's newborn daughter. As the family moved to Paris and then Vancouver, she followed and once in Canada, they hired a Chinese houseboy named Wong Foon Sing, who moved to Canada in 1913. He became infatuated with Smith and would give her gifts, and Smith's friends would testify that she feared him, while her diary revealed otherwise. On July 26, 1924, Wong claimed that he heard a car backfire and he found Smith's body in the basement with a bullet wound in her temple and a.45 caliber revolver near her right hand.   Constable James Green was called to the scene and contaminated it by grabbing the potential murder weapon. Even though there was no bullet, no blood or brain tissue on the walls, or no powder burns on her face, her death was considered a suicide. Later, a coroner called the death a "self-inflicted but accidental death&q

  Springtime is finally here and I'm so excited because I can finally go outside to read again! Descendant of the Crane by Joan He Genre: YA, Fantasy Release Date: 4/2  Princess Hesina of Yan does not want to be royal, she wants an unremarkable life and shirks the responsibilities of the crown whenever she can, but when her father is found dead, she is thrust into being the queen of a surprisingly unstable kingdom. She soon learns that her court is full of dissemblers and deceivers eager to use her father's death for their own political gain, which makes Hesina believe that her father was murdered. So she turns to aid of a soothsayer to find out the truth about her father, even though magic was outlawed centuries ago and this act very well could be punishable by death. The Devouring Gray by Christine Lynn Herman Genre: YA, Fantasy Release Date: 4/2  Violet Saunders has been uprooted from the city to a small town in rural New York that one of her ancestors

     Rose Harsent, a servant girl at the Providence home, was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant on May 31, 1902. Even though she wasn't married, she was six months pregnant. While it was initially reviewed as a suicide, local clergyman William Gardiner was eventually arrested for Rose's murder. Allegations soon began to rise that Gardiner was the father of Harsent's unborn child and that they had an affair the year prior. Since Gardiner was somewhat prominent in town, he was the foreman at the local seed drill works, and he had a wife with six children, it would make sense why he wouldn't want the affair to be made public, and it didn't help that his home was within sight of the Providence house.    Gardiner was tried twice for the murder, but no verdict was ever reached. During the first trial, the jury was split 11 to 1, in favor of guilty, and the second trial was split 11 to 1, in favor of not guilty, and then the prosecution issued a writ of noel