When my library announced online book clubs, I was all in. Our library has a number of online offerings, which they’ve increased since the beginning of the pandemic, and there are now quite a few book clubs up and running and I’m signed up for most of them.

I’m still attending my YA book club, and if you’ve been reading you’ll have picked up YA titles over the past few months from that endeavor.

New to me are the Fiction Book Club, the Mystery Book Club, and the Nonfiction Book Club. Keeping up with reading four books a month in addition to whatever else I’ve been reading hasn’t been too bad since I’ve mostly stuck to audio books.

For the most recent Mystery Book Club title though, I went out on a limb and tried an e-book.

Fallen Mountains, by Kimi Cunningham takes place in rural Pennsylvania. The story is carried along by a cast of characters led by Red, the sheriff of Fallen Mountains, PA.

The characters were identifiable and likeable. The author kept me in the dark until the very end about how things went down. The story isn’t a ripper all the way through, but has well- placed nuggets throughout that keep the reader’s curiosity and interest.

I liked the way the author took real-life issues and concerns from rural Pennsylvania, and used those ideas to partly drive the plot.

It’s funny how you read a book and you walk away with certain ideas about how you felt about it, but when you flesh those ideas out with others who also just read the book, it can really put things into clearer focus.

After a delightful meeting with my book club, I was reminded of the lack of three-dimensional female characters in the book who weren’t defined by the men in their lives. Another idea from the book is the healing for both parties that can come from a simple apology.

There were a few parts of the book we agreed we wanted more from – more flesh on characters, more background, a little more plot development. But there was a consensus that Kimi Cunningham shows great promise.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been much of a mystery reader, but I think I’m a convert. E-books? I’ll probably still stick to paper and audio, but that was an OK experience, too.