It looks she now has a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that says they participate in the Amazon Affiliate program which allows website owners the ability to earn a commission for products that are linked to.
Those "pretty pictures" are often illustrations from the work shown to assist in the review. That's quite the undertone you're wringing out of her rather mundane actions.
I think it is a big stretch to assume that anyone who clicks an illustration from a book in a review wants to purchase the book. By making so much of the screen space clickable like that she makes it quite easy for an accidental click to end up "capturing" the affiliate revenue from any amazon purchases that user makes in the next 10 hours (or whatever the amazon affiliate cookie time-out is).
Yes. That's called advertising. Something every page of her site denies it has.
Those images fulfill a purpose to the reader: They deepen the review.