The Ghost Writer – Julie Clark

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Olivia Dumont makes her living telling other people’s stories.

…as a ghostwriter — a person who listens to other people’s stories and spins them into a narrative–I understand now how very hard it is to discover what someone has chosen to conceal. And when they die, their secrets get buried in time until there’s no one around to remember them.

Although she has had a successful career, things have gotten a bit sticky of late and she suddenly finds herself in a beggars-can’t-be-choosers position. Enter Vincent Taylor, prolific and well-known horror writer who wants her to tell the story of his life at the center of which sits the unsolved murder of Vincent’s brother, Danny, and sister, Poppy.

Here’s the thing: Vincent Taylor is Olivia ‘s estranged father. It’s been years since she’s seen him and although she is well aware of the rumours about him being responsible for the death of his siblings and against her better judgment, Olivia agrees to take the job.

She arrives in Ojai to discover that her father is dying of Lewy body dementia. Vincent has a handwritten draft of the book, but Olivia can barely make heads or tails of it. He has also forbidden her to talk to any of the people who might still remember that long ago summer. Olivia is fairly certain her father is misdirecting her, but once she starts, she is determined to discover the truth, even if that truth is that Vincent did kill Danny and Poppy.

I really enjoyed this book. Not only do we get Olivia’s perspective, but we hear from Poppy and Vincent during the time leading up to the murders. There’s a diary and film footage (Poppy got a video camera for her birthday and took it with her everywhere) and also a peek back into Olivia’s own childhood when she thought her treasure-hunt-loving-father was the bee’s knees.

Secrets are revealed — though perhaps too slowly for some readers — and I thought The Ghostwriter was a total page-turner and read it in just a couple sittings.

Auto Buy Authors: Gabriel Tallent

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From his website: “Gabriel Tallent was born in New Mexico and raised on the Mendocino coast by two mothers. He studied English at Willamette University, with a focus on eighteenth-century cultural history. After graduation, he led trail crews, scrubbed toilets at Target, worked in the dining room at the Alta Lodge, and bussed tables at the Copper Onion. He now lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, Hattie, and their three rambunctious boys.”

I feel sort of like Gabriel Tallent is going to be the same sort of writer as Donna Tartt: everything he writes will be a masterpiece, but we’re going to have to wait a long-ass time between books.

Despite the fact that he only has two novels to his credit, this is how I know he’s an auto buy author for me. When Crux came out earlier this year, nine years after his debut My Absolute Darling, I bought and read it immediately. Such is the power of an auto buy author. Fingers crossed I don’t have to wait another decade for the next book.

I am not sure how My Absolute Darling ended up on my reading radar. It was named on The New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books list in 2017, but I didn’t discover it until 2019. I considered it for my book club pick, but said this in my review: “I highly recommend this book, although I understand that it won’t be palatable for many readers. It was on my short list as a potential selection for my book club, but I knew – even before I read it – that most of the women in my group would have a very difficult time with its subject matter. After reading it, I can say with certainty that I was right: they would have hated it. But I would argue that it’s compelling, intelligent and worthy of the copious praise it has received.”

I have often (selectively) recommended it, though, and virtually everyone who reads it agrees that it is amazing.

Crux was definitely an easier book to read subject-matter wise. It’s the story of teenage besties Dan and Tamma who spend their days rock climbing and dreaming of a different life. In my review I said “There is a lot of climbing jargon in this book and that might not be to everyone’s taste. I don’t know a dang thing about climbing, but by the end of it I was invested in their pursuit of “sending” each climb they attempted. I loved Crux. It’s my first five star read of 2026.”

Tallent is a talented writer. And he pulls no punches. And he has broken my heart twice now. So, obviously, he’s an auto buy author.

Martyr! – Kaveh Akbar

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Kaveh Akbar’s fiction debut, Martyr! would likely not have made it onto my tbr list if it weren’t for my #bookclubof3. Last year my friends Luke (former student and voracious reader) and Lauren (his wife and voracious reader) and I discussed John Williams’ novel Stoner and when they made plans to come home for a visit this summer we decided to talk about Martyr!. So, I have them to thank for this reading experience, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything was a do-over.

A recovering alcoholic (and aspiring writer), Cyrus Shams is crushed by the debilitating knowledge that he is not making anything of his life. Cyrus “told his AA sponsor Gabe that he believed himself to be a fundamentally bad person. Selfish, self-seeking. Cruel, even.”

Life hasn’t been easy for Cyrus. Born in Iran, his father Ali immigrated to the US after his wife, Roya, was killed when the U.S. Navy mistook the passenger jet she was on for something else and shot it out of the sky. (True event.) It was 1988, at the tail end of the conflict between Iran and Iraq. Cyrus was only an infant and has no memory of his mother.

Although Cyrus is essentially an American kid, he carries with him the trauma of his mother’s death and the stories his father has told him about Iran. After his father dies, Cyrus starts to consider – well, all the things you start to think about at a certain point in your life: your mortality and your purpose on earth chief among them.

Cyrus decides he wants to write a book about martyrs. According to the Cambridge dictionary, a martyr is “a person who suffers very much or is killed because of their religious or political beliefs and is often admired because of it.” I don’t think Cyrus has a particular religious belief he wants to die for. I think, in fact, this second definition is more appropriate: “someone who tries to get sympathy from others when he or she has a problem or too much work, usually when that person caused the problem or chose to do the work himself or herself.”

Like many 20-somethings, Cyrus is a bit of a navel-gazer. He admits that he wants his “little life to have something of scale. For the stakes to matter. […] For [his] having lived to matter.” To be fair, I think most humans would probably like that to be true, right? But it sucks Cyrus down a deep dark well as he searches for something meaningful in his life.

Then he stumbles on Marina Abramović-esque performance artist Orkideh, an Iran-born NYC-based woman who is spending her final days living (she’s dying of cancer) at the Brooklyn Museum where she will talk to anyone about anything. No appointment necessary. Who could possible know more about Cyrus’ quandary than her?

Luke, Lauren and I all agreed that Martyr! was a great read. Luke said he originally thought it might even be a five-star read for him, but as he gained a little distance from the book, he thought it was probably more of a four star read. That’s probably where I would land, too. I agreed with Lauren that the book had perhaps too many ideas to land all of them successfully. At least one of the reveals felt a bit contrived to me. There wasn’t a sucker punch of an ending which is something I look for in a five star read.

I wondered how Luke and Lauren might feel about Cyrus as they are far closer to his age than I am. Although some of the time his angst felt a bit circular, I still found him relatively sympathetic. I didn’t want to shake him at any rate.

Minor complaints aside, this is a beautifully written – and often original – book that asks (but doesn’t always answer) some of life’s big questions and tries to figure out exactly what it is to live a meaningful life.

The Love of My Life – Rosie Walsh

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Leo and Emma are a blissfully happy couple who live in London with their three-year-old daughter, Ruby, and their dog John Keats. When Rosie Walsh’s novel The Love of My Life opens, the couple are waiting for news about Emma’s cancer: has her treatment worked? Her diagnosis necessitates Emma’s covert communication with an unnamed person.

I started having vivid, photo-real dreams about us meeting, the feel of his skin, the smell of his hair. And so, when the thought came to mind–I want to call–I didn’t immediately dismiss it.

[…]

A few days after the diagnosis, I caved and made the phone call.

Then she reveals that she has been lying to Leo. Soon the reader will discover that Walsh misses no opportunity to lie to the reader, either.

Leo, an obituarist, starts to suspect that his wife has been keeping secrets and goes on a hunt to discover the truth. So, readers will have both perspective: Emma increasingly feeling trapped by her lies and Leo increasingly desperate to find out just what in the heck is going on with the one persona in all the world that he trusts.

And for the first half of the book, I was happy to go along because I didn’t have a sweet clue what was happening and I was okay with that. The misdirection wasn’t as annoying as it later became because in the second half of the novel I felt less like I was following Leo as he discovered the truth and more like the truth was being told to me. Suddenly the motivations just seemed a little too insert A into B.

This is less thriller and more family drama. If you like that sort of thing, you’d probably like The Love of My Life.

That’s Not My Name – Megan Lally

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Megan Lally’s YA thriller That’s Not My Name starts with a bang and pretty much kept me on the edge of my seat until the very end.

I think I might be dead.

I try to gather my bearings, but I can’t see. I feel nothing. Not even my own body. The lack of sensation, the way the silence wraps me in a hug and squeezes–it’s unnerving. I want it to stop–

Until the pain comes.

The police pick up a girl on the side of the road. She doesn’t know how she got there; she doesn’t even really know where there is. She doesn’t know her name. When her father shows up at the police station, she doesn’t recognize him. She was in a car accident, he explains. Or at least that’s what he thinks must have happened. He produces all her identification–her name is Mary–so the cop who found her feels comfortable releasing her into his care.

Then, in another town, we meet Drew. “Life really goes to shit when everyone thinks you killed your girlfriend,” he says. Lola has been missing for five weeks. She vanished without a trace and Drew was the last person to see her alive. Everyone, including the cops, think Drew must have done something to her, but they haven’t found a body so he hasn’t been charged with a crime.

As Mary slowly starts to doubt the veracity of her circumstances, Drew starts to do more to find out what happened to Lola, including following leads that the police won’t. It all makes for a page-turning ride that doesn’t exactly deviate from the tried and true thriller tropes but still manages to deliver a fast-paced narrative that teens will gobble up. I read it in one sitting.

The Comfort of Monsters – Willa C. Richards

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Hot on the heels of my last novel about sisters, False Witness, comes another book about sisters: The Comfort of Monsters by Willa C. Richards.

In this story, Peg McBride recalls the summer of 1991 when her younger sister, Dee, disappears. Dee’s disappearance barely causes a ripple in the crime landscape because she goes missing in Milwaukee in 1991, the same time as Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested.

Peg narrates the story of her relationship with her sister as children and young adults up until Dee’s disappearance, and then thirty years in the future when her ailing mother hires an internet-famous psychic in a last-ditch effort to find out what happened to Dee. It’s this development that causes Peg to reminisce about her sister, although I think Dee has informed every single decision Peg has made over the past 30 years.

Peg has always been convinced that Dee’s much older boyfriend, Frank, was responsible for Dee’s disappearance. She hadn’t liked him pretty much on sight.

Frank hugged me when we met. I didn’t like the feeling of his body against mine. I kept my arms awkwardly by my sides. When he pulled away, I felt like he was looking through my clothes. Some men seem to be able to do that–to make you feel totally naked.

After Dee’s disappearance, Frank vanishes into the ether and the case languishes. But despite being billed as a crime novel, the mystery of what happens to Dee isn’t really what this book is about. Sure, it informs Peg’s character (which isn’t particularly likable), but readers looking for a fast-paced mystery are not going to find that in The Comfort of Monsters.

Instead, the novel is a slow-moving, meandering character study of family dynamics, romantic entanglements, our fascination with true crime, race and memory.

Memory, of course, is also a story. It feels like the truth, especially when there is no one to dispute your recollection of events. But it is a story nonetheless–some moments have been elided, and others have been emphasized and made either luminous or horrific or both. […] And because now, more than ever, my sister’s case depends on these memories, I am terrified that crucial pieces of evidence have been lost along the way.

I liked it, but didn’t love it.

False Witness – Karin Slaughter

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I know that American crime writer Karin Slaughter has legions of rabid fans, but I don’t think that I am one of them. I mean, maybe I am throwing in the towel too early because I have only read one other book, Pretty Girls, besides this one. Like that one, this is a propulsive read about estranged sisters, and horrible crimes against women.

Leigh Collier is a lawyer working her way up the food chain. Her younger sister, Callie, is a hard core drug addict living mostly on the streets. Their lives rarely intersect until Leigh is assigned a new case that sends her hurtling back to her teen years.

Andrew Tenant has been accused of brutally raping a woman and leaving her handcuffed to a table in a park. He’s fired his lawyer and hired Leigh. Turns out, he’s not a stranger.

She would never forget him. Trevor Waleski had been a sweet kid. A little awkward. A lot clingy. The last time Leigh had seen him, he was drugged into oblivion. She had watched her sister gently kiss the top of his head.

Trevor aka Andrew hired Leigh because he knows something devastating about Leigh and her sister and he won’t stop until he gets exactly what he wants. The book spends 600+ pages with the sisters as they try to outmaneuver Andrew who, as it turns out, is pretty dang smart. And also a psychopath.

The book has all the requisite twists and turns. Callie was my favourite sister and her relationship with Dr. Jerry, the memory-impaired veterinarian for whom she sometimes works (and steals drugs from) is my favourite relationship in the book. Leigh’s husband, Walter, is also a great guy. He is kind to Callie and supportive of Leigh even though they are currently separated.

The book takes place during the height of Covid – so there’s social distancing and masks. Not sure it adds anything in particular to the story, but Slaughter herself said “Covid has exposed the ever-widening chasm between the haves and have-nots, spotlighted the housing crisis and food insecurity, focused attention on the lack of proper funding for schools, hospitals, and elder care, exposed a bankruptcy of trust in our government institutions, exacerbated the horrendous treatment of inmates in our jails and prisons, exponentially worsened xenophobic, misogynistic, and racist hate speech, heightened racial inequalities, and as usual, has grossly overburdened the lives of women; all topics I have attempted to touch on within the pages of [this] book”.

None of the Covid stuff did any of that for me, really, but perhaps other people will find that it added another layer to the story. I don’t know that I would have kept reading except that I wanted to find out how Callie and Leigh were going to get out of the bind they were in. Was the ending satisfying? Believable? Not sure. Lots of people will love this book, but I think my journey with Slaughter ends here.

In Five Years – Rebecca Serle

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I don’t think that I got the book I thought I was going to be getting with Rebecca Serle’s novel In Five Years. That’s not the fault of the book.

Dannie Kohan is living her best life as a lawyer in NYC. She has a fabulous apartment, a fabulous boyfriend and a bestie, Bella, who completes the fabulous circle of her life. One morning, after David proposes, she wakes up in a bed that is not hers with a man who is not David. It would seem five years have passed, but Dannie doesn’t remember any of it. When she wakes up, her world seems to have righted itself again.

Then, Bella introduces Dannie to her boyfriend, and it’s the hunky dude from Dannie’s dream. What does it all mean?

It would be a mistake to think that In Five Years is a romance in the traditional sense, and honestly, that’s what I thought I was going to get. Nevertheless, it is a love story.

Bella and I have been best friends since we were seven years old. Me, Nice Jewish Girl from the Main Line of Philadelphia. Her, French-Italian Princess whose parents threw her a thirteenth party big enough to stop any bat mitzvah in its tracks. Bella is spoiled, mercurial, and more than a little bit magical. It’s not just me. Everywhere she goes people fall at her feet. She is the easiest to love, and gives love freely. But she’s fragile, too. A membrane of skin stretches so thinly over her emotions it’s always threatening to burst.

So, these two women love each other and anyone who has a bestie will certainly relate to their friendship. But like any love story, it’s not all smooth sailing. I wish I could say it was as simple as Dannie’s dream and then meeting her dream guy in the flesh. But Serle goes a different route and your appetite for the story she tells will depend on whether or not you have a tolerance for …well, no spoilers.

I liked One Italian Summer better.

Auto Buy Authors: Lisa Reardon

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In my continuing series on the authors whose books I will always buy, this month’s featured auto buy author is Lisa Reardon. There is very little updated info about Reardon on the internet and that’s because she pretty much dropped off the face of the map in 2010 when she was incarcerated for the assault with the intent to commit murder of her father. Her sentence was four – seventeen years. There is very little information to be had about Reardon, but here is another account of the events surrounding this incident. I believe she only served a couple of years of that time and once she was released she sort of disappeared from the spotlight. As far as I know, she only wrote three novels and I have read all three. If by some miracle she wrote something else, I would hand over my money in a nanosecond.

I read Reardon’s novel Billy Dead at least 20 years ago and it is a book that has lodged itself in my heart for many years. My read of it predates this blog, but I reposted the NY Times review of it here.

“People lose people. I don’t know why we’re all so damned careless. Folks lose their kids, men lose their women, even friends get lost if you don’t keep an eye out.”

No question, Billy Dead is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I am a fan of gritty fiction and in Reardon’s capable hands, the story of siblings Ray, Jean, and Billy is a gut punch of a book. The dysfunction is a deep, dark well in this book and so is the abuse, but then so is the love. I think I really do need to read it again. I definitely became a fan of Reardon.

Next I read The Mercy Killers.

“It’s hard to think how different their lives would have been if it weren’t for the mess they got themselves into, if it weren’t for that war, if they hadn’t all been so young and stupid and scared.”

In my review of this book I said “Lisa Reardon writes about characters who live in a world vastly different from my own. They are broken-down people whose lives are messy – filled with violence and alcohol and drugs and hopelessness.”

Although I wouldn’t have thought that I would like The Mercy Killers based on its synopsis, I did like it.

Then I read Blameless.

I said: “Blameless is a quiet novel where nothing much happens. Mary is often her own worst enemy, but as her story is pulled back layer by layer and you come to understand all the ways life has kicked her in the teeth, you just want something, anything, good to happen for her. Reardon has a particular gift when it comes to writing broken characters and I really enjoyed my time with Mary, even though, like her previous novels, the story is pretty grim.”

“Oh my God,” she cried. “Oh my God,” with heaving, gasping, snot-filled sobs.

“It’s all right, Sharon.” I pulled my visor down low over my face. People up and down the beach were looking at us. “It has a happy ending.”

Across the board, Reardon’s novels are compelling, dark, potentially triggering and definitely ‘go there’ in ways that might make many readers uncomfortable. But they are also really well-written, heart-wrenching, and compelling. Therefore, although I suspect I will never have the opportunity to buy another book by her, Lisa Reardon is an auto buy author.

Carmilla – Sheridan Le Fanu

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According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “Jure Grando Alilović or Giure Grando (1578–1656) was a villager from the region of Istria (in modern-day Croatia) who may have been the first real person described as a vampire in historical records.” John Polidori’s 1918 short story The Vampyre is the first modern literature to feature the bloodsucking creature of the night, Lord Ruthven, who was famously inspired by Polidori’s employer, Lord Byron.

Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla predates Bram Stoker’s far more famous Dracula by 25 years. Le Fanu was a well-known writer of horror and mystery fiction during the Victorian period, and the author of fourteen novels and many short stories. And yet, he’s not nearly so well known as Bram Stoker, who is often credited with creating the archetypical vampiric character. (I don’t mean to say that Le Fanu is not well known, but I read Dracula as a teenager and I only heard of Carmilla a decade or so ago.)

Carmilla is the first person account of Laura who lives with her widowed father in Styria, Austria. The pair and their servants live in an isolated schloss (castle), the nearest village seven miles away. Laura is telling the story of what happened to her when she was nineteen from a point eight years in the future.

I am now going to tell you something so strange that it will require all your faith in my veracity to believe my story. It is not only true, nevertheless, but truth of which I have been an eyewitness.

A chance carriage accident brings a young lady, Carmilla, to the schloss. Her mother must attend to urgent business, but Carmilla must rest after this accident, and Laura’s father graciously agrees to welcome her into his home. After all, Laura could use a companion. Soon, though, Laura begins to feel unwell.

I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me.

Of course, modern readers will know immediately what’s happening. Carmilla is SPOILER ALERT the undead. And, of course, the supernatural shenanigans in Le Fanu’s novel will seem pretty tame by modern standards, but I can only imagine that Victorian audiences would have been shaking in their boots to read of some of the images that plagued poor Laura.

For a vampire literature completist, Carmilla is a must read.