Monthly Archives: September 2026

All the Wicked Girls – Chris Whitaker

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I discovered British author Chris Whitaker five years ago when everyone and their dog was buzzing about We Begin at the End. I love a bandwagon, especially when it comes to books, so I hopped on and thus began my love affair with this author. I tracked down a copy of his debut, Tall Oaks, from the UK and read that. Very different book, but enjoyable. Then when All the Colors of the Dark came out, I bought it and read it and LOVED it. That just left two books, All the Wicked Girls and The Leavers.

Summer and Raine Ryan are sisters growing up in Grace, Alabama, a backwater town where nothing much happens except for that one time when “Chief Black found a penis in the fall of 1985.” Of course, that was around the time of the Satanic Panic and now, in 1995, that’s just a story people tell their kids to keep them out of the woods.

Then Summer disappears. At first it appears that she’s run off of her own volition, but then the rumours start because “the land weren’t safe and hadn’t been for a long time. Not since the first girl was taken.”

Raine doesn’t trust Chief Black to find her sister, so aided by misfits Noah Wild and Purv Bowdoin, she starts an investigation of her own. The three teens fling themselves at danger like it’s an amusement park roller coaster. We are also privy to Summer’s first hand thoughts about her potential to get out of this rinky-dink town because she is a gifted musician. And there’s more to her story because of course there is.

There is a big cast of characters in this book and lots of tangled backstories. For example, Raine’s father, Joe, had spent almost a decade in jail and so none of the Ryans trust Black to do the right thing.

Bobby and Savannah have moved to Grace where Bobby has taken over as preacher from Pastor Lumen and Savannah offers Summer cello lessons. “…if Pastor Lumen was be-angry-and-do-not-sin Jesus, then Pastor Bobby was love-endures Jesus. […] By his second service the church was heavy with sweet perfume and flutterin’ hearts.” Lumen’s son, Samson, is an odd duck who works as a custodian at the church and the school. “Samson was afraid of his daddy, of the damnation the pastor said would visit them if Samson didn’t prove himself worthy.”

Purv’s father, Ray, is a drunken bully with “gold rings jutting from fists so big Purv didn’t ever stand a chance.”

Then there are the kids: Raine, Noah, and Purv. They are as delightful (and tough) a trio as you’d ever want to meet and if, at times, they seem too grown up well, considering the circumstances, it can be forgiven.

All the Wicked Girls is a mystery and it won the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award and was shortlisted for the CrimeFest Last Laugh Award. Of course I wanted to know what had happened to Summer and the other missing girls. There’s lots of misdirection in the book because people hold onto their secrets in this town. But truthfully, I was just happy to spend time with these characters. Writing characters is Whitaker’s strength as an author, and he does an unbelievable job of making you care about them.

I think We Begin at the End is a better book, but it’s a better book because Whitaker wrote this one first. And this one is pretty damn good.

Auto Buy Authors: Helen Dunmore

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British novelist, poet, and essayist Helen Dunmore (who sadly died in 2017) has been part of my reading diet for many years. What I like about her writing is its lyrical quality and also there is often a thread of unease running through her narratives, at least in my favourite books.

Of the thirteen adult novels she wrote before her death (she also wrote many books for children), I have read six plus her collection of short stories, Ice Cream. Thankfully, I have four more of her books on my tbr shelf.

The first book I read by Dunmore, With Your Crooked Heart, predates this blog.

Every day for a month now the sun has shone, and every morning you’ve brought the same things out into the garden.

The Times Literary Supplement said the book is “unites strong characterization and a rip-roaring plot with an archetypal quality somewhere between a fairy story and a Greek tragedy.

Thus began my love affair with Dunmore.

Your Blue-Eyed Boy

This is what I said: This is a novel about reconciling who you are now with who you were when. It’s easy enough to pretend that each section of your life is complete and separate, but this is a novel that asks us to question our past choices, our past loves and our place in the here and now.

A Spell of Winter

This is what I said: A Spell of Winter has many of the gothic hallmarks: the gloomy dwelling, a sense of mystery, a distressed heroine. As long as Cathy and Rob are isolated, they manage to sustain their relationship. But like winter, it can’t last. Eventually, the real world seeps in in ways both expected and unexpected.

The Greatcoat

This is what I said: The Greatcoat was published under the Hammer banner (horror aficionados will recognize Hammer as the British production company behind  films like The Woman in Black and Let Me In.  They’ve entered the world of publishing in partnership with Arrow, a subsidiary of Random House. It’s nice to read a “horror” story that is less about blood and guts and more about the kind of chills which prickle your skin and send a shiver up your back. There are no monsters here, but The Greatcoat is deliciously creepy nonetheless.

Talking to the Dead

This is what I said: …like all of the Dunmore novels I’ve read – as literary as they are – this one has an element of psychological suspense. The pace isn’t fast though; information is revealed slowly, like veils pulled back one at a time.

Zennor in Darkness

This was Dunmore’s first novel. This is what I said: Zennor in Darkness has a thread of the gothic and the forbidden running though it and this book is particularly melancholy because of the setting. Modern readers will have had no experience with the horrors of WW1 and what it did to communities and individuals, and although this book doesn’t take place in the trenches the book captures so much of that horrible period in history.

I had a lovely chat with Shawn Breathes Books about Zennor in Darkness a couple summers ago. You can watch that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDu_cUSDY44

My segment starts at about the 7:22 mark

If you have never heard of Helen Dunmore, I can highly recommend her. My favourite book is A Spell of Winter.

The Things We Never Say – Elizabeth Strout

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Like Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s newest novel The Things We Never Say is a character study more than it’s a story driven by plot.

Artie Dam is a high school history teacher in Revere, Massachusetts. He’s been married to Evie for over thirty years and they share a son, Rob, who is in his late 20s.

Lately, Artie has been thinking a lot about dying.

For more than two months, he had been thinking about how to kill himself without his wife or son (or students) knowing that he had done so. It was a great deal more complicated than he had originally thought. And this frightened him, to think it could not be done swiftly.

Artie is feeling isolated. He is a beloved and respected teacher, has a solid relationship with his son and wife, and has good friends but he doesn’t know how to talk to them, to share his unsettling feelings of hopelessness (the novel is set very much in the here and now, so Artie is especially concerned about the state of the world and his own country under its current administration). He also has no real understanding of how he is viewed by the people closest to him because

All of us live with a huge blind spot before our eyes, meaning that no matter what we think we know we can never fully understand how we appear to others. This was true for Artie Dam.

To Evie, Artie “appeared the most considerate man she had ever known, though irritating in his way.” The fact that he wears white socks, for example, drives her nuts. Although one senses that Artie and Evie have had a good marriage, and love each other, there is also a sense that they don’t really talk to each other any more and when Artie gets a shocking piece of news he does not share the knowledge with his wife.

Nothing much happens in this novel but honestly I could have cared less because Artie was such a recognizable character. Maybe it’s because he’s a teacher and so am I; maybe it’s because he is of a similar vintage; maybe it’s because his concerns about what is happening in the world mirror my own. As he tries to make sense of his life, and as he encounters moments of decency and kindness, I found him to be wholly sympathetic and human.

Ultimately, Artie comes to the conclusion that real connection is extremely difficult and rare.

And now he knew why. Because to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand.

It was a private thing, to be alive. He understood this now.

Five stars. No Notes. Highly recommend.

Pen Pal – J.T. Geissinger

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I think J. T. Geissinger’s book Pen Pal misrepresents itself. Even the blurb is misleading, promising a story about a a woman who receives a letter from some dude in prison which claims he will “wait forever if I have to.”

I told the mystery man he had the wrong woman. He said he didn’t. I said we’d never met, but he said I was wrong.

We went back and forth, exchanging letters every week that grew increasingly more intimate. Then one day, the letters stopped. When I found out why, it was already too late.

Kayla has just buried her husband, Michael and “Everything is meaningless. There’s a Michael-shaped hole” in her chest. But she has to get on with life.

First up, fixing the leak in her roof. Enter Aidan.

His height and size are immediately intimidating, as is his stony expression. He has dark hair, dark eyes, and a dark beard covering a square jaw. Wearing faded jeans, battered work boots, and a hunter-green button-down shirt rolled up muscular, tattooed forearms, he looks like he just wandered out of the forest after building himself a cabin from trees he cut down with an axe.

Cue banter and before you can say “dead husband” Kayla and Aidan are doing the horizontal mambo and, no surprise to anyone, it is the hottest sex she as ever had in her life.

Pen Pal is not really about pen pals. Someone appears to be stalking Kayla (which is how she ends up at Aidan’s apartment in the first place – don’t bother trying to make sense of that.) Their relationship falls into the insta-love category – pretty much my least favourite trope.

Their sexy fun times are often cringey because she is a rabbit and he is the lion and there is some sort of under explored master/slave dynamic which makes zero sense. And then we come to the twist…which apparently emotionally wrecked readers, but I was just huh?

So, this is not dark romance because Aidan is a good guy. I don’t think spanking = dark romance. Both main characters are under developed. Overall, the book seemed to be trying to be more than the sum of its parts.

I read it in an afternoon, but I won’t be reading anything else by the author.