Tag Archives: mystery

Saltwater – Katy Hays

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Loads of people liked Katy Hays’ sundrenched (it takes place in Capri, which is pretty much the only thing I liked about it) thriller Saltwater. Told from multiple perspectives, it’s the story of a bunch of rich assholes behaving badly and maybe I’ve just had enough of that in RL to care very much about it happening on the page.

Helen Lingate is vacationing on Capri with her father, Richard, her Uncle Marcus and Aunt Naomi, her boyfriend, Teddy, and Marcus’ assistant (and Helen’s friend) Lorna. The Lingates return to the same villa every year to honour Helen’s mother Sarah’s accidental (but was it, though?) death 30 years prior.

Helen is trapped by her family’s wealth. She just wants to live her life, but she can’t. She is haunted by the family tragedy, has a relatively distant relationship with her father, and has never really made any friends until Lorna came into her life. Now the two women seem to be plotting some sort of “get-out-of-Dodge” scheme that will free them from the tangle of family obligations (Helen) and sleeping with rich old guys (Lorna). Just about the only good thing about Capri (other than, you know, the sun and endless drinking) is Ciro, the handsome son of the villa’s housekeeper, whom Helen has known and loved since she was a child.

Everyone has a secret in this book; I suppose that is what is meant to keep you turning the pages, but the problem is that I didn’t care about any of these people. Helen is 33, for God’s sake, and she is behaving as though she doesn’t have any agency at all. Seriously, I just wanted to give her a good shake. If this is all so unpalatable, just take Ciro and go. Hard to give up all that cash though. But even the cash isn’t what Helen thinks it is.

What motivates any of these people, beyond money, is hard to pinpoint. As Helen says “Money is my phantom limb. It was part of my body once. I know this because I feel its loss like an ambient current that runs up my spine, an occasional, sudden shock. Money is metabolic, a universal part of our constitution.” Um? What?

I didn’t enjoy this book, but I read it to the end because, y’know, there’s a part of me that wanted to know how it would all play out. There were a bunch of requisite twists near the end and while some readers were likely shocked and surprised, my reaction was more of the eye-roll variety. I found the writing choppy and repetitive and, like I said, it took me way longer to read this than I thought it would.

So, not for me, but I suspect lots of people would find it enjoyable.

Things Don’t Break on Their Own – Sarah Easter Collins

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Although Things Don’t Break on Their Own is touted as a “miraculous literary thriller”, I think that’s doing Sarah Easter Collins’ debut a disservice. While the book is definitely literary and it’s definitely a page turner, I don’t think I would call it a “thriller”. But maybe that’s nitpicking and it really doesn’t matter.

Robyn and her wife, Cat, have invited some friends and family round for dinner. There’s Robyn’s older brother, Michael, and his girlfriend, Liv. There’s Nate, Cat’s brother, and his new girlfriend, Claudette, and then there’s Willa and her boyfriend, Jamie. Robyn and Willa have history; when they were 17 and in boarding school together they were roommates and then lovers, but it ended badly. That was years ago, now, though and the two women are friends. It wasn’t a particularly happy time for Willa. Her younger sister, Laika, disappeared when she was just 13 and nearly 22 years later, the family still doesn’t know what happened to her.

The story changes perspectives and doesn’t follow a straight line. As Robyn anticipates Willa’s arrival, she remembers the summer she took her back to Tea Mountain, the remote place she calls home. It is a transformative experience for Willa, whose own family is a dysfunctional mess. Robyn’s father is a potter, and as he repairs a broken bowl using the Japanese method of kintsugi, he assures Willa (without even knowing her all that well) that “You can fix anything, given the right tools.”

There is no fixing Willa’s fractured family though. Her father, Bryce, has a successful business, so money is not an issue, but he is a horrible and abusive bully, especially to Willa’s mother and Laika. In fact, Bryce never touched Willa, and perhaps some of her guilt stems from that. About Laika, Robyn says

I tried to keep her safe. I really did. I told her, keep your head down, don’t bring unnecessary attention to yourself, just do what you’re told, all the things that just came naturally to me. But I was so busy keeping her safe from herself that I forgot to warn her about the outside world. I should have told her that there were people out there, men, women even, who could harm her.

So much was my fault.

Robyn and Cat’s dinner party proves to be revelatory, but by the time you get to the “twist” (maybe that’s why they call this book a thriller), you’ll be so invested in these characters that –well, I don’t want to say it hardly matters, but it was honestly the least interesting part of the book.

I really enjoyed Things Don’t Break on Their Own. The writing was great, the characters were compelling, and the mystery surrounding Laika’s disappearance was intriguing. It’s a solid debut and I highly recommend it.

The Wasp Trap – Mark Edwards

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I whipped through Mark Edwards’ thriller The Wasp Trap in a couple sittings (helped along by two storm days), but it wasn’t really because the book was anything particularly special.

Twenty-five years ago, Professor Sebastian Marlowe assembled his “revolutionaries”, six 20-somethings with particular skills, and invited them to come to Thornwood, a stately country manor, to develop a dating app based on years of his own research.

At the end of the summer, after a party-gone-wrong, the six were shipped off to their homes in various parts of England and with the exception of Theo and Georgina, who had fallen in love and subsequently married, they don’t speak to each other until after Marlow has died and Theo and Georgina invite them to a dinner party in their former employer’s honour.

This is one of those locked room mysteries where you are meant to be suspicious of everyone’s motives. The story is mostly told through Will’s eyes. He’d been hired to write the web site’s copy, so it makes sense that he’s the observant one, the one who tries to piece things together when things go sideways. Which they do.

Once all the gang’s back together, someone in the house turns out not to be who they said they were…well, more than one someone, actually. Suddenly, the revolutionaries find themselves unwilling participants in a deadly game of “tell me your secret”.

The Wasp Trap toggles between the summer at Thornwood and the present day and reveals to the reader that, Lily, the genius of the group was also working on a separate project, an app that could figure out whether or not someone is a psychopath. As Will notes when Lily broaches the idea

The genius. The lothario. The salesman. The affluent couple, the joker and the local girl. Finally me, the wordsmith, whose role was to write it all down.

If any of us were a psychopath, I already had a good idea who it would be.

This is one of those books that will appeal to a lot of readers. It’s fast-paced, there are clearly stakes, lots of twists and cliffhangers that will make you turn the pages. It was just okay for me, but that’s just me. I didn’t really care for any of the characters that much and I wasn’t a huge fan of the ending.

Mileage will definitely vary.

Razorblade Tears – S.A. Cosby

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Razorblade Tears is my second book by S.A. Cosby (All the Sinners Bleed). It’s a straightforward revenge thriller that grabs you by the throat immediately and shakes the living daylights out of you until the end.

Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins have very little in common with each other except for the fact that Ike’s son, Isiah, fell in love with Buddy Lee’s son, Derek. Neither man had a solid relationship with their son for reasons that are more complicated than their sexual orientation. Ike spent several years in prison when Isiah was younger. Buddy Lee also spent time in prison. Ike has been out for a few years now, and has built a successful lawncare business; Buddy Lee lives in a rundown trailer and drinks too much. Ike is Black and married to his high school sweetheart; Buddy Lee is white and divorced.

Then their sons are murdered. And when it doesn’t look like the police intend to solve the crime, Ike and Buddy Lee join forces to find out what happened to them and make it right. And by make it right, I mean cause bodily harm to anyone involved.

It is often the case, and certainly true for Ike and Buddy Lee, that we only realize how much we love someone when they are gone. I mean, sure, these fathers loved their sons, but they also couldn’t abide the fact of their homosexuality. Their deaths stir up all sorts of unresolved feelings and also calls into question the validity of those feelings. Buddy Lee gets there a little quicker than Ike:

Derek was different. Whatever rot that lived in the roots of the Jenkins family tree had bypassed Derek. His son was so full of positive potential it had made him glow like a shooting star from the day he was born. He had accomplished more in his twenty-seven years than most of the entire Jenkins bloodline had in a generation.

Once the men start to ask questions about their sons, they find themselves in the crosshairs of a gang of bikers, and someone powerful further up the food chain. Ike and Buddy Lee are not without skills and they find themselves in some truly terrifying situations. Their partnership grows from wary colleagues to something like friendship as they take a wrecking ball to the mystery surrounding their sons’ deaths.

Razorblade Tears is violent, funny, heartfelt and a total page turner. It asks a lot of questions, not the least of which is what happens to a person who is not allowed to be their authentic selves. You will be rooting for these middle-aged men from start to finish.

The Safest Lies – Megan Miranda

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Seventeen-year-old Kelsey and her mother live in a fortress of a house; it even has a safe room in the basement. Kelsey has always felt safe there and, in fact, “The black iron gates used to be [her] favorite thing about the house.” She acknowledges that her life isn’t like the lives of her classmates. For starters, her mother hasn’t left the house in 17 years. For another, she has to meet with Jan.

Seeing Jan was part of my mother’s deal to keep me. Jan was assigned by the state. I’ve come to rely on her, but I also don’t totally trust her, because she reports to someone else, who decides my fate. My mother relies on her even more, and trusts her even less.

Although previously homeschooled, Kelsey now attends high school and on her way home one day she has a car accident. Ryan, classmate and local volunteer firefighter, is first on the scene and “saves” her from certain death. His heroism lands the pair in the paper and that’s when Kelsey’s life starts to unravel.

She does something she shouldn’t and sneaks out of the house one night to see Ryan receive a medal for saving her life. When she returns home, she discovers the gate at the front unlocked, and when she makes her way inside, her mother is missing. It’s a big deal because, remember, mom hasn’t been outside in 17 years.

Megan Miranda’s YA thriller The Safest Lies is pretty much what you’d expect from a book of this type. A plucky heroine, a solid love interest, a couple red herrings, a mystery and enough action to propel the plot forward. I was pretty invested when there seemed to be stakes (who are the shadowy figures lurking around and I guess that safe room will come in handy after all, eh?) It doesn’t necessarily wrap up as satisfactorily or as believably as I might have hoped, but as a seasoned thriller reader, that’s to be expected.

Teens probably won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough.

This Book Will Bury Me – Ashley Winstead

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On the plus side, Ashley Winstead’s latest novel This Book will Bury Me is a page turner. On the negative side, the book doesn’t hang together and I didn’t finish it feeling satisfied. This is the fourth book I have read by this author. I had similar feelings about her debut, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, and then I really liked The Last Housewife and Midnight is the Darkest Hour.

Janeway Sharp, a college student, receives horrible news: her father has died. She returns home to be with her mother and try to process this unexpected and devastating loss. She doesn’t quite know how to manage her grief and then one night she stumbles upon an online group of armchair true crime detectives and gets sucked down the rabbit hole.

Soon she is helping a small group of people (Mistress, Citizen, Lightly, and Goku) solve a murder, an activity that provides both satisfaction and distraction. Jane earns the title of “savant” because she can apparently see things/details that others miss. That’s lucky for her, I guess.

When a terrible crime takes place in Idaho, the group immediately jumps on it, eventually deciding to meet up there so they can be boots on the ground. Lightly, a former cop, has a connection in the FBI and suddenly they find themselves special consultants. If Idaho seems like a very specific place for a murder, that’s because this case is essentially the Idaho college murders which took the lives of four students and for which Bryan Kohberger was recently sentenced to life without parole.

Suddenly Jane finds herself sharing a house with people she had only known online and they become a family of sorts — just a family with a shared true crime obsession. They follow the clues, turn over rocks, and insinuate themselves into the lives of people connected to the case. All of this is ethically grey, of course, but Jane isn’t so naive as to not realize it is. Still, she’s determined to find out what happened.

The book is not without its controversy because of its similarity to the Idaho murders. All of this makes for a quick narrative and I didn’t really have a problem with it. My issues had more to do with the subplot of Jane’s father. Jane decides to do some digging, to find out about the person she felt the closest to, but whom she doesn’t feel she knows anything about. There were some things about her father that were revealed that didn’t really go anywhere and felt more like a distraction than a meaningful part of the novel’s narrative.

I also questioned some of the things that happened at the end of the book, as the narrative wrapped up. It seemed sort of implausible to me and left me feeling sort of meh about the whole thing when all was said and done.

Still, for anyone who has ever found a community online, or true crime junkies – you’d probably enjoy this book.

I Have Some Questions For You – Rebecca Makkai

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It took me forever to read Rebecca Makkai’s novel I Have Some Questions For You, but that does not speak to the book’s subject matter or quality – both of which are terrific, and should have been right up my alley.

Bodie Kane, a film professor and podcaster, is offered the opportunity to teach a mini-semester (two weeks) on podcasting at Granby School, the private New England high school she spent four not altogether happy years of her life. Her feelings about Granby are further complicated by her memories of Thalia Keith, her roommate who was murdered during their senior year. Omar Evans, the school’s athletic trainer, is currently serving life in prison for the crime, despite maintaining his innocence. Bodie is somewhat reluctant to return but, she “wanted to see if I could do it–if, despite my nerves, my almost adolescent panic, I was ready to measure myself against the girl who’d slouched her way through Granby.”

One of the students in her class wants to re-examine the crime, and Bodie finds herself sucked back into the past. As her student, Britt, takes another look at the scant evidence used to convict Omar, Bodie begins to consider the crime and the people involved from the distance of the 23 years which have passed since she graduated.

I Have Some Questions for You is not a thriller in the commercial sense of the word. It is written in the first person, almost like a letter to one of Bodie’s former teachers, a person she becomes increasing suspicious of as time goes on. It’s slow moving, especially in part one. There are also other things going on in Bodie’s life, an ex-husband who is accused of inappropriate sexual advances and the Twitter fallout which wraps its ugly arms around Bodie, Covid, and a stalled relationship with a handsome lawyer. The second half definitely picks up.

I think I found it slow going just because of the way I read it–a pause in the middle while I visited my kids–and so it’s definitely not a question of the book’s pedigree. I finished feeling wholly satisfied. It’s a compelling, well-written mystery with lots to say about our fascination with true crime, the fetishization of victims and how, sometimes, justice just isn’t served.

Await Your Reply – Dan Chaon

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Here’s a weird reading situation: I started and finished Dan Chaon’s novel Await Your Reply without really understanding what I was reading. The novel follows three different stories, all of them compelling enough to keep me reading but when I turned the last page my reaction was “huh?”

In one story, recent high school graduate, Lucy, runs off with her handsome history teacher, George Orson. It makes sense for her to go; her parents are dead and she isn’t close to her older sister, Patricia. “And so: why not? They would make a clean break.” George has promised her a remarkable life, but first a stop in Nebraska, where George becomes secretive and evasive.

In another story, Miles is on the hunt for his twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for a decade. Hayden’s most recent letter to Miles is filled with dire warnings about “the police, and any government official, FBI, CIA, even local government.” Miles knows his brother has had some mental health problems, and he could just ignore the letter when it comes, but he can’t do that, especially when Hayden tells him that he “may never hear from [him] again.”

Finally, there’s Ryan and his father, Jay. The novel opens with the two of them traveling to the hospital.

On the seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan’s severed hand is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler.

Ryan has only recently been reunited with his father and that reunion caused Ryan to give up the life and parents he once had. Jay is kind of a dope-smoking deadbeat who makes his living by stealing people’s identities and drags Ryan into this life, too.

So, what do these stories have to do with each other? It feels like absolutely nothing, yet my brain kept trying to fit the pieces together. The book’s unique structure makes it almost impossible to discern whether or not these narratives are running concurrently or one after the other. The book has a lot to say about identity and whether or not we should be content to live just one version of ourselves. I dunno. I found this book flummoxing, but I kept reading and I would still say I enjoyed the read even if most of it flew over my head.

Come With Me – Ronald Malfi

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Part ghost story, part serial killer story and part story about grief, new-to-me author Ronald Malfi’s novel Come With Me reminded me of the work of authors like Peter Straub and Thomas H. Cook, both fine authors imho.

Aaron Decker, a translator, and his wife, Allison, a reporter for a community newspaper, are happily married. They live a quiet life, but their happiness is upended when Allison is tragically killed. It is only after she is gone that Aaron discovers a receipt from a motel stay that Allison hadn’t told him about. Was she having an affair?

I’m of the opinion that when it comes to secrets, there is no end to what we don’t know about a person. Even the person who sleeps next to us and shares our lives.

Aaron can’t help himself; he has to go looking and what he discovers takes him on a journey through the back roads of his wife’s childhood and towards a serial killer.

Come With Me is written as though Aaron is talking to Allison and it appears Allison is communicating with Aaron from beyond the grave. Lights flick on. Songs offer clues. Fragments of conversations that previously made no sense click into place. Aaron discovers surprising secrets about his wife and soon he finds that he has no choice but to finish what she had started before her death,

I really enjoyed this book. It isn’t horror, and it isn’t a straight up thriller, either. It’s not a page turner, although I did very much look forward to diving into it every chance I could. There’s definitely some creepy moments and definitely some suspense, but I compared Malfi to Straub and Cook because both of those writers penned literary mysteries/ghost stories. Thoughtful and slow moving. I hope the comparison is understood as the compliment I intend it to be.

I will definitely be checking out more work by this author.

The Paris Apartment – Lucy Foley

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Jess needs to get out of Dodge (Dodge being London) and so she reaches out to her older half-brother Ben to see if she can come stay with him in Paris. But when she arrives in Paris, he’s not responding to her buzzing up to his flat, nor is he answering her calls. Jess is desperate because she’s broke, doesn’t speak the language, and doesn’t know anyone in Paris.

Lucy Foley’s novel The Paris Apartment has a similar structure to the only other Foley novel I’ve read The Guest List. In both novels, multiple characters have an opportunity to share their insight or, as is often the case, misdirect the reader. In The Paris Apartment, Jess encounters Sophie and her husband Jacques, the owners of the building who live in the penthouse. Then, there’s Nick, Ben’s university friend and the reason Ben was able to land such swanky digs. Mimi, an artist, lives with her roommate Camille; Antoine lives with his wife, Dominique, on the first floor. And then there’s the Concierge, an older woman who lives in a tiny cabin in the corner of the courtyard, tasked with keeping an eye on the building, and its inhabitants.

It becomes clear to Jess that these people are hiding something and her determination to find out what happened to Ben outweighs any fear she has for her safety. Ben is the only family she has and although a part of her resents his success (they share a mother, who died when they were quite young and both children were fostered out; Ben fared a little bit better than Jess and has had a more successful life), she also loves him.

There’s lots of misdirection and red herrings in Foley’s book and your level of enjoyment will depend on how much you care for Jess and finding out what exactly happened in the Paris apartment. The story is okay, albeit a little slow, particularly at the beginning. If you haven’t read a lot of this type of story before, this would be an okay place to start. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.