mystery

The Darkest Corners – Kara Thomas

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Eighteen-year-old Tessa is returning to her childhood hometown of Fayette, Pennsylvania to visit her incarcerated father who is dying of cancer. This isn’t the only reunion she’s facing. When she moved to Florida to live with her grandmother, she left behind her best friend Callie and the trauma of having to testify in a murder trial. She and Callie are estranged now, which makes the fact that she is going to be staying with Callie and her parents slightly uncomfortable.

Home is both different and the same. There’s a reminder around every corner of the summer when she was nine and Callie’s cousin Lori was murdered. She and Callie were material witnesses in the trial that put Wyatt Stokes behind bars, not only for Lori’s murder but for a string of other homicides. Not long after she lands back in Fayette, another girl is killed and it’s impossible not to see the similarities between this girl and all those who came before. But how is it possible, when Wyatt Stokes is behind bars? Things just don’t add up and so Tessa (and eventually Callie) start to dig into their memories of what happened that long ago summer.

The Darkest Corners is a fun read, but it’s definitely better if you read it in one or two sittings because there is a lot going on and a lot of character names to keep track of. Some of these characters have very little to do and are not much more than names on a page. They drive a certain part of the plot and are dropped like hot potatoes. Other characters, like Tessa and Callie, are more rounded. The last fifty pages – although perhaps not all that believable – flew by.

Mostly though, it was a good time.

Keep This To Yourself – Tom Ryan

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Mac Bell and his friends are marking the occasion of their high school graduation and the anniversary of the death of their best friend, Connor, by digging up the time capsule they’d buried as kids when Tom Ryan’s YA mystery Keep This To Yourself opens. Although they’ve tried to move on with their lives, it hasn’t been easy. Connor was the last victim in a series of killings that have remained unsolved and Mac, in particular, is having a hard time letting go.

Connor.

Seventeen. Tall and good-looking. Always smiling. Loved by everyone. The kind of guy that adults liked to say had “a bright future ahead of him.”

One of my very best friends since childhood. One of my only friends, if I’m being honest.

Mac wonders if he might not have been a little bit in love with Connor, too. Maybe that’s why, when he discovers a note tucked into a comic book (the two had been swapping comic books forever), he knows that Connor is reaching out to him from beyond the grave, asking for Mac’s help in bringing the killer to justice.

Ryan’s book is set in the tiny coastal town of Camera Cove, a place where everyone knows everyone– which means that everyone is a suspect. As Mac begins following the cold case, he meets Quinn, cousin of one of the other victims. There’s an immediate attraction between the two young men, and Quinn is as anxious as Mac to crack this cold case open once and for all, so they band together to try and find a connection between the victims or anything else the authorities might have missed.

Keep This To Yourself is a straightforward YA mystery with a smart and likeable narrator and some clever twists. This is not my first book by this author (I Hope You’re Listening), and it certainly won’t be my last.

I Did It For You – Amy Engel

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The fact that I sprung for a hardcover copy of Amy Engel’s (The Roanoke Girls, The Familiar Dark) latest novel I Did It For You should tell you that I am a fan. I am so sad that it wasn’t as good as her previous novels – which I LOVED.

Fourteen years after Eliza and her boyfriend Travis were shot in a local park, Eliza’s younger sister Greer comes home to Ludlow, Kansas. Bad things happen in Kansas, apparently. (It’s the place where the Clutter family - made famous in Truman Capote’s iconic book In Cold Blood – were killed in 1959.)

Greer has a love-hate relationship with Ludlow. On the one hand, her childhood besties Ryan and Cassie are there (Ryan has recently returned home following his divorce; Cassie had never left). On the other hand, she has a strained relationship with her parents. Her father is an alcoholic and her mother buried her grief in relentless cleaning. Why come home now, when she has made a life for herself in Chicago? Well, that’s because two more kids are dead. Greer is convinced that these deaths are connected to her sister’s murder even though the person responsible for Eliza and Travis’s deaths, Roy Mathews, was caught and executed.

In an effort to uncover the truth, Greer teams up with an unlikely person: Dean Mathews, Roy’s older brother. Together, they try to figure out Roy’s motive for killing Eliza and Travis because while Roy admitted to killing them, he also said he didn’t really know them and so the crime doesn’t make sense to either Greer or Dean.

Maybe if I hadn’t read The Roanoke Girls or The Familiar Dark first, I would have liked I Did It For You more than I did. I read a lot of thrillers, and this one stacks up just fine against many of them. But I was really hoping for the sucker punch The Familiar Dark offered or the dark family secret hidden in the depths of The Roanoke Girls. For me, this just didn’t have the same emotional depth as those two books. That said, the last third of the book definitely outpaced the first two thirds and while I suspected one thing, I was surprised by another revelation. So, not a total miss – really not a miss at all, just not as good as I’d hoped.

The Finishing School – Joanna Goodman

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An invitation novelist Kersti Kuusk receives to attend the 100th anniversary of the boarding school she went to in Switzerland coincides with the news that one of her former classmates has died after a battle with cancer. In her last letter to Kersti, Lille reasserts that their mutual friend Cressida had not fallen by accident and that incriminating evidence to prove this might be found in the Helvetians ledger.

Canadian novelist Joanne Goodman’s novel The Finishing School toggles between the present, where Kersti and her husband Jay are struggling to conceive and Kersti is also out of ideas for her next novel, and the past, where Kersti’s time at the Lycee International Suisse is unspooled.

Born to Estonian immigrants, Kersti is the youngest of four sisters. The honour of attending the Lycee had fallen to Kersti because “her sisters didn’t have the grades to earn the Legacy Scholarship,” but Kersti also suspected that “her parents are sending her away because they’re exhausted.”

Kersti’s new roommate is the beyond beautiful Cressida.

…she’s far from ordinary. She has a beautiful, unruly mane of hair, spiraling out in all directions. Her head is just slightly to big for her slender body, but she’s dazzling, with pale green eyes, exquisitely long lashes, and a prominent, arched brow […] all of it together a masterpiece of teenage magnificence.

Kersti spends the next few years of high school loving and loathing Cressida in equal measure. Cressida can be a lot, but she is also fiercely loyal and generous and her friendship affords Kersti a life she would never have had access to otherwise.

We learn early on that Cressida had fallen from the balcony of her dorm room, and Lille’s letter many years later dredges up all those old memories. When Jay suggests that there might be a new novel in this story, it is both a distraction from Kersti’s failed attempts to get pregnant (which is causing a lot of strife in her otherwise happy marriage) and also sends her down a rabbit hole in an attempt to figure out what really did happen almost 20 years ago.

The Finishing School is a real page turner and also a book about friendship, motherhood and loyalty. I could barely put it down.

The Quarry Girls – Jess Lourey

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Jess Lourey (Unspeakable Things, Bloodline) has written another fast=paced thriller ripped straight from the headlines. Literally. In her Author’s Note, Lourey says of her childhood home in Minnesota: “Three killers were on the loose in Saint Cloud when I was growing up. Only two have been caught.”

In The Quarry Girls, best friends Maureen, Brenda and our narrator, Heather, are coming of age in Pantown, a suburb of Saint Cloud, in 1977. Pantown was

built by Samuel Pandolfo, an insurance salesman who in 1917 decided he was going to construct the next great car manufacturing plant in good old Saint Cloud, Minnesota. His twenty-two-acre factory included fifty-eight houses, a hotel, and even a fire department for his workers. And to be sure they made it to work come sleet or snow, he ordered tunnels dug linking the factories and the houses.

One day, while playing hide and go seek in the tunnels, Heather and Brenda see something they aren’t supposed to see. When a local girl who is just a little bit older than they are goes missing, the teens begin some sleuthing of their own. It turns out that not everyone in Pantown is to be trusted.

There are all sorts of nefarious characters in this book including local boys Ricky and Ant and a new guy, Ed who

was way too old to be hanging out with high school kids, even a brain-fry like Ricky. […] Ed was exciting and terrifying and so out of place. His greased black hair and leather jacket against the soft, pastel Pantowners shopping behind him reminded me of a sleek jungle cat let loose in a petting zoo.

Even Heather’s parents, a mother who spends most of her time in bed and whose moods are unpredictable and a father, the local D.A. who is hardly never home, don’t seem all that reliable. Heather’s story is as much about the journey to adulthood as it is about what dark deeds are happening in Pantown.

And – an added bonus – so many references to the 1970s, the period of time in which I was coming of age. Heather’s friend Claude looks like Robby Benson. Getting dolled up meant an extra slick of Kissing Potion. Phones operated on a party line. Smokie and the Bandit was on the big screen. All these little nods to the period were just so much fun.

The story itself is fast-paced, well-written and I couldn’t put it down.

True Crime Story – Joseph Knox

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Joseph Knox’s novel True Crime Story capitalizes on the public’s insatiable appetite for, well, true crime stories. I have to admit, I can never scroll past any of the true crime videos that pop up on my social media feed.

For a hot minute, I thought True Crime Story was actually true. The novel opens with a note from the publisher claiming that this second edition “includes wider context on the previously undisclosed role of Joseph Knox in the narrative.” Knox inserts himself into the narrative based on his relationship with Evelyn Mitchell, a writer who reaches out to Knox to ask for advice on this story she is writing about the disappearance of Zoe Nolan, a nineteen-year-old University of Manchester student who leaves a party and is never seen again. In his note at the beginning of the book, Knox references his previously published novel Sirens – which, in fact, is a real book – thus my initial confusion.

True Crime Story is not based on a real person or crime. “I don’t think I used any one young woman as inspiration–if only because I was more interested in the milieu of a murder/missing person,” Knox said. “The press–good and bad–the grieving families and friends, and the ones who clearly see it as the start of their 15 minutes. There’s a lot of opportunity attached to tragedy–a grotesque kind of fame–and I think that’s what I was more interested in than anything.” (Shelf Awareness for Readers)

This novel is structured as a series of statements made by Zoe’s friends, family and other people associated with the case. Think Daisy Jones but more stabby. There is also an exchange of emails between Mitchell and Knox and a limited amount of multi-media posts and photos. Sometimes events are recollected differently by various people; therefore, we are reading the observations and memories of a group of unreliable narrators. It makes for interesting reading as you try to untangle an individual character’s motivation and perspective.

Zoe also has a twin sister, Kim, who is – by her own account – the polar opposite of Zoe.

She was the most invincible of us all, everything-proof and stunning, wearing this luminescent red jacket, ultrahot red all over. Matching red lipstick and a slightly visible red bra. Zoe was busy being noticed.

Everyone has secrets in True Crime Story. I found this novel thoroughly engaging even though the ending isn’t necessarily 100% satisfying.

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

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Published in 1992, Donna Tartt’s debut novel The Secret History is an astounding accomplishment. I read it for the first time shortly after it was published and I remember it making such a huge impression on me. It was a book that sort of stuck in my brain even though, over the years, I forgot the details of what it was about. I often recommend it to students and this summer my son Connor – who read the book, at my urging, when he was 13 or 14 – suggested we do a re-read. I did; he did not.

The book’s narrator Richard Papen recalls his time at Hampden College, a small liberal arts college in rural Vermont. (Many critics say it’s based off Tartt’s alma mater, Bennington.) The novel opens dramatically

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know.

Richard has come to Hampden from Plano, California a place which has “created for [him] an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup.” After beginning college in California, a fight with his parents leads him to Hampden where he hopes to study Greek, a subject for which he has an affinity. The only Greek tutor, Julian Morrow, is reluctant to accept Richard into his class. Julian tells him, “I have limited myself to five students and I cannot even think of adding another.”

Those five students soon become central to Richard’s life. There’s Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, the twins, Charles and Camilla Macauley, Francis Abernathy and Henry Winter.

All of them, to me, seemed highly unapproachable. But I watched them with interest whenever I happened to see them: Francis, stooping to talk to a cat on a doorstep; Henry dashing past at the wheel of a little white car, with Julian in the passenger’s seat; Bunny leaning out of an upstairs window to yell something at the twins on the lawn below.

A chance encounter in the library offers Richard an invitation to this insular group and from there a front row seat to their complicated dynamics. The novel traces the shifting alliances, the pretentious ponderings and the copious drinking of this group of young academics. Oh, and there’s a murder and other dark deeds.

The Secret History is considered the grand dame of dark academia, although it wasn’t even really a thing when the book was published. Dark academia became a thing on Tumblr in 2015 and “is a genre of literature that literally revolves around academia or learning. Therefore, you will see that it is mostly set in educational institutions and follow the lives of students.” (Medium) TikTok has a trend for the aesthetic subculture of dark academia. (NY Times) For me, dark academia is a story that takes place on a college campus or at a boarding school, where students are concerned with the study of literature but there are also dark forces (not of the supernatural variety) at play. Wikipedia has a pretty good overview here.

When I read The Secret History the first time, dark academia didn’t exist, so it was interesting to read it this time and see all the qualities that I recognize now as being hallmarks of the category: an isolated, insular campus setting, a preoccupation with academia, toxic relationships, corrupted morality. I think inherent in dark academia is bildungsroman. It is certainly true that Richard is changed by the novel’s end – and not necessarily for the better.

My memory of my first reading of Tartt’s book is that it was exceptional. This is a literary novel which I would now describe as overwritten, but that is a stylistic choice. Tartt has penned two other novels, The Little Friend and The Goldfinch, which won the Pulitzer in 2014 and they all have this in common: Tartt loves language and she is a master of her craft.

This reading of The Secret History was a little bit more of a slog than the first time around considering I was waiting for the “big” things to happen. I also found the characters just a little bit precious and not of this world. For a book that is set in the 1980s – granted a lot more years ago now than it was when first written – Richard and company seem just a tad foolish. They dress in “starchy shirts with French cuffs” and Richard sometimes observes to his delight, Francis wearing pince-nez. I mean, really. Sometimes they speak as though they are from another planet. But perhaps all the pretention is the point. These are students in their early 20s, trying to make sense of their world but they are, perhaps, too clever for their own good.

If you haven’t yet read The Secret History, I highly recommend it. And if you are already a fan of dark academia, check out these titles:

If We Were Villains – M.O. Rio

Bunny by Mona Awad

The Girls Are All So Nice Here – Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Babel – R.F. Kuang

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

One of Us Is Lying – Karen M. McManus

The Broken Girls – Simone St. James

Vladimir – Julia May Jonas

See What I Have Done – Sarah Schmidt

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“Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done she gave her father forty-one.”

I have been fascinated with the story of Lizzie Borden since I was a kid and saw a movie where the rhyme about Lizzie was sung by schoolchildren. (Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the film.) Years later, I read Evan Hunter’s novel Lizzie. I can’t imagine there’s anyone out there with zero knowledge of this famous true crime case from 1892, but you can easily go down the rabbit hole by searcing her name on YouTube.

Sarah Schmidt’s 2017 novel See What I Have Done reimagines the infamous case through the eyes of four characters: Lizzie; her sister, Emma; the Borden’s maid, Bridget; Benjamin, a mysterious man hired by the sisters’ Uncle John. 

The novel opens with the discovery of Mr. Borden.

I looked at father. I touched his bleeding hand, how long does it take for a body to become cold? and leaned closer to his face, tried to make eye contact, waited to see if he might blink, might recognize me. I wiped my hand across my mouth, tasted blood.

It is clear early on that things are not “normal” in the Borden household. Lizzie has a prickly relationship with her stepmother, Abby, whom she often calls Mrs. Borden. Emma is away from home so she is not there to act as a buffer between Lizzie and the senior Bordens. There seems to be a love/hate relationship between the sisters; both of their dreams have been thwarted by their overbearing father and their petty jealousies. Bridget wants desperately to return to Ireland and has been squirreling money away, planning her escape. Schmidt lets us see into the interior lives of these characters, and the stifling house they inhabit.

As for the fourth character, Benjamin – he comes into the picture after a chance encounter with Uncle John. As far as theories are concerned, having another suspect in the mix isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

What I admired most about this version of Lizzie Borden’s story was the writing and Schmidt’s ability to make all these characters sympathetic. None of them are particularly reliable and whether or not you believe everything they have to say, is up to you.

Borden was acquitted of the actual crimes and See What I Have Done doesn’t offer any definitive resolution in terms of her guilt or innocence. That said, I think Miss Borden might have gotten away with murder.

A great read.

The Whistling – Rebecca Netley

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Rebecca Netley’s debut novel The Whistling has all the necessary ingredients for an old-fashioned ghost story: an isolated location, a crumbling manor, unexplained occurrences, and plenty of things that go bump in the night.

It is 1860 and 24-year-old Elspeth Swansome arrives on the remote Scottish island of Skelthsea. She has been hired by Miss Gillies to look after her niece, Mary.

Iskar, Miss Gillies’ home, sits on the top of a hill. It is “a house larger than the others” remote and casting “a long shadow beneath which gorse and scrub shivered in the autumn chill.” Iskar was once beautiful, but is now showing signs of age and disrepair. It feels, to the reader and surely to Elspeth, dark and claustrophobic.

Elspeth’s young charge, Mary, has not spoken in months – not since the death of her twin brother William. There was also some scandal with the last nanny, Hettie, who ran off in the night with her lover. In addition, Mary’s mother – Miss Gillies’ sister – has recently died. All these tragedies strike a chord with Elspeth as she has also had some personal tragedy in her own life.

It doesn’t take long for things to get going. There are the requisite menacing characters, including Greer, a maid in the house who seems to hate Elspeth on sight and Ailsa, a woman from town who tells her that “All is not well at Iskar.” She’s got that right.

Elspeth hears humming in the halls, finds weird stones wrapped in human hair, sees shadows. Sometimes she finds Mary staring off into space and muttering to herself in a language no one can understand – even though she doesn’t speak to anyone else. Things get so creepy for Elspeth that she decides she is going to go back to the mainland, but in the end she can’t do it because of her growing affection for Mary.

Things get creepy for Mary, but unfortunately things didn’t get creepy for me. I mean – I guess I like my “horror” a little more horrific. This is an atmospheric book and might actually make a good movie, but it’s not scary.

There is a mystery at the centre of The Whistling. Although it’s not really my type of book, it was easy to read and entertaining enough for the kind of book it was. I suspect people who like their horror a little on the “lite” side, will likely really enjoy this book.

My version of the book, published by Harper Collins, has 377 pages…but the margins are wide and the font is huge – not sure what that was about. In addition, Netley had a writing quirk that drove me a little batty: “As I studied her features”; “As we walked”; “As I explained in my correspondence”. This is, I understand, a 100% personal pet peeve, but it did drive me a little batty. Otherwise, the writing is fine.

Easy to read, but nothing new.

The Rose Petal Beach – Dorothy Koomson

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I was a big fan of Dorothy Koomson’s novel The Ice Cream Girls, but The Rose Petal Beach? Not so much.

Told from multiple perspectives and bouncing from the present back to different points in the past, this is mainly the story of Tami and Scott, a married couple with two young daughters, who live in Brighton. Tami, who is Black, and Scott, who is white, have known each other since they were children. Scott is a Challey and “everyone knew the Challey family.”

Whenever Mum or Dad saw one of the Challeys in the street they’d talk about them quietly afterwards but not so quietly we didn’t hear. We knew they were people you crossed over the road to avoid. But you had to pretend that wasn’t why you crossed the road – they’d do you over if they thought you’d done that.

A chance encounter between Scott and Tami when they are eleven changes their lives. Tami tells Scott he can be whoever he wants – wise words from an eleven-year-old. Fast forward to present day and the couple are – at least from the outside – happily married and living the dream. Until the police arrive and arrest Scott. From that point on, Tami’s life spirals out of control.

The other two women in this story are Beatrix and Mirabelle, two women who live on the same street at the Challeys, and both of whom are friends with Tami. Mirabelle also works with Scott. Although Mirabelle isn’t one of the novel’s narrators, we do get to know quite a lot about her life. Later on in the story – and it’s a long one, clocking in at over 600 pages – we also meet Fleur.

The main problem with The Rose Petal Beach is that these people were ridiculous. The characterization was all over the place, especially with Scott. Is he a good guy? Is he an asshole? Is he a criminal? Well, yes and he can be all of those things in a single paragraph. The reveals seemed to come out of nowhere and felt less like legitimate twists and more like wtf?!

Although this novel is well reviewed – some even calling it a “masterpiece”, I found it kind of ridiculous. I know that we have to be willing to suspend disbelief a little bit when we read this kind of domestic thriller, but I at least want to care about the characters and I didn’t – not even a little bit.