Tag Archives: mystery

Kala – Colin Walsh

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Colin Walsh’s debut, Kala, is an example of a book I started, didn’t get very far, abandoned, and then picked up again a few weeks later and fell into without trouble. It’s been called everything from “A thriller–and a lot more” (Roddy Doyle) and “A masterclass in building suspense” (The Washington Post). I think the book falls somewhere in the middle.

Helen, Mush, and Joe are childhood friends who grew up in Kinlough, Ireland. Helen, a journalist who has been living in Canada, and Joe, a big-time musician, don’t make it home very much, but Mush has never left. He works at his mother’s cafe and spends his time alone or with his teenage cousins, Donna and Marie. There used to be three other members of their circle of friends: Aidan, Aoife, and Kala.

We’re fifteen and it’s the summer of our lives–the whole town’s pure responsive to our energies.

At the end of that summer, though, Kala disappears. Now, fifteen years later, Joe and Helen end up back in Kinlough and their return coincides with the discovery of human remains.

The story is told from Helen, Joe and Mush’s perspectives as they recount that final fifteenth summer (Kala was Helen’s best friend and Joe’s girlfriend) and also examines who they are now. They have all been traumatized by that long ago event. When Helen starts to poke around, asking questions she wouldn’t haven’t known to ask at the time, it stirs up some long-buried secrets.

There are some scary people in Kinlough, including Aiden’s own father, Ger, and his gang. Everyone in town knows they are up to no good, including Joe’s father, Dudley, a member of the local Guarda. If you are going to poke a wasp’s nest, you’re bound to get stung. But Ger is not the only bad element in Kinlough; the rot goes deep.

Kala is not a page-turner, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t riveting. Each of the main characters have demons in their pasts, and Joe and Helen in particular have a fractious relationship. They were such interesting characters, never mind their connection to Kala and the town.

The writing itself is also really compelling. They sounded Irish, at least to me; the musical cadence and the vocabulary is really specific. Here’s Mush describing hanging with Kala and the other girls:

Kala and me were friendly from the get-go, like. Even when Joe wasn’t around I’d call over to hers to hang out, watch films. Girls were pure different from fellas. They lit the room with candles, got extra pillows and cushions from upstairs. Big bags of M & M’s and Maltesers. Popcorn with lashings of butter.

The book did have some real moments of suspense, and the pace picks up especially towards the end, but I think the book is mostly about family, loyalty, friendship, memory and love. It took a while to read, but I felt like it was worth the effort.

Savage Ridge – Morgan Greene

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High school seniors Nick, Peter and Emmy kill their classmate Sammy Saint John. That’s not a spoiler. After the deed, the three besties go their separate ways and swear they will never return to their backwater town, Savage Ridge.

Sammy’s father, Thomas, and older brother, Ellison, never stop looking for Sammy or believing that Nick and his friends are responsible for Sammy’s death. Except no body has ever been found and the three friends have airtight alibis.

Ten years later, they’ve hired ex Detroit detective-turned PI Sloane Yo to try her luck at cracking the case. First she has to get the three friends back to Savage Ridge, and then she has to see if she can break them or, even better, if being near each other again won’t cause them to crack under the pressure.

The novel is told from a variety of perspectives: Nick, Barry ‘Pop’ Poplar, the town sheriff; Lillian Dempsey, the original investigator hired by the Saint John family; Ellison Saint John and Sloane Yo. The novel flips back and forth between then and now. Then James Saint John ruled Savage Ridge; people were afraid of the power he had to ruin lives. Now, he’s holed up in his mansion dying of cancer. The rest of the characters have their own motives and baggage, particularly Sloane who is clearly fighting some demons but is also smart and tenacious enough to get to the bottom of the motive.

Savage Ridge is a s-l-o-w burn mystery, not a whodunnit, a why-they-done-it. It takes a long time to get where it’s going and I am not really sure it was worth it once I got there. New info that comes in the final act feels a bit like a cheat and a final twist just didn’t land for me. That said, it’s worth the time for a patient reader.

The Crime of Julian Wells – Thomas H. Cook

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Of the Thomas H. Cook novels I have read, this one probably sits close to the bottom in terms of how much I enjoyed it. But a book by Cook, even a lower tier book, is still worth the read, imho.

Philip Anders’s best friend Julian Wells has killed himself. He rowed himself out into the pond “Far enough that he will appear small and indistinct in the distance so that his sister cannot tell what he is doing, nor get to him before he can complete the task.”

Julian’s death just doesn’t make any sense to Philip and he is determined to figure out what would have driven him to do it. That means he will have to revisit the past.

Julian wrote true crime stories and was quite successful at it. He’d written about serial killers and war crimes and cases of injustice all around the world. Julian once once wrote that “There is no more haunting story than that of an unsolved crime.” All his books were meticulously researched and

As a result of that research, there’d always been considerable sweep to Julian’s work, as his friendlier reviewers had sometimes pointed out. No crime floated freely. It was always part of a larger disorder, one fiber sprung from a hideous cloth.

Philip’s curiosity leads him from Argentina to France to England as he tries to figure out what his friend was up to. Ultimately, he think’s Julian’s death had to do with the disappearance of a young guide they’d met years before while visiting Buenos Aires. It had never occurred to Philip that Julian might have had some part to play in Marisol’s disappearance; he only knew that his friend had been keen to find her after she’d gone missing.

The story of what happened to Marisol is central to The Crime of Julian Wells, but Cook takes his time unspooling the details. That’s his way and I have always happily gone along with him because I knew there’d be some sort of twist in the gut surprise at the end. Not so much with this one, but no matter. As always, the book is well-written and mines the rich depths of friendship, morality, and family. And for a little extra verisimilitude, the crimes mentioned in the novel are all based on real events.

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.

Litani – Jess Lourey

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Litani is the fourth book I have read by author Jess Lourey (Unspeakable Things, Bloodline, The Quarry Girls) and it’s a corker.

Fourteen-year-old Francesca “Frankie” Jubilee has just arrived in Litani, Minnesota to live with her mother, Linda, whom she hasn’t seen in seven years. She’d had no choice in the matter; her much loved father has died and Frankie has no place left to go but back to the town where her parents grew up and where her mother is currently a Carver County prosecutor.

Litani, population 2700, has a downtown comprised of “two square blocks of shops and offices anchored by Engle Brewery […] all bloodred brick and gaping windows clinging to knives of broken glass.” Litani is “ghost-quiet […] rows of windows staring […] like vacant eyes.”

After Frankie gets beat up in the woods by three younger girls she meets Crane, a teenager a couple years older than her, who warns her that she “shouldn’t go into the woods at all.”

Litani is set in the 1980s (with all the requisite allusions) at the height of the Satanic Panic. Something is clearly up in Litani, that’s for sure, and Frankie is smart and tenacious enough to want to get to the bottom of it, especially after one of her bullies disappears. Then there’s The Game, a vague and deeply unsettling threat that it seems many of the young kids in Litani are aware of.

Rumours abound, but Linda — who seems ambivalent about her daughter at the best of times– seems to be working towards prosecuting some bad actors and the reader is introduced to a laundry list of potential suspects.

There are some genuinely creepy moments in this book, and all done without one bit of graphic writing; it’s all lingering looks and paranoia and that tickle up the back of your neck. It is also a story about family and a coming-of-age story. I loved every single second.

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

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.

Girl, 11 – Amy Suiter Clarke

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The notion of using a podcast transcript as a structural element in a novel has been around for almost a decade. Kathleen Barber’s 2017 novel Are You Sleeping is widely considered the first book to include a podcast and it must have seemed like a cool gimmick at the time. Loads of novels have done it since. Sadie, None of This is True, and Listen for the Lie are a few of the titles I have read that use this formula.

Amy Suiter Clarke’s novel Girl, 11 follows Elle Castillo, whose podcast Justice Delayed tackles unsolved cold cases. Formerly a social worker, Elle brings a strong stomach and a desire to help victims not glorify perpetrators to her work, and she’s had some successes. But now she is trying to solve the case of The Countdown Killer (TCK).

This case has involved several murders with a distinct signature. Girls, in descending order of age, are kidnapped, held for seven days, poisoned, whipped and then deposited someplace where they are easily found. There is definitely a rigid pattern to the crimes.

According to John Douglas, the former FBI special agent who made his name interviewing and analyzing serial killers, there is a difference between the modus operandi–the way a crime is committed–and the signature. The signature is what the killer does to achieve fulfillment. The way they kill might change over time, and it won’t necessarily impact the killer’s satisfaction. But every killer has a signature, something they have to do, or the kill won’t give them the release they’re after. Based on what we know, the numbers are his signature. The three girls, three days apart; the seven days of captivity; the twenty-one lashes.

The numbers mattered more than anything else. And that tells us something.

Elle is like a dog with a bone and she has earned some street cred with the police, so when another girl goes missing after a long period of dormancy, Elle is brought in to consult. The cops don’t think this can possibly be TCK, but when Elle suffers a very personal loss, it begins to look like he’s back.

The New York Times Book Review called Girl, 11 “propulsive” and, I dunno, it wasn’t propulsive for me. It was long and relatively slow and, at times, repetitive. There are multiple perspectives in the novel and some of those perspectives felt like exposition: let me show you why this person behaves this way. Here’s the backstory. I never really love that.

But, overall, this is a well-written novel and if you haven’t had a lot of experience with books like this, you could do a lot worse.