I Died on a Tuesday – Jane Corry

Janie White, 18, is just about to move to London to start a job in publishing when she is run down while biking home from the beach. “On the day I died, the sea was exceptionally flat,” she recalls. So, clearly not dead then. Twenty years later, an arrest is made in this horrific hit and run and the culprit appears to be pop sensation Robbie Manning. He surrenders without argument because “the past has finally caught up with him.”

Jane Corry’s novel I Died on a Tuesday is an overly long (465 pgs), overly complicated, not-very-well-written thriller. Besides these two narratives (well, Janie can’t speak anymore, but she can sing) we also hear from Vanessa, a widow who works at the local courthouse as a witness service volunteer, who comes into Janie and Robbie’s orbit through the trial.

Things might have been a little more palatable if Corry had focused on just one story, but everyone gets in on the action. For example, Vanessa’s marriage is harbouring a huge secret and her friend, Richard, a local judge (and whom she cleverly refers to as Judge) has a secret, and Janie’s mother went missing around the time she had her accident. But did she though? And Robbie’s rise to fame is suspicious. And all these threads, somehow – and mostly unbelievably – tie themselves into a neat little bow by the time we get to the end of the book. Some people might (and did) say that this book was full of twists. Honestly I just felt like yelling “squirrel” every time I turned the page.

None of these characters were remotely believable to me. None of their motives sufficiently explained their decisions. None of the dialogue felt real to me. It was all tell. I knew by about page 50 that I wasn’t going to like it, but I slogged through hoping that where the writing suffered, there might be a pay off in the plot. I will happily read a book with mediocre prose if the story is a banger.

Nothing to see here.

Don’t Believe It – Charlie Donlea

I’ve read a couple books recently that employ a podcast/documentary element (None of This is True, Listen for the Lie, The Favorites) and it’s definitely something that can add a little something something to a novel. In Charlie Donlea’s novel Don’t Believe It, Sidney Ryan is a documentary filmmaker whose last three projects have ended up exonerating people and Grace Sebold is hoping that Sidney can help overturn her conviction.

A decade before Grace and a group of friends arrived at Sugar Beach, St. Lucia, to celebrate the wedding of Daniel and Charlotte. It should have been a sun soaked holiday, but then Julian is found dead and just days later Grace is arrested for the crime. Incarcerated in a St. Lucian prison for the past ten years, her letters to Sidney have finally yielded the desired result and Sidney has agreed to take a look at the evidence.

Sidney decides to investigate and reveal what she finds week by week. Grace assures Sidney that is she is innocent, that the facts will bear that out. Circumstantially at least, it appears that all the signs point to Grace being the culprit, but there are some questions and soon Sidney begins to believe in Grace’s story. Forensics seem to agree.

Sidney talks to police, friends and family. She pores over evidence and consults experts. There’s an eleventh hour twist and all the requisite red herrings just to keep you guessing.

All of this should have been page turning stuff, but it really wasn’t. The ending introduces the idea of a secondary character investigating something else that is introduced in the the book, so I am not sure if this is meant to be the beginning of a new series, but I won’t be carrying on.

Listen for the Lie – Amy Tintera

It takes a lot to really surprise me when it comes to thrillers. Amy Tintera’s novel Listen for the Lie did not surprise me, but it was an okay diversion from the shitstorm of the world in which we are currently living.

Lucy Chase returns to Plumpton, Texas for her grandmother’s– the feisty Beverly– 80th birthday. Lucy hasn’t been home in five years. Lucy’s life is pretty much off the rails: she’s just been fired and her boyfriend, Nathan, is on the precipice of kicking her to the curb. (Literally, since they live together.) Lucy really, really doesn’t want to go home.

When she left Texas for L.A., it was to escape the side-eye she was getting from everyone after the death of her best friend Savvy. Why all the suspicion? Well, no one knows quite how Savvy died, but what everyone does know is that she and Lucy were seen fighting and then Lucy was found covered in blood with no memory of what happened. No charges were ever brought against her, but that doesn’t really matter. Everyone thinks she killed Savvy. Geesh, even Lucy herself isn’t convinced that she’s not guilty.

Enter Ben Owens, host of the popular true crime podcast Listen for the Lie.

Is it true that no one believes Lucy Chase? Is she hiding something, or have the people of Plumpton accused an innocent woman of murder for five years?

Let’s find out.

Ben sets about interviewing all the people who know Lucy: her mother, her high school besties Maya and Emmett, Savvy’s ‘boyfriend’ du jour Colin, Savvy’s family and Lucy’s ex-husband, Matt. Eventually, Lucy agrees to talk on the record. I am sure that if you’d listened to this novel on audio you would have had an interesting reading experience, but I am not an audio reader.

It’s hard to say why this book wasn’t a winner for me. Maybe it was because I didn’t really like any of these characters, including Lucy herself (who spends a lot of time fantasizing about how to kill the various people she encounters.) The podcast scripts in novels has certainly been done before (Sadie, None of This is True) and here it is used to offer up potential explanations, and perhaps to incriminate other people.

When Lucy does finally start to remember what happened, it’s just a bit over-the-top. For me, I would slot Listen for the Lie in the okay category. The writing, the mystery, the reading experience were all okay.

I suspect others will like like it a lot more than I did.

Those Across the River -Christopher Buehlman

Those Across the River is my second novel by Christopher Buehlman (The Lesser Dead) and he now joins the ranks of my auto buy authors.

Frank Nichols and his soon-to-be-wife Eudora have just landed in Whitbrow, a backwater town in Georgia. Their life is a little bit in flux. Frank was essentially chased out of Chicago, where he’d worked at a college, because Eudora had been married to a colleague. The two meet at a faculty luncheon.

She was twenty, wearing a sweater the color of an Anjou pear. I was still built like the St. Ignatius basketball center I had been fifteen years before.

We were in love before the salads came.

It is 1935 and Frank is a WW1 veteran, prone to night terrors; Dora is a school teacher. They land in Whitbrow because Frank has inherited a property. The letter that tells him about this inheritance also cautions him to sell the property, that there is “bad blood” there, but with limited options, they decide to move. Frank is going to write the history of Savoyard Plantation, a derelict property owned by his ancestors.

As Frank and Dora settle into their new lives, they find it to be both secretive and charming. For one thing, the townspeople gather once a year to release pigs into the woods as a sort of sacrifice. But to what? Then there’s the plantation, which is located somewhere across the river, but Frank finds that no one is interested in taking him there. One of the locals tells him “Them woods is deep and mean.”

Just how mean? Well, it takes a while for Frank (and the reader) to figure out just what the heck is going on. Some readers might get frustrated with the slow pace at which the story unfolds, but I liked it. I really enjoy the way the Buehlman writes; he’s also a poet and it shows in his prose. One reviewer suggested that the main characters are wooden and the plot not that compelling, but I disagree. I was wholly invested in this story.

I won’t spoil the reveal. I did figure it out before the end, and while it isn’t a scary horror novel, it is atmospheric and a compelling read.

The Woman in Cabin 10 – Ruth Ware

I just wanted something quick and mindless to read and Ruth Ware’s novel The Woman in Cabin 10 ticked the boxes. Kinda sorta.

Travel writer Laura “Lo’ Blacklock is about to go on a five-day cruise, the inaugural voyage of the Aurora, a “boutique super-luxury cruise liner traveling around the Norwegian fjords” and nothing is going to stop her, not even the fact that she recently woke up in the middle of the night to discover a strange man in her flat.

Lo is certain that she can parlay this experience into a promotion at Velocity, the magazine she writes for. At the very least, she might be in line to take over as editor when hers goes out on maternity leave.

As is often the case with first-person narration, Lo isn’t very reliable. For one thing, she drinks a lot. For another, she takes anxiety medication. And she’s already sleep deprived when she boards, due to the aforementioned home invasion. Still, she is determined to make the most of this opportunity, until the woman in the cabin next door to hers (there are only ten on this ship) goes missing. Lo had only met her briefly when she knocks on her door on day one to borrow mascara. (Who would ask to borrow a stranger’s mascara? Yikes.)

Anyway, after a dinner with far too much alcohol, Lo is woken from a dead sleep.

I don’t know what woke me up – only that I shot into consciousness as if someone had stabbed me in the heart with a syringe of adrenaline. I lay there rigid with fear, my heart thumping at about two hundred beats per minute…

What she thinks she witnesses is someone being thrown overboard; what she thinks she sees is blood on the glass partition that separates her balcony from the balcony of the woman next door. When she relates her story to the ship’s head of security, though, he assures her that no one is staying in cabin ten. For the next 150 pages or so, Lo tries to figure out what she actually saw and who this woman is.

The Woman in Cabin Ten is a locked room mystery that takes way too long to get where it’s going, but it’s easy to read and if you don’t read a ton of this type of story, you’ll probably find it fun.

Look for it on Netflix in the coming months.

Wink Poppy Midnight – April Genevieve Tucholke

I knew I was going to love Wink Poppy Midnight pretty much from the opening line when Midnight tells us that “The first time I slept with Poppy, I cried.” Midnight isn’t much at sixteen but Poppy, the school’s icy queen bee, tells him

You’re going to be so beautiful at eighteen that girls will melt just looking at you, your long black lashes, your glossy brown hair, your blue blue eyes. But I had you first, and you had me first. And it was a good move, on my part. A brilliant move.”

Thing is, Poppy doesn’t want Midnight, not really. She wants Leaf Bell (yes, everyone in this novel has a weird name.) Poppy fell in love with Leaf “the day he beat the shit out of DeeDee Ruffler.” The fact that Leaf doesn’t want anything to do with Poppy; he “saw right through the pretty, saw straight through it.”

Leaf’s younger sister, the dreamy red-haired Wink lives at a farm across the road from the house Midnight moved into with his antiquarian book-seller father after his mother and half-brother, Alabama, move to Paris so she can write her latest novel. One day, Wink shows up on Midnight’s doorstep and in her odd presence, Midnight feels peaceful because “Wink wasn’t taking stock. She wasn’t trying to figure out if I was sexy, or cool, or funny, or popular. She just stood in front of me and let me keep on being whoever I really was.”

April Genevieve Tucholke’s (Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea) YA novel is dreamy and other worldly. These teens inhabit a world outside of the halls of a high school, but their imaginations, petty cruelties and longings will be recognizable. I enjoyed my time with them and loved the way this book was written.

Every Single Lie – Rachel Vincent

Beckett Bergen’s life is about to get a whole lot more complicated -and it was pretty complicated to begin with. For starters, she just dumped her boyfriend, super-hot-star-baseball player, Jake, because she’s convinced that he’s cheating on her. He insists it’s not true, but there’s definitely something he is not telling her.

Then there’s her complicated home life. Her mom, Julie, is a detective on the teensy police force in their small Tennessee town, and she’s barely at home – meaning that Beckett and her older brother, Penn, are responsible for looking out for their younger sister, Landry, 13. Beckett’s dad died several months ago, and it turns out there’s lots Beckett and her siblings don’t know about the circumstances of his death.

But Rachel Vincent’s YA novel Every Single Lie really kicks off when Beckett makes a shocking discovery in the locker room at her school.

There’s something sticking up out of the open duffel. I step closer, then I stumble to a shocked halt.

It’s a hand. A tiny, tiny little red hand.

And it isn’t moving

This discovery sends shock waves through Beckett’s small town and without really quite knowing how, she finds herself at the center of a lot of attention. Rumours start spreading like wildfire – many of which are spread by an anonymous Twitter account, Crimson Cryer, which asserts that perhaps Beckett is more closely linked to this baby than just being the person who discovers the body.

I really liked Beckett and her tenacity. She is determined to find out who this baby belongs to, even though the rumour mill is making it very difficult, and potentially dangerous, for her to do so. There are lots of clues which lead her to some very surprising places, but this book is more than just a solid page-turning mystery. This is also a book about grief, secrets and the damage social media can do.

Lock the Doors – Vincent Ralph

Sixteen-year-old Tom’s mother has had a string of bad luck with men, but now she is married to Jay, who is exactly who he says he is – a nice guy – and they have recently moved into a brand new house. Not everything is perfect. Jay’s daughter, Nia, is also living with them. She’s a year older and clearly hates Tom. And although the house is Tom’s mom’s dream come true, Tom soon makes an odd discovery. It looks like someone had installed locks on the outside of two of the bedroom doors. Weird, right?

At school, Tom is tagged to show new girl, Amy, around and although Tom is slightly awkward and not all that good with the ladies, he and Amy sort of hit it off. Then Tom discovers that Amy used to live in his old house. As bits and pieces of Amy’s life are revealed Tom starts to think that things just don’t add up. But the more he pushes Amy, the stranger things get. When Tom meets Amy’s family, June and Chris and Amy’s younger brother, Will, and makes some new discoveries in his new home, well – it all makes for page-turning fun.

Tom is a clever and likeable character who suffers from OCD.

I’m worse when I’m worried. On good days, I can touch everything once and sleep like a baby. On the worst days, I check everything twenty or thirty times and only make it halfway up the stairs before doing it all again. I know it’s silly, I know it’s irrational. But it’s part of me, and it’s not going anywhere.

It is perhaps partly his OCD that makes Tom so dogged when it comes to figuring out the truth. It might also be, in part, because of the horrors his mother faced prior to meeting Jay. What if Amy is in trouble? Tom can’t imagine not helping her even if it means getting himself into some scrapes.

Of course, it all comes together perhaps a tad too easily in the end, but I had a good time reading and I think teens who like mysteries will really enjoy this one.

Blackwater – Jeannette Arroyo & Ren Graham

Blackwater, a YA graphic novel, by Jeannette Arroyo and Ren Graham has a lot going for it. First of all, lots of representation including POC, trans, teens with health issues, werewolves, ghosts. Yes, you read that last part right.

Tony is a high school track star with a side of delinquent. Eli is the new kid who misses a lot of time because of an autoimmune disorder. Neither of these boys has the world’s best home life (Tony’s father works a lot and doesn’t seem all that invested in Tony’s life and Eli’s mother just seems completely checked out, perhaps worn down by her son’s health issues.)

A tentative friendship begins to develop between the two boys. Eventually, Tony has to admit that his feelings towards Eli might be something more than “friends.” Then, there’s an incident in the woods and suddenly Tony is dealing with a lot more than just his feelings.

Blackwater is part ghost-story, part high school drama, part m/m romance. I did feel that it was a little top heavy-so the end felt rushed. That said, it’s an hour of your time and it delivers on themes of acceptance, family and friendship.

Darkmere – Helen Maslin

I love a ghost story, especially if it takes place in a creepy castle on a windswept British coastline. Helen Maslin’s YA novel Darkmere offers readers two stories, one more successful than the other.

Seventeen-year-old Kate has been invited to Darkmere for the summer holidays by Leo, the boy she has a bit of a crush on. Darkmere is a castle he’s inherited, although he suggests “it isn’t a posh castle. It’ll be in a shit state because no one’s lived there for years. But it’s still a castle. And best of all it’s supposed to be haunted.”

Kate agrees to join Leo and his friends Beano, Hat-Man Dan and his girlfriend Lucie (who is only allowed to go if there will be another girl) and Jackson. The castle turns out to be remote and without any modern comforts or access to the Internet.

Darkmere Castle was built in 1825 by George Francis St Cloud as a wedding present for his young bride, Elinor. Tragically, Elinor took her own life during the second year of her marriage, and local legend has it that she died cursing her husband and his male heirs.

It is Elinor’s story that makes up the other part of the story. We learn about how she comes to be St Cloud’s bride and what her life is like when she arrives at Darkmere. As we learn more about her story – and it’s definitely the more interesting of the two narratives – things start to go sideways for the teens in the modern setting.

Maslin’s story, while not particularly scary, is atmospheric and filled with the requisite secret passages, strange sightings, and things that go bump in the night. I could have done without Kate’s story, really, although I guess without her arrival things at Darkmere would never have been stirred up.