Tag Archives: mystery

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.

The Family Remains – Lisa Jewell

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Lisa Jewell has always been a dependable writer for me. I know I am going to get a well-written, page-turning, thrill of a book, usually with multiple narratives that somehow all dovetail together in a satisfying way.

The Family Remains is a stand-alone sequel to The Family Upstairs, a book that I absolutely flew through when I read it during the height of Covid. I honestly do not think that you could read this one without having read its predecessor, though, and truthfully I don’t think this one is necessary.

Siblings Henry and Lucy Lamb are the adult survivors of a traumatic childhood — their parents, Henry and Martina, fell under the spell of a con man, David Thomsen and a woman called Birdie Dunlop-Evers. I won’t say much more about that because that’s the story you really want to read. Lucy is the mother of three children, Libby, whom she had when she was a kid, Marco and Stella. Currently they live with Henry until they can move into the huge new house she’s recently purchased with her share of a giant windfall. Libby is about to head to Botswana to meet, for the first time, her father Phin (who just happens to be David Thomsen’s son and also lived in the house when all the shit went down in the first book.) Henry has always been obsessed with Phin, but hasn’t seen him in years, so he decides to tag along. Except Phin leaves Botswana and heads stateside, so Henry drops everything to chase after him. Honestly, it’s all sort of unbelievable and ridiculous. (And I hate to say that because I really do love this author.)

Seemingly unconnected to that narrative is another character called Rachel, a struggling jewelry designer who meets, randomly, Michael. After a whirlwind romance, the two marry and then that all goes to hell in a handbasket. Could not have cared less about her.

Finally, there’s Detective Inspector Samuel Owusu, the man tasked with finding the identity of a human skeleton which washes up onto the banks of the Thames. This discovery is the catalyst that is meant to kickstart this new chapter in the lives of these characters.

This story depends, I think, on an understanding of what came first because without it, this all feels like telling. In her acknowledgments, Jewell thanks the readers who begged her to write a sequel to The Family Upstairs. Perhaps some people felt like they needed to know what happened after the final pages of that book, but I was not one of them. I mean, I never feel like I waste my time when I read this author because I do really like her, but this book just didn’t work for me.

Try these ones instead: The Night She Disappeared, Invisible Girl, Watching You, I Found You, The Girls in the Garden

All the Sinners Bleed – S.A. Cosby

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I am not really a reader that jumps on the hype train and I think at least 75% of my time is spent reading backlist books. Even when I do buy a popular title when it comes out, there’s no guarantee that I am going to read it straight away.

S.A. Cosby has been on my reading radar for a while and I own a copy of his novel Blacktop Wasteland, but it’s been languishing on my tbr pile for months despite its rave reviews. His newest book All the Sinners Bleed is all over the place and lots of people are talking about it, so on my most recent visit to the bookstore, I picked it up. Then I read it…in about 48 hours and when I wasn’t reading it, I was thinking about when I could get back to it.

Titus Crown is Charon County’s first Black sheriff. He’s recently returned to his hometown after some time in the FBI and he’s going to need those skills to uncover the identity of a serial killer.

When the novel opens, Titus is called to the local high school where there is an active shooter. The shooter is the son of one of his friends from high school and one of the victims is a beloved teacher, Mr. Spearman. It’s hard to make sense of the crime, but as it turns out it’s just the beginning of the horror that will grip Charon.

I love a good thriller/mystery. And I love a main character who can look after himself. Titus is 6’2″ and a former football player, so I am guessing he cuts a pretty imposing figure. He’s a no-nonsense, take-charge kind of guy, but he also has some demons of his own. There’s an incident from his days with the FBI that he alludes to, there’s a strained relationship with his younger brother, Marquis, and then there’s his love life. It’s complicated.

What makes All the Sinners Bleed so propulsive is its straight-forward plot. Cosby doesn’t waste any time igniting the powder keg, but there are other interesting things going on too. There’s the white supremacists who want to march during a town festival and the Black leader of one of the local churches who wants to prevent that march. Small town politics means that the white chairman of the board, Scott Cunningham, thinks Titus answers to him. There’s religious fanaticism and confederate apologists. And bonus: the writing is really solid. It doesn’t get in the way of the plot; it’s muscular when it needs to be but also, at times, poetic.

But there were moments like today when the true nature of existence was revealed to him. Moments when the ephemeral curtain of divine composition was pulled away and entropy strode across the stage. For all his attempts at control, days like today, when he’d seen a boy he’d known since infancy get his chest cratered, reminded him that chaos was the true nature of things.

All the Sinners Bleed is a well-written, violent, dark novel and I loved every minute of it.

Everything We Lost – Valerie Geary

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Valerie Geary (Crooked River) is definitely an auto-buy author for me. Although Everything We Lost wasn’t what I was expecting, I still found the book well-written and thoughtful.

Lucy Durant was just 14 when her older brother, Nolan, 16, disappeared. Although life wasn’t particularly easy for the siblings (their father left and their mother turned to alcohol), they have always been close, that is until Nolan’s former best friend, Patrick, starts paying attention to Lucy and she decides that Nolan and his interest in the stars and UFOs is just too uncool.

After Nolan goes missing, Lucy goes to live with her father and that’s where we find her, ten years later, with a stalled life. Her father, Robert, is about to remarry and he feels that it’s time for Lucy to get on with her own life.

They were kicking her out. She had seen this coming, was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner, like after she dropped out of college her freshman year, but still her eyes blurred with tears that she quickly blinked away. She wasn’t ready. She would never be ready.

At loose ends, Lucy returns to Bishop, the small California town where she grew up. She feels as though she might finally be able to unravel the tangled truth of what happened the night that her brother disappeared. That means she’s going to have to talk to her mother, from whom she’s been estranged for the past decade. It also means that she is going to have to try to remember what happened on that last night she and Nolan were together.

Lucy and Nolan take turns telling the story of what happened leading up to the night Nolan goes missing. Nolan’s narrative illustrates his growing isolation, and fascination with outer space. He is convinced of the existence of life on other planets and extraterrestrials. He spends all his time watching the sky and taking notes about what he sees. When he meets and strange and beautiful girl called Celeste, he is sure that she is from another planet.

Everything We Lost is really a coming-of-age story, even though Nolan’s disappearance is an intriguing mystery. Geary writes Lucy and Nolan’s story as believer and non-believer. From the outside looking in, it is easy to dismiss Nolan’s increasing paranoia as just that: the men in the black cars are watching him; the lights in the sky are from space ships; he imagined Celeste before she miraculously appeared in his life.

Although I have my suspicions about what happened to Nolan – and I think the clues are in the story – Geary doesn’t offer any easy answers, and I am okay with that. Everything We Lost isn’t a quick read, but I enjoyed the book.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart – Ed Tarkington

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The whole time I was reading Ed Tarkington’s debut novel Only Love Can Break Your Heart, I was having this weird deja vu. I don’t know whether it was specific plot points – although the story isn’t particularly original – or just the book’s general vibe. In any case, it was very reminiscent of M.O. Walsh’s My Sunshine Away or any number of Thomas H. Cook’s mysteries. This is high praise, trust me.

The narrator of Tarkington’s novel is Richard “Rocky” Askew. He’s telling this story from some distant point in the future, but when the book opens he is seven and lives with his father, “the Old Man”, mother, Alice, and his older-by-eight-years step brother, Paul, who “had a reputation around town as a “bad kid.””

Rocky worships Paul, hangs on his every word, and follows him around like a puppy. He is equally smitten with Leigh, Paul’s girlfriend, daughter of the town’s judge. When the novel opens, Paul suggests a visit to Twin Oaks, the huge unoccupied mansion with a violent history near the Askew’s property. Turns out, someone (Brad and Jane Culver) has purchased the house and Paul is shot on the property. This incident sets off a strange chain reaction of events – perhaps too many for one book – that includes a failed business deal, a romantic tryst between a teenaged Rocky and the Culver’s adult daughter, Patricia, and a double homicide. This murder comes late in the novel and propels the novel’s final chapters forward to its tidy conclusion.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart is not a story which is driven by plot. This is a story about family, love, regret. The novel takes place, for the most part, in the 70s and 80s. Paul introduces to Rocky to music, including Neil Young, whose song “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” provides the title of book. This is a novel that is very much steeped in a time and place. That’s one of the novel’s admirable traits. Actually, there is a lot to like about this book even though sometimes I felt like I wanted more of one thing (why did Paul “kidnap” Rocky; where did Paul disappear to and why?) and less of another (the choice of Equus as the high school play felt a little too on the nose).

Still, I enjoyed my time with Rocky and although there wasn’t a huge emotional payoff at the novel’s conclusion, this was still a great read.

You Let Me In – Camilla Bruce

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Camilla Bruce’s debut You Let Me In is quite unlike anything I have ever read before and although it was odd, it was also strangely compelling.

Eccentric and reclusive romance writer Cassandra Tipp has disappeared….or died…no one is really sure. Her life has been a strange one which has included the death of her husband and then the apparent murder-suicide of her brother and father. In her will, she leaves everything to her sister’s children, but first they have to read the manuscript she’s left them.

Cassandra’s life has been difficult. Her mother was “a stern woman, maybe not too happy.” Her father was “a big man with fleshy lips and cheeks like a basset hound.” She had a younger brother, Ferdinand, and a younger sister, Olivia. By her own account, Cassandra was a bad girl and

No one keeps an eye on the bad girl. The peculiar daughter is left on her own. So easy to slip away then, fall into the twilight places of the world. To be taken and lost. Preyed upon.

This is how Cassandra comes into contact with Pepper-Man, a twilight figure who would “appear at the end of [her] bed and sit there cross-legged, grooming his hair with a comb made of bone.”

Cassandra’s relationship with Pepper-Man is an intimate one. He feeds on her; sometimes Cassandra wakes up with “his deep buried deep in [her] throat.” It’s difficult for readers to know if he is real or whether, like Cassandra’s psychiatrist believes, a manifestation of childhood trauma because sometimes “something happens that is so horrible, so painful and confusing our brains take charge and rewrites.”

Dr. Martin writes a whole book about Cassandra: Away with the Fairies: A Study in Trauma-Induced Psychosis. This book tries to explain an alternate view of Pepper-Man. Its publication doesn’t do anything to make Cassandra and the strange circumstances of her life any more palatable, and it sure as heck won’t help the reader determine what the heck is really going on in Bruce’s novel.

I do have my own theory, but I won’t spoil the book by offering it up. You Let Me In wasn’t at all what I was expecting, but it was – I was going to say enjoyable, but that’s not the right word- definitely a fascinating read.

Dreaming Darkly – Caitlin Kittredge

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After her mother dies, seventeen-year-old Ivy Bloodgood is sent to Darkhaven, a small island off the coast of Maine, to live with her mother’s brother Simon. Ivy and her mother haven’t had the most stable of lives, moving from place to place and existing on what they could make reading tarot cards and stealing. Ivy isn’t sure life is going to be much better at Darkhaven, a place made “from granite blocks the size of Volkswagens”.

Ivy doesn’t know much about her mother’s family and when she arrives at Darkhaven she realizes she might not have known very much about her mother, either.

Why would my mother have left this behind? She was ruthless, and she loved money. I couldn’t believe poor-little-rich-girl syndrome have driven her out of this spectacular house and away from the credit cards and clothes and cars that came with a family like this. Never mind the inheritance.

Darkhaven isn’t a safe haven, though. Almost as soon as she arrives, Ivy begins having horrifying dreams of blood and violence. Then there’s the Ramseys, the only other family who lives on the island. There’s bad blood between the Ramseys and the Bloodgoods, but that doesn’t stop Ivy from spending time with Doyle Ramsey, the only person she feels like she can trust.

There’s a lot going on in Caitlin Kittredge’s YA novel Dreaming Darkly. As Ivy digs into her family history, she starts to discover that her mother had withheld more than just the size of the house she grew up in. Uncle Simon isn’t all that forthcoming with the family stories, either, and that just makes Ivy even more determined to get to the bottom of the family secrets. And there are lots of them.

While I did enjoy reading this book, I think it’s about 100 pages too long. The last 25 pages, as the secrets of Darkhaven are revealed, happen so quickly, you barely have time to get your feet underneath you. There were lots of moments in the middle that just slowed the narrative down and probably didn’t need to be there. There were also some instances where characters appeared only as a way to impart information to Ivy; they didn’t seem to serve any other purpose.

Still, if you like family secrets, a creepy location, and a plucky heroine then Dreaming Darkly might just be the book for you

The Hunted – Roz Nay

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I was hooked from the very start of Canadian writer Roz Nay’s novel The Hunted.

A hand over my mouth wakes me, the skin of it tinny with metal and salt.

…

“Stevie,” he whispers, his voice hoarse. “It’s not safe here. You’re not safe.”

Stevie and Jacob are high school sweethearts who have left their small-town Maine home in search of adventure and respite from the death of Stevie’s grandmother, a loss that meant that she is out of a job and a place to live. Now, at twenty-four, they’ve landed in Africa, where Jacob has taken a job as a dive instructor at GoEco, which is located on an island south of Zanzibar.

Stevie is clearly on tenterhooks and her first few days in Africa do nothing to settle her nerves. Nothing is like it is back home. On her first night at a hostel, another traveler tells her that “You can’t trust anyone.”

Then they meet Leo and Tasmin, a beautiful British couple. We know Leo isn’t to be trusted because he is the other narrator.

They seemed new. Vulnerable. I have to admit, I felt an almost immediate fondness for them both.

It’s interesting to read a cat and mouse thriller when the cat is identified so early on; you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. As the novel moves on, we get to learn a little bit about both Leo and Stevie — seems they both have some carefully guarded secrets.

Although things sort of fell apart for me once the foursome arrived in Rafiki and the machinations seemed a little over-the-top, I still enjoyed the read.

This is my second novel (Our Little Secret) by Nay. I will definitely continue to read what she writes.

Please See Us – Caitlin Mullen

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Caitlin Mullen’s debut novel – and Edgar Award Winner – Please See Us is well written, but it took me forever to read. I don’t know: is that a bad thing?

Twenty-something Lily has run away from NYC and a messy breakup with about-to-be-famous sculptor Matthew and landed back home in Atlantic City. She needs a job but “it was unsettling to be in Atlantic City again — coming home had filled [her] with an inarticulate dread.” She takes a job as a receptionist at a hotel spa, a job she doesn’t want but needs if she wants to get back to her life, a new life, in New York.

Ava, aka Clara Voyant, is a teenager who reads tarot cards and palms on the strip. She lives with her aunt, Des, above the shop. They’re behind on their rent and Ava lives with the dream of saving enough money to join her mother in California. When the novel opens, Ava reads the cards of a man looking for his niece, Julie. Ava has seen the missing posters around town, but she doesn’t want to mislead the man.

I didn’t want to disappoint him with the truth: what I saw was limited, out of my control. I couldn’t just call up information from the universe as easily as plugging a question into a Google search.

Ava and Lily’s paths cross and soon they are working sort of together to find out what has happened to the missing girl who, turns out, is one of several missing girls. Of course, the reader will already know that the outcome of the man’s search probably won’t be good. The novel’s opening lines tell us that “By the second week of June, there are two dead women laid out like tallies in the stretch of marsh just behind the Sunset Motel.”

Mullen’s novel meanders through the interior lives of Ava and Lily and also, Luis, a deaf and mute janitor who works at the spa. We also get a glimpse into the lives of the girls who end up in the marsh, poignant snapshots into who they are, and the circumstances and choices which led to this most horrifying end.

Ava and Lily are compelling characters, both young enough – especially Ava – to use poor judgement and make bad decisions. Please See Us definitely has a something to say about the violence against women, and how society sees and judges women who, often through no fault of their own, end up using their bodies as a means to an end. (Frankly, the most despicable character in this whole thing is Ava’s Aunt Des who essentially pimps her out to make rent money.) There is a mystery here, but it’s a s-l-o-w burn and might not appeal to readers who want things to move along a little more quickly.

Redemption Prep – Samuel Miller

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Like Samuel Miller’s debut novel, A Lite Too Bright, Redemption Prep doesn’t give up its secrets willingly. I think was about two thirds of the way through this thoughtful, intelligent mystery before I felt as though I was on semi-firm ground. And even then…

Redemption Prep is a private high school deep in the woods in Utah. Students have been told that “recruitment was incredibly selective, that [they’d] been chosen because of [their] accomplishments.”

Miller’s novel focuses on three of these students: Evan, Aiden and Neesha. Besides all being students at Redemption, they have another thing in common: Emma. When the novel opens, Emma has disappeared. Aiden is her star-basketball-player boyfriend; Neesha is her roommate and Evan is the boy who watches her every move.

As the school scrambles to locate Emma, it is clear that each of the students associated with her have their own concerns. Neesha, for example, is worried that Emma has disappeared because of the drugs she was selling for her. Aiden has been worried that Emma was going to break up with him and that her disappearance might have something to do with that; she’s certainly been acting strangely over the past couple of weeks. Evan is convinced that something more complicated, or perhaps even sinister, is going on.

Something is definitely not quite right at Redemption Prep. For one thing, no one is allowed to miss Mass. Ever. (Even though a high proportion of the student body is not Christian.) For another thing, there are a lot of maintenance workers at the school, and it soon becomes apparent that they aren’t your run-of-the-mill janitors. Then there’s the school’s head instructor, Dr. Richardson, a formidable leader with whom one does clearly not want to mess.

Eventually, despite their differences, Aiden, Evan and Neesha – along with a couple of their classmates, Zaza and Peter – form an alliance. Despite the school’s claims to the contrary, they are convinced that something nefarious is going on at Redemption Prep. They’re not wrong.

There is a lot going on in this book. It’s definitely well-written, but I do think it’s a little slow-going until it hits about the 3/4 mark, and then things really speed up. The ambiguous ending wasn’t wholly satisfying, but I still enjoyed the book overall.