Tag Archives: page turner

All the Wicked Girls – Chris Whitaker

Posted on by
Reply

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.

The Lamb – Lucy Rose

Posted on by
Reply

“On my fourth birthday, I plucked six severed fingers from the shower drain.”

Margot lives with her mother, Ruth, down a country lane somewhere in England. From a very young age, Margot knows that her world is different. Well, different is putting it mildly. Ruth is a cannibal (and, by default, so is Margot.)

Nestled between the groves, we spent our days waiting for strangers to find us.

[…]

We’d had all sorts of strays here. Some of them had come away from car crashes, but what they didn’t know was that Mam had a little habit of leaving nails and glass on the back roads when she left the house. Some of the strays were lost, trying to hike across the fells without knowing that this gloom was where they’d spend the rest of their short lives.

[…]

That night, they didn’t scream much. It must have been quick.

If you are at all squeamish, Lucy Rose’s debut The Lamb might not be the book for you. I knew from the very first couple of pages that I was going to be icked out and I absolutely was. There’s lots of talk of turning body parts into pies and bones into broth and how delicious a crispy finger is.

But, this is also a story about a mother and daughter whose lives are changed when a stray arrives at their door who Ruth decides to keep because, as it turns out, she (Eden) is one of them. And Eden fundamentally changes the dynamic in the household which leaves Margot on the outside looking in.

Margot is used to making herself small so as not to draw attention. But she makes a friend at school, Abbie, and her bus driver, Steve, also seems to sense something is not quite right. The danger doesn’t come from the outside world, though. Her mother tells her

“I didn’t want to carry a child!” […] I never wanted to be a mama. I just wanted to be a person. None of this was supposed to happen. […] You make me hate myself.”

The Rose is a fairy tale and a story about female rage and motherhood. Do women cannibalize themselves in order to do what is expected of them? Does the hunger for more ever go away? What sacrifices must be made in order to live a fulfilling life?

If you have a strong stomach, The Lamb is a terrific read.

Litani – Jess Lourey

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

The Love of My Life – Rosie Walsh

Posted on by
Reply

Leo and Emma are a blissfully happy couple who live in London with their three-year-old daughter, Ruby, and their dog John Keats. When Rosie Walsh’s novel The Love of My Life opens, the couple are waiting for news about Emma’s cancer: has her treatment worked? Her diagnosis necessitates Emma’s covert communication with an unnamed person.

I started having vivid, photo-real dreams about us meeting, the feel of his skin, the smell of his hair. And so, when the thought came to mind–I want to call–I didn’t immediately dismiss it.

[…]

A few days after the diagnosis, I caved and made the phone call.

Then she reveals that she has been lying to Leo. Soon the reader will discover that Walsh misses no opportunity to lie to the reader, either.

Leo, an obituarist, starts to suspect that his wife has been keeping secrets and goes on a hunt to discover the truth. So, readers will have both perspective: Emma increasingly feeling trapped by her lies and Leo increasingly desperate to find out just what in the heck is going on with the one persona in all the world that he trusts.

And for the first half of the book, I was happy to go along because I didn’t have a sweet clue what was happening and I was okay with that. The misdirection wasn’t as annoying as it later became because in the second half of the novel I felt less like I was following Leo as he discovered the truth and more like the truth was being told to me. Suddenly the motivations just seemed a little too insert A into B.

This is less thriller and more family drama. If you like that sort of thing, you’d probably like The Love of My Life.

That’s Not My Name – Megan Lally

Posted on by
Reply

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.

False Witness – Karin Slaughter

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Bunny – Mona Awad

Posted on by
Reply

For a while, Bunny was everywhere and so I bought it and shelved it and, finally, I’ve read it. Canadian writer Mona Awad’s story of academia, writing, and mental health (??) is a masterclass of a fever dream and more than once I was scratching my head and asking myself just what in the heck is going on. When I turned the last page, I still can’t say for sure what I read.

Samantha Mackey is in the graduate writing program at an elite New England college, Warren University. In her writing class of five, she is the outlier; the other four women in the class, The Duchess, Cupcake, Creepy Doll, and Vignette, are an insular group who affectionately call each other Bunny. Their affectation drives Samantha crazy and she and her bestie, Ava, spend most of their time mocking the other women.

How fiercely they gripped each other’s pink-and-white bodies. forming a hot little circle of such rib-crushing love and understanding it took my break away.

[…]

I quietly prayed for the hug implosion all last year. That their ardent squeezing might cause the flesh to ooze from the sleeves, neckholes and A-line hems of their cupcake dresses like so much inane frosting.

But then, one day, Samantha gets invited to Smut Salon, a gathering of the bunnies where they share their “Absolute Truth” and drink a “bile-green concoction in which what looks like a small black turd floats.” Suddenly Samantha finds herself one of the members of this strange sisterhood and losing, it seems, her grip on reality.

This is a crazy novel, honestly, but I gobbled it up in a couple sittings without complaint. I think much of what happens is deliberately ambiguous. Is Samantha going crazy? Are the student bunnies really turning actual bunnies into subservient men (although men without penises and who have to wear gloves because their hands are deformed)? Is the whole thing a metaphor for the creative process? Why can’t Samantha write anything? Why does Ava disappear? Who is Max? So many questions and although none of them are answered in a specific way, I think I am satisfied with my own interpretation of the the book. Which I am not going to share here because you’ll want your own.

Definitely worth a read.

Girl, 11 – Amy Suiter Clarke

Posted on by
Reply

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.

White Lies – Lucy Dawson

Posted on by
Reply

Many years ago I read Lucy Dawson’s novel His Other Lover which I remember really enjoying. That’s probably why I picked up White Lies, but I am sorry to report that it didn’t land quite the same.

Alexandra Inglis is a family doctor at a group practice somewhere in England. She is married to Rob and mother to two little girls, Maisie and Tilly. Her life is blissfully happy until, in retaliation for Rob’s indiscretion, she gets blinding drunk while on a girls’ weekend and sleeps with a complete stranger.

He straightened up, and I realized he was tall. I drank in a tight T-shirt, gym-honed arms, beautiful eyes–and didn’t stop staring. He looked confused at my brazenness, but then came a shy smile.

I saw how it was going to go immediately.

What Alex fails to realize in her inebriated state is this hot guy is actually a seventeen-year-old patient and sleeping with him opens up a whole world of complications.

White Lies offers more than one perspective for although Alex insists that she was too drunk to know she was crossing the line because she absolutely 100% did not know who this guy (kid?) was, he has a completely different story.

So, what we end up with is a he said/she said narrative with two wholly unreliable narrators and a a cast of secondary characters who have a vested interest in the truth.

This book was easy enough to read, but truthfully, not actually all that plausible and the ending felt like it belonged in a completely different story.

Mileage will vary.