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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.

When I Was Ten – Fiona Cummins

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Something horrible happened at Hilltop House.

Fiona Cummins’ thriller When I Was Ten travels back in forth between then (the immediate aftermath of the crime and then even further back to the time leading up to it) and now, twenty years later.

After Brinley, one of two main characters, reveals that she was struck by lightning when she was twelve, she also tells us that the parents of her childhood friends, Sara and Shannon, were “Stabbed fourteen times with a pair of scissors in a frenzied and brutal attack.”

Catherine Allen, the other protagonist, lives a quiet life with her husband, Edward, and twelve-year-old daughter, Honor. She “only wants to be ordinary” but the truth is that her story is anything but.

How are these two women connected? That part of the mystery is easily solved, but there is so much more to come in Cummins’ novel about childhood friendship, family relationships, and abuse. As Brinley, a journalist, starts to revisit her part in what happened at Hilltop House, the book picks up steam and the last half was pretty much unputdownable. Cummins was a journalist, so she has some interesting observations about the parasitic nature of true crime journalism.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book.

Rovers – Richard Lange

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Stephen King called Richard Lange’s novel Rovers, “The best vampire novel [he’d] read since Let the Right One In.” I don’t usually go in for author endorsements except I know that King is a voracious reader and when it comes to things that go bump in the night, you could do way worse that King when he’s at the top of his game (and let’s face it, he usually is.)

Lange’s novel tells the story of brothers Jesse and Edgar (think George and Lennie from Of Mice and Men if they were bloodsuckers). They’ve been vampires–or Rovers as they’re called in Lange’s universe– for seventy-five years, Jesse first and then, at his mother’s behest, Edgar. They travel together, stay away from other people (except for that time when Jesse fell in love with Claudine) and feed only when they have to, usually about once a month. As far as vampires go, they’re relatively benign.

The Fiends, on the other hand, are not. They’re a motorcycle gang, led by bookworm Antonia and her lover, Elijah. For the right price, they’ll do a job and the job at hand involves a lot of money and a baby. When two of the gang take the baby to a remote location to feed, Jesse, Edgar, and a human woman they’ve just met– and to whom Jesse has taken a shine because she reminds him of Claudine–just happen to be nearby. Right place wrong time or wrong place right time – take your pick, but either way, now the three are on the run because the Fiends will stop at nothing to find them.

Then there’s Charles, a man who has been bouncing from city to city, hunting for the person responsible for the death of his son, Benny. When he meets Czarnecki a grizzled old man on a similar mission – to rid the world of Rovers- Charles’ understanding of the world is forever altered.

Rovers is a straightforward, action packed, novel where I found myself feeling tremendous sympathy for some of these characters, even though I clearly should not. Lange leans into some of the vampire tropes: sunlight kills, behead the vampire and they turn to dust. Other things are slightly different: no fangs, instead a nick to the jugular and it’s an all you can drink buffet and just about any injury will heal given time. These vampires eat a lot of people food, too.

This is a violent, often gory, fun novel – if vampires are your thing.

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.

Just Like Mother – Anne Heltzel

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Maeve is a book editor in NYC. She’s got a pretty good life, including a friends with benefits arrangement with Ryan. What Maeve doesn’t have is family. She grew up in a matriarchal cult, Mother Collective, a situation from which she escaped/was rescued when she was just a child. The only thing she really misses from that time in her life is her cousin, Andrea. They lost touch and Maeve hasn’t looked for her in years. Then, on a whim, she takes a DNA test and suddenly Andrea is back in her life…and things get, well, complicated.

This is the premise of Anne Heltzel’s first novel for adults Just Like Mother. And it started out really well. I love cult stories, and although this once doesn’t spend too much time in the cult, there is certainly enough information for readers to know that it’s whackadoodle (although, really, are there any cults out there that aren’t?) This is a cult of women, the one male child mentioned is referred to as ‘Boy’. There’s a locked room and strange sounds come from behind the door, a puppy Maeve thinks.

When Maeve and Andrea are reunited, Maeve is both elated and wary. After all, their shared childhoods weren’t idyllic. Andrea seems to have landed on her feet though. She’s made millions as the “CEO of a start-up that had been making the news for its groundbreaking contributions to the lifestyle market.” But almost as soon as Andrea re-enters her life, Maeve’s life starts to implode. She loses her job and then, a personal tragedy catapults Maeve to upstate New York, where Andrea lives in a fabulous mansion with her husband, Rob.

That’s when things get weird. Just Like Mother is one of those books that you keep reading because it is so ridiculous that you can’t stop. Some readers called it “terrifying” and “deeply disturbing” but it was neither of those things for me.

The First Day of Spring – Nancy Tucker

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The opening line Nancy Tucker’s debut The First Day of Spring is a corker.

I killed a little boy today.

That’s eight-year-old Chrissie speaking. Yep – you heard that right; Chrissie is eight. She lives an impoverished life with her mother, but beyond being poor, her mother is emotionally distant and Chrissie is mostly left to fend for herself. Her clothes are never clean; she often wets the bed and there is never anything to eat at her house “even though the whole point of a kitchen was to have food in it.”

Chrissie survives because of free school dinners and by hanging around at her best friend Linda’s house at tea time, even though she is fairly certain Linda’s mother doesn’t really like her. In fact, no one seems to like Chrissie very much; she’s bossy, often kicks people who talk back to her, and brags and lies in equal measure.

After she kills the little boy, Chrissie has a “belly-fizzing feeling [like when she] remembered a delicious secret, like sherbet exploding in [her] guts.” Somehow the secret sustains her and provides opportunities for her to receive the attention she so desperately craves. Besides, Chrissie is fairly certain the little boy will come back from the dead: Jesus did and so does her father, who disappears and reappears at random intervals.

The novel also features an adult Chrissie, now going by the name Julia. She and her young daughter, Molly, live by a strict set of rules.

…back to the apartment at three forty-five, […] a snack at four, […] read the reading book at four-thirty, […] watched Blue Peter at five, […] had tea at five-thirty.

Julie’s life is structured because bad things happen “when [she] stopped concentrating.”

Julia has already had to move and change her name once because people are not kind when they find out who she is and what she has done. When she starts getting phone calls, she thinks her life is going to be upended again. And when Molly accidentally breaks her wrist, Julia is sure that the authorities are going to take her daughter away from her. That sends her on a journey back into her past.

The First Day of Spring is suspenseful, heart-breaking and hopeful, and I highly recommend it.

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.

None of This is True – Lisa Jewell

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Lisa Jewell’s most recent novel, None of This is True, could have been ripped straight from the true-crime headlines. And just like a true-crime podcast or documentary, Jewell’s book is totally binge-able.

Alix Summer, a successful podcaster who lives a polished life with her successful husband, Nathan, and her two young children in a tony London neighbourhood, meets Josie Fair, a part-time seamstress with two adult children and a husband, Walter, who is old enough to be her father. Their meet cute happens at a local gastropub, not the sort of place Josie would normally be dining, but it is her 45th birthday and she wanted, for once, to do something special. Turns out, it is also Alix’s 45th birthday.

This incidental meeting seems momentous to Josie, so when she accidentally on purpose runs into Alix again she confesses that she doesn’t “break free of the past now, then when will [she]?” She wants to tell her story and Alix is looking for another project. Josie and her messed up life seems like the answer to her creative prayers.

It doesn’t take long for Josie to start becoming full-on obsessed with Alix’s house and the casual elegance of her life. She asks Alix to help her buy new clothes. She takes small, inconsequential things from the Summers’ home, which she visits regularly because Alix’s podcast studio is in the back garden. She captivates Alix with the story her relationship with Walter, which began when she was 13 and he was 42, and of a daughter who ran off at 16. Another daughter, Erin, never comes out of her bedroom. It is clear that Josie’s life is messed up.

Or is it?

As with all of Jewell’s really great books – you really won’t know what to believe…or in this case – who to believe. The book’s structure is comprised of podcast recordings, Netflix documentary transcripts and chapters told from both Josie and Alix’s point of view. It makes for easy reading; I read it in two days. Like the media it mimics, None of This is True is easily consumable, a big bowl of buttered popcorn that’s fun to eat but not exactly life-sustaining.

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.

Strange Sally Diamond – Liz Nugent

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Sally Diamond’s father always told her that when he died that she should put him out with the trash, so

When the time came, on Wednesday, 29th November 2017, I followed his instructions. He was small and frail and eighty-two years old by then, so it was easy to get him into one large garden garbage bag.

The first fifty pages of Liz Nugent’s novel Strange Sally Diamond flew by. I was wholly invested in Sally’s story and her peculiar personality. Her awkward interactions with the people who live in her small Irish town, the fact that she seemed so out of step with the world, her appearance – all of these things would have been interesting enough on their own. But there is so much more to her story and when a teddy bear arrives in the mail from New Zealand, Sally’s insular life explodes. Although she has always known that she was adopted, she didn’t know any of the details of the origins of her birth. Her father’s death and the arrival of this teddy bear exposes her dark past.

I don’t want to spoil the story – hers, or that of the novel’s secondary narrator, Peter – so it’s hard to really talk about without giving things away. In any case, my problems aren’t with the story itself, which certainly had lots of potential. And my problem wasn’t with Sally, either. Despite her idiosyncrasies, I quite liked her. And my problem wasn’t even with the writing itself, which was straightforward and easy to read.

Strange Sally Diamond is another case of a book that tells you things, sometimes at convenient times. The truth of Sally’s pre-adoption life is revealed to her in a series of letters. Despite Sally’s warm feelings about her father, his less-than-altruistic motives are revealed to us by her aunt, her mother’s sister. As Sally becomes less a fish out of water and more of an active member in her community, all too quickly (given the 40 years of isolation and trauma) she has a circle of friends, a social life, people looking out for her. I mean, I guess we can believe that the reason she never had any of those things is because her father was over-protective…

All the pieces fit neatly into place and perhaps that is the sign of a well-crafted novel, but for me, it was just okay.