Tag Archives: popular fiction

Saltwater – Katy Hays

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Loads of people liked Katy Hays’ sundrenched (it takes place in Capri, which is pretty much the only thing I liked about it) thriller Saltwater. Told from multiple perspectives, it’s the story of a bunch of rich assholes behaving badly and maybe I’ve just had enough of that in RL to care very much about it happening on the page.

Helen Lingate is vacationing on Capri with her father, Richard, her Uncle Marcus and Aunt Naomi, her boyfriend, Teddy, and Marcus’ assistant (and Helen’s friend) Lorna. The Lingates return to the same villa every year to honour Helen’s mother Sarah’s accidental (but was it, though?) death 30 years prior.

Helen is trapped by her family’s wealth. She just wants to live her life, but she can’t. She is haunted by the family tragedy, has a relatively distant relationship with her father, and has never really made any friends until Lorna came into her life. Now the two women seem to be plotting some sort of “get-out-of-Dodge” scheme that will free them from the tangle of family obligations (Helen) and sleeping with rich old guys (Lorna). Just about the only good thing about Capri (other than, you know, the sun and endless drinking) is Ciro, the handsome son of the villa’s housekeeper, whom Helen has known and loved since she was a child.

Everyone has a secret in this book; I suppose that is what is meant to keep you turning the pages, but the problem is that I didn’t care about any of these people. Helen is 33, for God’s sake, and she is behaving as though she doesn’t have any agency at all. Seriously, I just wanted to give her a good shake. If this is all so unpalatable, just take Ciro and go. Hard to give up all that cash though. But even the cash isn’t what Helen thinks it is.

What motivates any of these people, beyond money, is hard to pinpoint. As Helen says “Money is my phantom limb. It was part of my body once. I know this because I feel its loss like an ambient current that runs up my spine, an occasional, sudden shock. Money is metabolic, a universal part of our constitution.” Um? What?

I didn’t enjoy this book, but I read it to the end because, y’know, there’s a part of me that wanted to know how it would all play out. There were a bunch of requisite twists near the end and while some readers were likely shocked and surprised, my reaction was more of the eye-roll variety. I found the writing choppy and repetitive and, like I said, it took me way longer to read this than I thought it would.

So, not for me, but I suspect lots of people would find it enjoyable.

The Wasp Trap – Mark Edwards

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I whipped through Mark Edwards’ thriller The Wasp Trap in a couple sittings (helped along by two storm days), but it wasn’t really because the book was anything particularly special.

Twenty-five years ago, Professor Sebastian Marlowe assembled his “revolutionaries”, six 20-somethings with particular skills, and invited them to come to Thornwood, a stately country manor, to develop a dating app based on years of his own research.

At the end of the summer, after a party-gone-wrong, the six were shipped off to their homes in various parts of England and with the exception of Theo and Georgina, who had fallen in love and subsequently married, they don’t speak to each other until after Marlow has died and Theo and Georgina invite them to a dinner party in their former employer’s honour.

This is one of those locked room mysteries where you are meant to be suspicious of everyone’s motives. The story is mostly told through Will’s eyes. He’d been hired to write the web site’s copy, so it makes sense that he’s the observant one, the one who tries to piece things together when things go sideways. Which they do.

Once all the gang’s back together, someone in the house turns out not to be who they said they were…well, more than one someone, actually. Suddenly, the revolutionaries find themselves unwilling participants in a deadly game of “tell me your secret”.

The Wasp Trap toggles between the summer at Thornwood and the present day and reveals to the reader that, Lily, the genius of the group was also working on a separate project, an app that could figure out whether or not someone is a psychopath. As Will notes when Lily broaches the idea

The genius. The lothario. The salesman. The affluent couple, the joker and the local girl. Finally me, the wordsmith, whose role was to write it all down.

If any of us were a psychopath, I already had a good idea who it would be.

This is one of those books that will appeal to a lot of readers. It’s fast-paced, there are clearly stakes, lots of twists and cliffhangers that will make you turn the pages. It was just okay for me, but that’s just me. I didn’t really care for any of the characters that much and I wasn’t a huge fan of the ending.

Mileage will definitely vary.

Deep Cuts – Holly Brickley

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I think your enjoyment of Holly Brickley’s debut novel Deep Cuts will very much depend on how much you love music…and not just in a casual way but in an all-consuming, possessive, nerdy way.

Percy and Joe meet at a campus bar in Berkeley in 2000. They are both students and peripherally known to each other “in that vague way you can know people in college, without ever having been introduced or had a conversation.”

Then “Sara Smile” comes on while they are both waiting for drinks and it kicks off a conversation about the difference between a perfect track and a perfect song. Apparently, there is a difference. Percy explains:

“A perfect song has stronger bones. Lyrics. Chords. Melody. It can be played differently, produced differently, and it will almost always be great. Take ‘Both Sides, Now,’ if you’ll excuse me being a girl in a bar talking about Joni Mitchell–any singer who doesn’t suck can cover that song and you’ll be drowning in goosebumps, right?

[…]

“Now, ‘Sara Smile’–can you imagine anyone besides Daryl Hall singing this, exactly as he sang it on this particular day?”

Joe is an aspiring musician and Percy a writer and their meet cute morphs into a decade long will they/won’t they, should they/shouldn’t they relationship. Joe has a girlfriend, Zoe, “a tasteful punk”. Joe describes their relationship to Percy as “a perfect track [because you] need the context–family, friends, our hometown.” Soon, the three are hanging out together, although it’s clear that Percy has a thing for Joe.

Joe asks for Percy’s advice about some of his music and Percy is nothing if she isn’t honest. She tells him his song “is over-written [and] kind of forced” but that his singing is “magical.” Joe comes to depend on this honesty as he starts to chase a professional musical career.

When Zoe and Joe break up and Zoe gives Percy her blessing to make her move, things are further complicated because Joe, it seems, doesn’t want to mess up this musical partnership the two have going. Thus the will they/won’t they. Their lives pull them in different directions after college, but they are besties (without the benefits) until one night at a wedding when they suddenly aren’t.

I enjoyed Deep Cuts well enough. I did find all the song references tedious, but that didn’t stop me from making a playlist. I found Joe and Percy sort of tedious, too, but only in that way many kids in their 20s are – especially as seen from the viewpoint of someone in their 60s. I suspect that had I read this book in my 20s, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy this. I loved the angst; I enjoyed some of the secondary characters. The dialogue felt authentic and so did the 20-something navel gazing.

Life itself provides some deep cuts of its own. Mistakes are made. Feelings are hurt. Friendships ebb and flow. By the end of the book I was trying to decide if Percy and Joe actually should or shouldn’t be together. They hurt each other, but they love each other, too. Like any great song, they are a sum of all their parts.

The Hollow Kind – Andy Davidson

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Body/cosmic/folk horror isn’t really my thing, I don’t think, but Andy Davidson’s The Hollow Kind is still an entertaining, albeit slow (until the last 50 or so pages) read.

Nellie and her young son, Max, have fled their lives and headed for Georgia, to the rural property left to her by her grandfather, August Redfern. Nellie’s husband, Wade, is abusive and Nellie was desperate to get away, so even though the property is dilapidated, Nellie is certain they can be quite happy there.

What Nellie doesn’t really understand is the property’s dark history, which began in 1917 when August, not a native southerner, meets George Baxter and then his daughter, Euphemia, who becomes August’s wife. Euphemia’s dowery is 1000 acres of woodland. George tells August:

Roots go deeper here than you ight imagine, August. Appease them and you’ll recoup your money soon enough. I promise you that. In these woods, there’s no end to the riches a man can now.

Unfortunately, August doesn’t know the half of it.

Davidson’s novel moves back and forth between Nellie and Max in 1989 and August and his young family in 1917-23. We are also privy to a short period of time that Nellie spent with her grandfather at Redfern Hill when she was a teenager, which I guess helps us to understand why he would have left the property to her. Although it is clearly obvious that the property is not quite right and any sane person would not even consider staying there, Nellie is between a rock and a hard place. She has no place else to go.

There is menace at every turn for Nellie and Max. Wade is still out there. George Baxter’s grandson, Lonnie, is desperate to get the property back and he is a nasty piece of work, and then there’s the house and property. The first sight of the house fills Max with dread.

…the old house rearing up before them has teeth, claws, is a thing alive. A dragon in the midst of a long slumber. It sees us. A fresh sweat springs out beneath his clothes. Above the roof, bats loose themselves like stones from slings.

The history of Redfern Hill is complicated and gruesome. It takes a long time to get where it’s going, but if you don’t mind the meandering pace, there’s lots to like about this book.

Atmosphere – Taylor Jenkins Reid

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I hope that my first read of 2026 is not an indication of how the rest of my reading year is going to go because Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel Atmosphere was just not for me. My first experience with Reid was Daisy Jones and the Six and I loved it. I was so sure that she was going to be a favourite author for me, and so I started with her backlist and read One True Loves and it was a no from me. Since it came before Daisy Jones though, I thought I would read something after, so I tried Malibu Rising. Also a no. I would not have picked up Atmosphere for that reason alone, but a book about lady astronauts was of zero interest to me anyway. Then it got selected for my book club.

Joan Goodwin has a “PhD focusing on the analysis of magnetic structures in the solar corona” but she is “spending her expertise teaching eighteen-year-olds the definition of a parsec.”

Vanessa Ford is an aeronautical engineer who is also a pilot. She is “tall and straight, her shoulders broad.” The first time Joan lays eyes on her, she thinks “That’s an astronaut.”

These two woman are astronaut candidates in 1979. Historically, Sally Ride was the first woman in space. She went to space in 1983. Fictionally, Joan and Vanessa count themselves among “The Six.”

“The Six” became part of NASA Astronaut Group 8, a selection of 35 candidates tapped to begin training at Johnson Space Center in Houston in 1978. And the women weren’t the only ones making history. The class of astronauts in training was also NASA’s first to include people of color — three African Americans and one Asian American.” – CNN

Joan and Vanessa become friends, and then more than friends, a relationship that they keep secret for a variety of reasons. I found the whole love story part of this book super cringey. You want me to believe that two women, smart enough to be tapped as astronauts, are sneaking around and having inane conversations about how the sky now makes sense because of the other person. I mean, you wanted to be an astronaut, right? You never wanted to know anything about the sky until you looked into the eyes of a beautiful astronomer? Yikes.

Beyond the cringe, I just found the writing pedestrian. Loads of people on the WWW were calling Atmosphere a six star read, a book that made them bawl their eyes out. It made me want to tear my hair out. I didn’t particularly care about any of these characters. Joan’s sister, Barbara, is selfish and miserable (until she finds a rich man). Barbara’s daughter, Frances, is precocious and meant to be a surrogate daughter for Joan because they are way closer than mother and daughter. Even that relationship felt inauthentic.

This one’s a dud.

Razorblade Tears – S.A. Cosby

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Razorblade Tears is my second book by S.A. Cosby (All the Sinners Bleed). It’s a straightforward revenge thriller that grabs you by the throat immediately and shakes the living daylights out of you until the end.

Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins have very little in common with each other except for the fact that Ike’s son, Isiah, fell in love with Buddy Lee’s son, Derek. Neither man had a solid relationship with their son for reasons that are more complicated than their sexual orientation. Ike spent several years in prison when Isiah was younger. Buddy Lee also spent time in prison. Ike has been out for a few years now, and has built a successful lawncare business; Buddy Lee lives in a rundown trailer and drinks too much. Ike is Black and married to his high school sweetheart; Buddy Lee is white and divorced.

Then their sons are murdered. And when it doesn’t look like the police intend to solve the crime, Ike and Buddy Lee join forces to find out what happened to them and make it right. And by make it right, I mean cause bodily harm to anyone involved.

It is often the case, and certainly true for Ike and Buddy Lee, that we only realize how much we love someone when they are gone. I mean, sure, these fathers loved their sons, but they also couldn’t abide the fact of their homosexuality. Their deaths stir up all sorts of unresolved feelings and also calls into question the validity of those feelings. Buddy Lee gets there a little quicker than Ike:

Derek was different. Whatever rot that lived in the roots of the Jenkins family tree had bypassed Derek. His son was so full of positive potential it had made him glow like a shooting star from the day he was born. He had accomplished more in his twenty-seven years than most of the entire Jenkins bloodline had in a generation.

Once the men start to ask questions about their sons, they find themselves in the crosshairs of a gang of bikers, and someone powerful further up the food chain. Ike and Buddy Lee are not without skills and they find themselves in some truly terrifying situations. Their partnership grows from wary colleagues to something like friendship as they take a wrecking ball to the mystery surrounding their sons’ deaths.

Razorblade Tears is violent, funny, heartfelt and a total page turner. It asks a lot of questions, not the least of which is what happens to a person who is not allowed to be their authentic selves. You will be rooting for these middle-aged men from start to finish.

We Used to Live Here – Marcus Kliewer

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Years ago, I started to watch the movie The Strangers and I couldn’t make it past the first twenty minutes. Totally creeped me out.

While I eventually did make it through the whole thing, I don’t think I’d ever be looking to repeat the experience. Except maybe in book form.

Marcus Kliewer’s novel We Used to Love Here began its life on Creepypasta. I have only had one other experience with a book with the same starting point: Pen Pal. Like that book, this one started off with a bang and ended with a bit of a whimper.

Eve and Charlie have recently purchased an old fixer-upper in a secluded location with the intent of either renovating or demolishing and rebuilding. Eve is home alone one evening when the doorbell rings. There’s a family on her doorstep and Eve concludes

All in all, they seemed the kind of brood that would cap a Sunday-morning sermon with brunch at Applebee’s. Eve was more than familiar with this crowd.

The father wants to know if he can bring his family in because he used to live in the house. Weird, right?

Eve is reluctant to let them in and so she plays the only card she has: she’ll check with her girlfriend because

The distant alarm bells of her subconscious rang out. She vaguely remembered hearing stories. Stories of strangers showing up at houses, claiming they had lived there once, asking to take a quick look around. Then, when the unsuspecting victims had let down their guard: robbery, torture, murder.

What starts as a relatively straightforward domestic thriller soon morphs into something completely unhinged. The family starts to seem less “off” and Eve starts to feel way more unreliable. And the house, yeah, the house is changing, too. “”The basement’s bigger that you’d think,”” Thomas tells Eve. “”Lots of nooks, crannies, places to hunker down.”” Similarly, the attic is labyrinthine. But this discovery, like the basement, is new to Eve – discovered only after the arrival of the family.

We Used to Live Here was certainly easy to read – but I found it sort of disjointed, especially as things went along. It wasn’t scary, although there were certainly some creepy moments. I didn’t finish it feeling satisfied, mostly because I wasn’t 100% sure I understood exactly what had happened. That may be my own fault rather than the book’s – so your mileage might vary.

Count My Lies – Sophie Stava

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Time is running out on my summer break; I head back to my classroom on August 25. So it’s back-to-back thrillers for me.

Sloane Caraway is a compulsive liar. Always has been from the time she was a kid and when her life (single mom, constant moves) didn’t suit her, she just made up a better version for herself. Now she’s in her early 30s living in a two bedroom apartment with her mom in Brooklyn, working as a nail technician. One day in the park, she rushes to the aid of a father whose daughter has been stung by a bee. She starts by telling the father, Jay Lockhart, that she’s a nurse. Then, she adeptly handles the crisis, earning the father’s gratitude. When he asks her name, she lies about that, too.

The first part of Sophie Stava’s debut, Count My Lies, follows Sloane as she finds herself pulled into the Lockhart’s orbit. Jay’s wife, Violet, is perfect and Sloane finds herself wanting to be like her. Their daughter, Harper, it turns out, is in need of a nanny and suddenly Sloane finds herself with a new job and, she hopes, a new friend.

But, of course, things are not as they seem. Sloane outs herself as unreliable from the get go, but about half way through, the book switches perspectives and we find ourselves seeing things from Violet’s point of view. It turns out, Violet is lying, too.

Count My Lies isn’t exactly original, but let’s face it — with so many domestic thrillers on the market these days, you’d be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t remind you of something else. I don’t think my issues with this book have anything to do with the plot, I mostly just didn’t care about the characters. I think we’re supposed to like Sloane and Violet, but I didn’t really understand what motivated either of them. Well, we’re told why Violet makes the choices she does, but none of it felt real. By the time we get to her part in the story, the narrative feels more like plot points being clicked together like Lego pieces.

As for Jay, he gets his own section of the book too, but generally he is a non-entity – just a dude who is “handsome in an obvious, teenage heartthrob sort of way.”

Look – if you don’t read a ton of thrillers, you would probably have a good time with this book. It was just okay for me.

Don’t Let Him In – Lisa Jewell

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Pretty much any book by British author Lisa Jewell is a guaranteed slump buster. While I haven’t always loved every book I’ve read (and I’ve read several: None of This is True, The Family Remains, The Night She Disappeared, Invisible Girl, The Family Upstairs, Watching You, I Found You, The Girls in the Garden), every single one of them has been an entertaining, fast-paced read. Jewell’s latest novel, Don’t Let Him In, is no exception.

Ash Swann’s life has taken a bit of a turn. Her father has recently died, she’s had a bit of trouble at work, and she’s moved back home to recover from both of these traumatic events. That’s when Nick Radcliffe enters her life– well, her mother’s life. He reaches out to the Swanns after her father’s death and before you can say “to good to be true” he has insinuated himself into their lives.

Martha and her husband Alistair live a quiet life with their three children. Martha has a thriving florist business, and Al has a busy job in the hospitality industry where “Sometimes he’s home all the time, other times they call him in at the last minute and he’s away for days.” Martha forgives him time and again because she never imagined that as a forty-four-year-old divorcee she’d meet someone like Al.

There’s a third voice in the book, this one belonging to a male character and set four years in the past. He’s very forthcoming about his marriage to an older woman, Tara, whose adult children disapproved of the union. Tara’s daughter, Emma,

doesn’t like me at all. Neither of Tara’s children does. I don’t care too much about that. I can’t say I particularly like them either. I don’t need to like them, and they don’t need to like me. The most important thing, the key to everything, is that my wife trusts me. And she does. Implicitly.

Careful readers will have no trouble figuring out how these three separate narratives and timelines connect. The fun in this story is really in watching women band together – spearheaded by Ash – to out a snake in the grass. Does it strain credulity? Yes. Did that matter? No. Don’t Let Him In is a fun time and I gobbled it up in just a couple sittings.

This Book Will Bury Me – Ashley Winstead

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On the plus side, Ashley Winstead’s latest novel This Book will Bury Me is a page turner. On the negative side, the book doesn’t hang together and I didn’t finish it feeling satisfied. This is the fourth book I have read by this author. I had similar feelings about her debut, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, and then I really liked The Last Housewife and Midnight is the Darkest Hour.

Janeway Sharp, a college student, receives horrible news: her father has died. She returns home to be with her mother and try to process this unexpected and devastating loss. She doesn’t quite know how to manage her grief and then one night she stumbles upon an online group of armchair true crime detectives and gets sucked down the rabbit hole.

Soon she is helping a small group of people (Mistress, Citizen, Lightly, and Goku) solve a murder, an activity that provides both satisfaction and distraction. Jane earns the title of “savant” because she can apparently see things/details that others miss. That’s lucky for her, I guess.

When a terrible crime takes place in Idaho, the group immediately jumps on it, eventually deciding to meet up there so they can be boots on the ground. Lightly, a former cop, has a connection in the FBI and suddenly they find themselves special consultants. If Idaho seems like a very specific place for a murder, that’s because this case is essentially the Idaho college murders which took the lives of four students and for which Bryan Kohberger was recently sentenced to life without parole.

Suddenly Jane finds herself sharing a house with people she had only known online and they become a family of sorts — just a family with a shared true crime obsession. They follow the clues, turn over rocks, and insinuate themselves into the lives of people connected to the case. All of this is ethically grey, of course, but Jane isn’t so naive as to not realize it is. Still, she’s determined to find out what happened.

The book is not without its controversy because of its similarity to the Idaho murders. All of this makes for a quick narrative and I didn’t really have a problem with it. My issues had more to do with the subplot of Jane’s father. Jane decides to do some digging, to find out about the person she felt the closest to, but whom she doesn’t feel she knows anything about. There were some things about her father that were revealed that didn’t really go anywhere and felt more like a distraction than a meaningful part of the novel’s narrative.

I also questioned some of the things that happened at the end of the book, as the narrative wrapped up. It seemed sort of implausible to me and left me feeling sort of meh about the whole thing when all was said and done.

Still, for anyone who has ever found a community online, or true crime junkies – you’d probably enjoy this book.