Tag Archives: popular fiction

False Witness – Karin Slaughter

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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.

In Five Years – Rebecca Serle

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I don’t think that I got the book I thought I was going to be getting with Rebecca Serle’s novel In Five Years. That’s not the fault of the book.

Dannie Kohan is living her best life as a lawyer in NYC. She has a fabulous apartment, a fabulous boyfriend and a bestie, Bella, who completes the fabulous circle of her life. One morning, after David proposes, she wakes up in a bed that is not hers with a man who is not David. It would seem five years have passed, but Dannie doesn’t remember any of it. When she wakes up, her world seems to have righted itself again.

Then, Bella introduces Dannie to her boyfriend, and it’s the hunky dude from Dannie’s dream. What does it all mean?

It would be a mistake to think that In Five Years is a romance in the traditional sense, and honestly, that’s what I thought I was going to get. Nevertheless, it is a love story.

Bella and I have been best friends since we were seven years old. Me, Nice Jewish Girl from the Main Line of Philadelphia. Her, French-Italian Princess whose parents threw her a thirteenth party big enough to stop any bat mitzvah in its tracks. Bella is spoiled, mercurial, and more than a little bit magical. It’s not just me. Everywhere she goes people fall at her feet. She is the easiest to love, and gives love freely. But she’s fragile, too. A membrane of skin stretches so thinly over her emotions it’s always threatening to burst.

So, these two women love each other and anyone who has a bestie will certainly relate to their friendship. But like any love story, it’s not all smooth sailing. I wish I could say it was as simple as Dannie’s dream and then meeting her dream guy in the flesh. But Serle goes a different route and your appetite for the story she tells will depend on whether or not you have a tolerance for …well, no spoilers.

I liked One Italian Summer better.

Girl, 11 – Amy Suiter Clarke

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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.

Yesteryear – Caro Claire Burke

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It’s been a couple of weeks since I finished Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, Yesteryear, but life has been very busy as it always is at the end of the school year. Exams are over now, though, and all the marking is done so once prom and grad are over and done with, it’s just a coast to the end of the year and a whole summer of reading on my deck.

I probably needed some time to sit with Yesteryear anyway. A couple of the young teachers that I work with were both raving about it, couldn’t put it down, and so I moved it up the tbr pile. My feelings are more ambivalent than theirs.

Natalie Heller Mills lives in a beautiful restored farmhouse “nestled in the rolling divots between two mountain ranges in Idaho.”

She and her husband, Caleb, are parents to five children and Natalie is pregnant with baby number six. They are living the American Dream. But it’s a curated dream because Natalie is a social media influencer. Her stock and trade is selling her lifestyle to over a million followers. That’s a lifestyle that takes a lot of work.

Through the camera’s discerning eye, the cooking space was perfectly cluttered: a half-filled mason jar of water here, a flour spill there, a few forgotten flower stems strewn across a worn-looking cutting board. It looked like a space where a mother worked; like a kitchen in the real world, only obviously better than anything the real world had to offer.

It takes a lot of effort to sell the dream Natalie is selling. She needs help to do, but she never shows the help because Natalie “wouldn’t be able to forgive [herself] if [her] social media account ended up compromising them in any way.”

Yesteryear is very timely in that it captures the current juggernaut that is tradwives. Natalie is a devout Christian (but is she?) who bakes sourdough bread, homeschools her children and eschews the modern world in favour of the world she has created. She is definitely the brains behind the operation – as readers will come to understand when they read about her upbringing, her time away at college and her decision to marry Caleb, “the youngest of five boys, the runt of the litter in an American dynasty.”

But then one morning Natalie wakes up in an unfamiliar room under an unfamiliar blanket. When she makes her way to the kitchen she discovers her family, her children but not her children “all wearing raggedy-looking clothes that remind [her] of a pioneer reenactment.” Her husband’s “eyes are not [her] husband’s eyes. This man’s eyes are black and cold and dead.” What in the actual heck is going on? Is she on some weird reality television show?Is she actually expected to live the life she sells online?

When I think about trad wives, I think about Nara Smith.

Back when I used to have Instagram I would sometimes watch her videos and laugh – her voice, the ridiculous outfits, making Froot Loops and Fruit Rollups from scratch because her kids wanted to eat them. But, she’s coining it and is clearly not a dumb woman. She has at least four kids and is 25, so she definitely fits the mold. She and her husband, Lucky Blue, are both models and Mormon. I suspect Natalie isn’t quite as glamorous as Nara, but you get the idea.

I find trad wives fascinating and terrifying, but they aren’t a new phenomenon. Remember The Stepford Wives?

Yesteryear has a great premise and it’s a timely novel and it’s well written. Natalie is a character you will love to hate because she is self-involved and fake. But I also felt some sympathy for her, although maybe I wasn’t supposed to. But I didn’t love the book. I found it too long and the reveal was sort of unbelievable for a variety of reasons that would be spoilery to talk about. I think the book does offer some pointed commentary about motherhood, fame, the patriarchy, misogyny, influencer culture and so there’s certainly lots to talk about. It was just okay for me.

White Lies – Lucy Dawson

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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.

American Fantasy – Emma Straub

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I was in my later 30s before I discovered what fandom was, although in retrospect, I have always been a fan girl. I was the teenager who bought Tigerbeat magazine and spent hours making scrapbooks featuring whatever celebrity I thought was cute at the time: Davy Jones, David Cassidy, Robby Benson, Jan-Michael Vincent, Richard Gere and then David Boreanaz, who introduced me via my deep and abiding love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer to fandom proper by way of message boards and fanfiction and, eventually, LiveJournal, where I happily spent a good decade of my life.

At school, my students know me as the teacher obsessed with Ryan Gosling and over the years they have added to a huge wall of photos and other stuff devoted to the superior Canadian Ryan. (see above)

Emma Straub’s (This Time Tomorrow) latest novel American Fantasy is definitely relatable to me. This is the story of 50-year-old Annie who is on a four day cruise, a trip she was supposed to take with her sister, Katherine, who broke her leg and couldn’t come. This is a special cruise because Boy Talk will be on the ship along with 2000 woman (and a smattering of long-suffering husbands and some gay dudes) known as Talkers, uber fans of Boy Talk who have “sold millions of records. Millions. More records than artists today even imagine selling.”

But that was then; this is now. Now Boy Talk are middle aged men (and their fans are middle aged, too.) Sarah, the assistant tasked with making sure the band is looked after, and that their legions of fans have a fabulous holiday, describes the band to one of her new employees, Tyler:

It’s Shawn and Keith Fiore; they’re brothers. Shawn’s the de facto leader, I’d say, you’ll see what I mean. Intense. Keith is the nicest one. Corey West, who you’ll probably recognize from TV, et cetera. Scotty Sanchez and Terrance Campbell. Scotty is the life of the party, a sweetheart; Terrance is kind of a weirdo.

Annie is relatively ambivalent about the whole cruise, but her sister insisted that she go and life hasn’t been great for her recently. Newly divorced and with her daughter out living her own life, she feels a bit adrift, so why not go and see these boys (men!) who adorned her bedroom walls as a teenager. She never actually expects to have any fun, but soon enough fun is exactly what she is having.

The novel’s perspective shifts between Annie’s, Sarah’s and Keith Fiore’s, who is feeling increasingly isolated and out of sorts. His own marriage is on the rocks and, frankly, life hasn’t been that great. He does, though, understand which side his bread is buttered on. The women on this cruise were “crammed together like fish in a tin, and they were paying to do it. They were paying for Keith’s entire life.”

For four days, the Talkers, Annie included, drift through a variety of photo ops and mini concerts all designed to give the fans an up-close (but not too close) and personal (but not too personal) experience with the band. The lives of these three main characters and a whole list of secondary characters twine together in unexpected ways.

In many ways, this novel made me feel seen. In the early 90s, while I was living in England, I got the opportunity to see David Cassidy in Blood Brothers in the West End. I wrote about meeting him at the stage door in my review of the novel I Think I Love You.

My time in the Buffy fandom was so important to me. When I was in my early 40s, David Boreanaz came to New Brunswick and made a film called These Girls. I got to meet him.

I cried for about three solid hours after this picture was taken.

So lots and lots of this book was 100% relatable to me. And so was Annie’s personal journey of rediscovering herself post divorce as she “wondered if being alone was better or worse than being unhappy. Some days, she wasn’t sure.”

American Fantasy didn’t pack the emotional punch for me that This Time Tomorrow did, but I found it interesting, entertaining, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny and definitely made me want to dig out my Robby Benson scrapbooks. Yes, I still have them.

After Everything You Did – Stephanie Snowden

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Reeta wakes up from a coma, handcuffed to a hospital bed. She doesn’t know how she got there; she doesn’t know her last name; she doesn’t remember anything about where she came from. And she definitely doesn’t remember committing the horrific crimes for which she is accused.

Inside she felt hollow. No personality lingered, no feeling of happiness or stress or calm or anger filled the void. She felt only weakness. She tried to access the feeling of hate or fury that would surely drive someone to do these things, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t find a malevolent fascination with the macabre, or a perverted desire for blood and gore. She rooted deep into her absent character and could come up with nothing but empty space.

Reeta is accused of murdering two young women who look like her and there are two more missing girls. The FBI know for a fact that it’s her, even though these days the evidence against her might be considered circumstantial at best. But it’s 1966, not 2026. Desperate to figure out who she is, Reeta reaches out to Washington Post reporter Carol Joyce hoping the reporter will help. All Reeta has to go on is the photograph Agent Willow gave to her. Reeta knows the man in the photo is her father.

Carol knows the man in the photo is connected to Pine Ranch, a plantation house turn religious homestead aka cult, led by the charismatic Jeb. But information about Jeb and the cult is meted out at a snail’s pace (and too bad because that was the most interesting part of this story).

I was hoping After Everything You Did was going to be a quick page turner, but it wasn’t. No quick internet searches available to speed things along, sadly. No forensics to clear up any lingering confusion. At 350 pages, it just took a dog’s age to get anywhere and when the twist finally came (and judging from the reaction on Goodreads, it was a shocker to lots of readers), I found myself just sort of weary from all the times characters swallowed thickly.

Just okay for me.

Twice – Mitch Albom

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Never in a million years would I read a book by Mitch Albom and then Twice was chosen for our March book club. Where did my aversion come from, I wonder, because I know nothing about him. I mean, everyone and their dog has heard of Tuesdays with Morrie, reportedly one of the best-selling memoirs of all time. It’s a book that many teachers use in their classrooms at school, but I never have. I have never seen the movie, either. Never had any interest.

Twice is the story of Alfie Logan who discovers, age eight, that he has a unique ability to relive events over again. He uses it for the first time when his mother dies. Despite being told to sit with her while his father runs to the store, Alfie goes out to the soccer field. When he returns home, his mother is gone. The next morning, he wakes up to discover that she is still alive; essentially he has been given a do-over. During this second chance encounter, his mother tells him that “This is something [he’s] going to be able to do the rest of [his] life.” But she cautions him: “But it won’t fix everything, Alfie. The second time won’t always be better than the first.” But reliving this moment doesn’t save Alfie’s mom because, as he discovers, he

can’t change mortality. If someone’s time is up, it’s up. I can travel back to before the death takes place. I can alter how I experience it. But it’s still going to happen. Nothing I can do to stop it.

Can I say it was better, rewinding my mom’s departure? I don’t know. The first time, I left the house and returned motherless. The second time, I stood witness as she departed this world. You tell me.

Thus begins Alfie’s long life of second chances. As expected, in the beginning he uses this gift to save face, to meet girls, to excel at school. He is reunited with Princess, the girl he met when they were both children in Africa (Alfie’s mother was a missionary), and he redoes a few days in order to win her affection.

The story is told across the table from Bahamian casino detective LaPorta, who has nabbed Alfie for winning two million bucks at the roulette table. Surely he’s cheated. Alfie insists that LaPlant will understand everything once he reads this journal, which is addressed to ‘Boss’ (I was thinking God because there is a Christian undercurrent running through this book).

It was storming on the morning I picked up this book. I knew I had to read it before our meeting which was only a handful of days away. I flew through it in about three hours. It was easy to read because a wordsmith Albom is not. The book purports to be about the choices we make and how those choices shape us and our lives, but the structure of the novel and its saccharine dénouement made it mostly unpalatable for me.

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.