Tag Archives: popular fiction

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.

Mad Honey – Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan

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Although I have read several books by Jodi Picoult (The Pact, Nineteen Minutes, The Tenth Circle, My Sister’s Keeper), I read them pre-2007, which is when I started this blog. I loved The Pact, but I remember feeling manipulated by My Sister’s Keeper, which is probably when I stopped reading her. I had never heard of Jennifer Finney Boylan. I can’t really tell you why I picked up Mad Honey, but I can tell you that I loved it.

This is the story of Olivia, who lives with her teenaged son, Asher, a star hockey player, in the house she grew up in in rural New Hampshire. She’d left her life as the wife of a cardiothoracic surgeon when Asher was six, well, she’d fled her life, really, because her ex was abusive. Now she does what her father did before her: she is a beekeeper. There’s loads of interesting things about beekeeping in this book.

This is also the story of Lily, who has recently moved to this same small town with her single mother, Ava. Lily is beautiful and fragile and shy, but when she and Asher meet, through Asher’s childhood bestie, Maya, something clicks and the two are soon inseparable.

This novel is told from these two perspectives and it is really a story about love: the love a mother has for their child, romantic love and self love. It is also a story about secrets, the ones we keep from others, but the truths we keep from ourselves, too. It is also a page-turning courtroom drama because– this is not a spoiler; it is revealed in the blurb– at the end of the first chapter we learn that Lily is dead.

The story toggles back and forth to the beginning of Lily and Asher’s relationship, to their growing feelings for each other (as seen through Lily’s eyes, but also what is witnessed by Olivia), but also reaches further back to provide some insight into how Lily and her mother ended up in New Hampshire. Olivia also reflects on her marriage to Braden, the giddy beginning and the incident that finally caused her, after many other incidents, to flee. She and Asher are close, and so when he is charged with Lily’s murder there is no question of believing he is innocent. But then: maybe Asher has something of his father in him after all.

There is a plot twist in this book that I did not see coming — although I probably should have since Picoult is very much known for her topicality. Anyway, it was a surprise and it definitely added a whole new layer to this story. These characters felt real to me and their struggles also felt nuanced and authentic. I was wholly invested in the outcome of the trial and I absolutely could not wait to get back to the book after I set it down. Mad Honey is provocative, thoughtful, and timely.

If you have never read Picoult before this would be a great place to start, and if you’ve read her but, like me, given her a break, I highly recommend this one.

The Wedding People – Alison Espach

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Phoebe’s life has fallen apart and one last kick to her heart is the final straw, so she books a one way flight to Newport, Rhode Island and makes a reservation to stay at Cornwall Inn. Just a one night stay because Phoebe intends on killing herself.

Phoebe and her husband Matt had always intended to shake up their vacations and come to this amazing hotel, but they always ended up defaulting to the same old same old, and then one day he just up and left her.

But now Phoebe stands before a nineteenth-century Newport hotel in an emerald silk dress, the only item in her closet she can honestly say she still loves, probably because it was the one thing she had never worn.

Phoebe isn’t expecting the hotel to be full, but it is. There’s a wedding and all the wedding people are here for the entire week leading up to the nuptials. When Phoebe meets the bride, Lila, in the elevator, she blurts out that she intends to kill herself in an attempt to explain to Lila that she is not, in fact, one of the guests.

Alison Espach’s novel The Wedding People is really a book about connections and how sometimes a random and seemingly inconsequential meeting can change the trajectory of your life. Although Phoebe is clearly in emotional pain, she recognizes it in others.

…Phoebe is starting to understand that on some nights, Lila is probably the loneliest girl in the world, just like Phoebe. And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person

It will be no surprise that Phoebe does not, in fact, kill herself. Instead she finds herself embroiled in the wedding drama, propositioning the wrong man, standing in as the maid of honour, and working through her own trauma. The book is funny, sentimental, and life-affirming because as Phoebe starts to remind herself “I am here.”

Beats the alternative.

The Paris Apartment – Lucy Foley

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Jess needs to get out of Dodge (Dodge being London) and so she reaches out to her older half-brother Ben to see if she can come stay with him in Paris. But when she arrives in Paris, he’s not responding to her buzzing up to his flat, nor is he answering her calls. Jess is desperate because she’s broke, doesn’t speak the language, and doesn’t know anyone in Paris.

Lucy Foley’s novel The Paris Apartment has a similar structure to the only other Foley novel I’ve read The Guest List. In both novels, multiple characters have an opportunity to share their insight or, as is often the case, misdirect the reader. In The Paris Apartment, Jess encounters Sophie and her husband Jacques, the owners of the building who live in the penthouse. Then, there’s Nick, Ben’s university friend and the reason Ben was able to land such swanky digs. Mimi, an artist, lives with her roommate Camille; Antoine lives with his wife, Dominique, on the first floor. And then there’s the Concierge, an older woman who lives in a tiny cabin in the corner of the courtyard, tasked with keeping an eye on the building, and its inhabitants.

It becomes clear to Jess that these people are hiding something and her determination to find out what happened to Ben outweighs any fear she has for her safety. Ben is the only family she has and although a part of her resents his success (they share a mother, who died when they were quite young and both children were fostered out; Ben fared a little bit better than Jess and has had a more successful life), she also loves him.

There’s lots of misdirection and red herrings in Foley’s book and your level of enjoyment will depend on how much you care for Jess and finding out what exactly happened in the Paris apartment. The story is okay, albeit a little slow, particularly at the beginning. If you haven’t read a lot of this type of story before, this would be an okay place to start. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.

Believe Me – JP Delaney

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Claire Wright wants to be an actress and that’s why she’s moved from the UK to NYC where she makes ends meet by working for a lawyer who is trying to catch husbands who cheat on their wives. Claire is the lure and she’s damn good at it; she can be whoever you want her to be.

Then she is tasked to entrap Patrick Fogler. His wife, Stella, seems overly concerned for Claire’s safety, telling Claire that Patrick “Is like no man you’ve ever met.”

Claire’s not worried though. When she “bumps” into Patrick at a bar she describes him as “Good looking, in a quiet, intellectual way.” He doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy who would cheat, but Claire acknowledges that the likable, charming guys “tend to be the ones who cheat most.”

Patrick, though, doesn’t take the bait. And that might have been the end of it, except that Stella turns up dead and Claire finds herself a suspect, which is how she comes to be in the crosshairs of Detective Frank Durban and Forensic Psychologist Kathryn Latham. They have a very special job for her. They think Patrick is responsible for Stella’s death, and perhaps a string of other murders, too, and they want Claire to infiltrate his life.

The set up for this book was terrific. I was wholly invested in Claire and the seedy world of depravity she suddenly finds herself in (although that doesn’t really go anywhere.) Somewhere in the middle of the book, though, things started to fall apart a little bit for me. And, then, I guess the ship rights itself towards the end. It’s not an altogether satisfying thriller because of all the red herrings and characters air dropped into the narrative to aid with the plot.

The novel seems to want the reader to “believe” and then spends all its effort in misdirecting us. I read a lot of thrillers, and this was okay.

I Died on a Tuesday – Jane Corry

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Janie White, 18, is just about to move to London to start a job in publishing when she is run down while biking home from the beach. “On the day I died, the sea was exceptionally flat,” she recalls. So, clearly not dead then. Twenty years later, an arrest is made in this horrific hit and run and the culprit appears to be pop sensation Robbie Manning. He surrenders without argument because “the past has finally caught up with him.”

Jane Corry’s novel I Died on a Tuesday is an overly long (465 pgs), overly complicated, not-very-well-written thriller. Besides these two narratives (well, Janie can’t speak anymore, but she can sing) we also hear from Vanessa, a widow who works at the local courthouse as a witness service volunteer, who comes into Janie and Robbie’s orbit through the trial.

Things might have been a little more palatable if Corry had focused on just one story, but everyone gets in on the action. For example, Vanessa’s marriage is harbouring a huge secret and her friend, Richard, a local judge (and whom she cleverly refers to as Judge) has a secret, and Janie’s mother went missing around the time she had her accident. But did she though? And Robbie’s rise to fame is suspicious. And all these threads, somehow – and mostly unbelievably – tie themselves into a neat little bow by the time we get to the end of the book. Some people might (and did) say that this book was full of twists. Honestly I just felt like yelling “squirrel” every time I turned the page.

None of these characters were remotely believable to me. None of their motives sufficiently explained their decisions. None of the dialogue felt real to me. It was all tell. I knew by about page 50 that I wasn’t going to like it, but I slogged through hoping that where the writing suffered, there might be a pay off in the plot. I will happily read a book with mediocre prose if the story is a banger.

Nothing to see here.

Broken Country – Clare Leslie Hall

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I am clearly more of a sucker for the hype than I originally thought. I watch a decent amount of BookTube and follow a few bookish accounts on Insta. (I ditched Facebook a few months ago, but haven’t abandoned this Meta dumpster fire product yet – mostly because I have found it less dominated by advertising.) I have been seeing Clare Leslie Hall’s book Broken Country lauded all over the place and, of course, it’s a Reese’s Book Club pick. (I love that Reese is such a bookworm and that she is turning these books into movies and series.) The clincher for me was the book had been compared to The Paper Palace and regular readers of this blog will know that that was my favourite book of 2021. (Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace, even blurbed Broken Country.)

It is 1968 and Frank and Beth are happily married, living a quiet but busy life on their farm in North Dorset. They have had some recent heartbreak, the loss of their son, Bobby, but they’re healing and they have each other and Frank’s younger brother, Jimmy, who is like a little brother to Beth.

In all the fantasies over the years of meeting Gabriel Wolfe again, driving his child and his dead dog home was never one of them.

So, who is this man who upsets the apple cart of Beth’s life? They’d met thirteen years before, when they were teenagers and Beth was out walking and ended up on private land owned by Gabriel’s wealthy family. Beth has heard of him through the small-town grapevine. He was “the famously handsome boy from the big house.” Of course he’s beautiful (they always are), but Beth also remarks that “He’s not my type at all.” (Yeah, totally believable.)

Their relationship is swift and intense and all-consuming, until it isn’t (for reasons I will let you discover on your own, but it’s pretty standard Romance 101 fare). After things end with Gabriel, Beth returns home and into the waiting arms of Frank, who has been carrying a torch for her since they were kids. They build a life together and it’s a life that Beth loves. Until Gabriel resurfaces at his family home, Meadowlands.

Look, Broken Country, was easy peasy to read. I finished it in a couple sittings. I am a sucker for anything angsty and when I started this book I was sure it was going to fill my angst cup to overflowing.

You can live a whole lifetime in a final moment. We are that boy and girl again with all of it ahead, a glory-stretch of light and wondrous beauty, of nights beneath the stars.

Broken Country starts with a murder trial, and so that propels the book along because it’s a while before you learn the circumstances of who and why. There are a couple twists you might not see coming. The writing is decent. The characters are all good people trying to make the best choices they can under the circumstances they are presented with. The issue is that I just didn’t understand the insta-love between Gabriel and Beth, like, at all. And truthfully, I wasn’t even really rooting for them. We are shown their relationship in flashbacks, but it wasn’t anything earth shattering. Same with Beth’s relationship with Frank. By all accounts, he’s a top-shelf guy. And he sticks by Beth even when some might say he shouldn’t. And then there’s Jimmy – whose reaction to business that is not his is, imho, over the top.

Lots of people have gushed about the inherent heartbreak in the story of these people, but I wasn’t moved. I could see all the moving parts, I was just never invested. I think loads of people will (and have) love this book. I don’t begrudge the time I spent with it at all. It was just okay for me.

Don’t Believe It – Charlie Donlea

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I’ve read a couple books recently that employ a podcast/documentary element (None of This is True, Listen for the Lie, The Favorites) and it’s definitely something that can add a little something something to a novel. In Charlie Donlea’s novel Don’t Believe It, Sidney Ryan is a documentary filmmaker whose last three projects have ended up exonerating people and Grace Sebold is hoping that Sidney can help overturn her conviction.

A decade before Grace and a group of friends arrived at Sugar Beach, St. Lucia, to celebrate the wedding of Daniel and Charlotte. It should have been a sun soaked holiday, but then Julian is found dead and just days later Grace is arrested for the crime. Incarcerated in a St. Lucian prison for the past ten years, her letters to Sidney have finally yielded the desired result and Sidney has agreed to take a look at the evidence.

Sidney decides to investigate and reveal what she finds week by week. Grace assures Sidney that is she is innocent, that the facts will bear that out. Circumstantially at least, it appears that all the signs point to Grace being the culprit, but there are some questions and soon Sidney begins to believe in Grace’s story. Forensics seem to agree.

Sidney talks to police, friends and family. She pores over evidence and consults experts. There’s an eleventh hour twist and all the requisite red herrings just to keep you guessing.

All of this should have been page turning stuff, but it really wasn’t. The ending introduces the idea of a secondary character investigating something else that is introduced in the the book, so I am not sure if this is meant to be the beginning of a new series, but I won’t be carrying on.

The Favorites – Layne Fargo

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In 1998, Canadian ice dancers Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz competed in the Nagano Olympics, finishing just off the podium in fourth place. I was wholly invested in them at the time; they were innovative and fun to watch.

Flash forward to 2018 and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir at the PyeongChang Olympics, where they capped off a long career with another Olympic gold. Even people who didn’t know anything about the sport rooted for this Canadian pair, and if you want to see why – just watch the video. It’s also interesting to watch the two videos back to back to see how far the sport has come.

So, that brings me to Layne Fargo’s novel The Favorites, a novel which drops the reader into the competitive, cutthroat world of competitive ice dancing. I have seen this book all over the place and so I bought it and read it and it was a ride.

Katarina “Kat” Shaw has only ever wanted one thing in her life – to be like two-time Olympian Sheila Lin. Well, she wants one other thing, actually: Heath Rocha. Kat and Heath have known each other since they were kids, when Heath, a foster child, came to live with the Shaws.

When the novel opens, they are sixteen and just about to head off to the National Championships. Kat’s parents are dead and she’s been left in the care of her older brother, Lee. I use the word ‘care’ loosely because Lee only really cares about getting high.

Anyway, Kat is a talented skater and Heath is a good partner because he won’t get in the way of what she really wants – which is to skate in the Olympics. The problem is they live in Illinois, have no money and little access to professional coaching, meaning that they don’t have the support necessary to make it all the way to the top. But then, they meet Sheila Lin and that changes the trajectory of their whole lives.

The Favorites draws some of its inspiration from Wuthering Heights, a novel I read a million years ago but which I credit for kick starting my love of stories featuring characters who shouldn’t necessarily be together but desperately belong together. I mean, I am not sure Kat and Heath deserve to be in the same company as Catherine and Heathcliff, but this book wants you to believe they do.

Look, I’m going to be straight up. I devoured this book. I couldn’t wait to come home and pick it back up at the end of the day. It’s an unapologetic soap opera covering many, many years and many, many skating competitions. Part of the narrative takes the form of clips from people talking about Kat and Heath and some of the events that happened to them as they chase their Olympic dream a la Daisy Jones and the Six; the rest of the book is Kat’s first person narration.

Objectively, it’s not a great book, in the sense that it’s not great literature. I felt like I was being told things to get me from one moment to the next and I never really felt the great passion between the two main characters because their love story was PG13, even as adults. The characters got older, but they didn’t act any different really. The book reads very YA, although it’s not. There’s lots of backstabbing and crying and miscommunication and gossip. The whole thing wraps up pretty tidily. It’s not unsatisfying, it’s just neat.

We stared at each other in the shadows, so close we were sharing breath. Later, we’d become world famous for that: stretching out the moment before a kiss until it was almost unbearable, until every member of the audience felt the quickening of our pulses, the pure want reflected in our eyes.

But that was choreography. This was real.

I might not have believed it by the end, but I skated along with them quite happily until their final bow. If there’s a limited series coming, I’m all in.