Author

Henrietta Thornton

Review

The Grey Wolf

by Henrietta Thornton

Quebec Detective Inspector Armand Gamache, so beloved of readers after 18 outings that showcase his fierce love for his family and his quiet investigative smarts, here finds himself far from his village of Three Pines, both in his investigation and emotionally. After he accepts a mysterious invitation to meet someone at a Montreal Cafe and the rendezvous ends in a terrorist attack, Gamache must hit the road to find out who his coffee date was and why he was seemingly murdered. Clues are few and Armand can’t trust his department as there are signs of an informant, but the lives of millions of Canadians are on the line. There’s a rich religious element here, with Gamache traveling to monasteries and even having a Vatican nun grilled as to her past. This book contains a more frightening thriller element than in some of Penny’s previous tales. But as the author’s acknowledgment so poignantly states, “Home. That’s really what the books are about.” Readers will happily follow Gamache back there to his beloved Reine-Marie and their now overflowing brood. A tense, satisfying tale.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Seraphim

by Henrietta Thornton

Every book has words, is comprised of words, but this book is about words. The ones that 16-year-old Robert Johnson used when his charter school teachers, who treat optimism as a kind of hygiene, told him he should confess to the murder of Lillie Scott, a hero of the rebuilding of New Orleans, who hired at her restaurant those down on their luck. The words the boy can’t or won’t say about what really happened, which barely matters anyway since the system will drag him in now or later, formed as it is of “strange empty words in the shape of language but without any meaning.” And the words that are unsaid as Lillie “[lies] down in the street so noiselessly, slow like a sheet in the breeze flutters to the ground.” Shoulder to the wheel of all this is Ben Alder, a former rabbinical student and son of a linguist, and his dude of dudes, Grand Old Dude of York, Mayor Van Dude of Dudetown, Boris Pasternak. These public defenders ask for every case involving a child, and Ben becomes Robert’s lawyer. All the boy wants is to talk to his dad. But Ben doesn’t tell him that he’s also representing the father, who, unknown to the boy, is in the same jail. Ben has “no questions that are small enough for the courtroom,” but still wrangles his fear and his clients through the morass to a satisfying outcome, one that will leave readers with large questions of their own, mainly about this country’s treatment of Black boys. Debut novelist Perry, a former New Orleans public defender, has wonderfully distilled a world of hurt onto the page.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

I Dreamed of Falling

by Henrietta Thornton

This novel of small-town heartbreak, grittily emotional in a way that’s reminiscent of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, introduces the lovably flawed Grady family: Roman, his partner, Ashley; their son, Mason; Roman’s mom, Tara; and her partner, John. They all barely hold it together financially and every other way in their part-time Airbnb in upstate New York. The house needs extensive repairs, but who has the money? Instead they’re muddling along, with Tara mainly raising Mason and his parents resenting her takeover. Then Roman finds Ashley dead on the riverbank behind her drug-addict friend’s house. As word gets out that Ashley had a bag of pills in her pocket, everyone in town assumes it was an overdose. But Roman wants real answers, and his digging creates a realistic, relatable saga of poverty mixed with love and bad choices. All the characters here are memorable, but four-year-old Mason and his bottomless, bewildered grief are particularly well drawn. A family and a story to remember.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Perfect Sister

by Henrietta Thornton

I love the kind of us-and-them stories set in places like the Hamptons, and the latest by DeCarolis (The Guilty Husband, Deadly Little Lies) is packed with twists. Alex and Maddie Walker are sisters who look so alike and are so close in age that people think they’re twins. Their mother referred to them that way, a glimpse of love amid her boozy, selfish ways. Now Mom’s long gone, and the sisters, who are now in their twenties, are distant after an argument that followed her funeral. But when Alex doesn’t hear from Maddie, who has been in the Hamptons for the summer, she heads to that tony town to get to the bottom of things. What she finds is very strange—Maddie had been living at one of the swankiest houses in the area, Blackwell Manor. Alex stays with the Blackwells herself, keeping a safe distance from their rich but miserable lives—until things take a turn when another young woman goes missing. As Alex becomes a thorn in the police’s side, she uncovers secrets about the present and the distant past. Dark sexual themes feature amid the absorbing suburban suspense that’s told from multiple, tantalizing viewpoints.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Bedlam Cadaver

by Henrietta Thornton

Harry Hunt, former right hand to Robert Hooke, from whom he’s now estranged, is back in his third 17th-century London mystery, after The Bloodless Boy and The Poison Machine. He’s still immersed in a life of the mind and courting Hooke’’s daughter, Grace. Otherwise, though, his circumstances have changed markedly, with new prosperity sitting increasingly uncomfortably on him as events, and a surprising relationship, remind him where his roots lie. He’s also reminded from whence he came when the King takes him down a peg during an investigation (“Your use to me outweighs your impertinence”). The case starts when Harry attends the planned dissection of the corpse of a suicide from Bethlehem Hospital, the notorious insitution nicknamed Bedlam, which is halted quickly when Harry sees that the cadaver is that of no Bedlam pauper but his neighbor. How her body got to a hospital where she wasn’t a patient is a puzzle. Adding to the horror, another woman shortly goes missing and Harry is charged. He’s soon on the run, offering Lloyd the opportunity to show what London in 1681 was like outside its gilded halls and to keep readers on edge as the law and other malevolent forces close in. With its rich language, gory details of an era that was an attack on the senses, tidbits on Popish vs. Protestant politics, and shocking facts about early medical training, this is another immersive winner from Lloyd.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Puzzle Box

by Henrietta Thornton

This sequel to Trussoni’s 2023 The Puzzle Master (my favorite book of all time!) finds savant Mike Brink once more faced with a puzzle that others have found unsolvable. This time his help is requested by the Japanese imperial family, who dispatch another puzzle genius, Sakura Nakamoto, to whisk him from New York to Tokyo. Mike is well known for his work creating puzzles and taking part in competitions in which participants recite the string of numbers that form pi, his synesthesia allowing the numbers to appear “as a scale of color at the edge of his vision.” These are the upsides of the accident that left him an affable genius. But there are drawbacks. He’s so far been unable to form any romantic relationship and struggles to understand himself. So when Sakura tells him that the beautiful Dragon Puzzle Box, a puzzle that’s uber-famous in Mike’s world, is available for him to try, and that it will help him to understand his gift, he jumps at it. This is no ordinary box—others who have tried to open it have had fingers amputated or been poisoned by the puzzle’s booby traps. Work on it takes Mike on thrilling journeys not only to fascinating Japanese locales but further into the recesses of his mind than he thought possible. Engrossed readers will happily make the trips with him. While you’re waiting for this wonderful follow-up, get The Puzzle Master and read our interview with Trussoni when that book was published.

0 comment
1 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Things Don’t Break on Their Own

by Henrietta Thornton

If you like a jaw-dropping twist, this is the book for you, and I mean the reaction literally: at one point in this great domestic drama, one character whispers a closing remark to another that literally made my mouth hang open. And that wasn’t the last surprise. The drama concerns a missing child, Laika Martenwood, whose English family’s treatment by the media after she’s gone will remind readers of the real-life McCann family, dragged through the tabloids after their daughter was snatched. The Martenwoods are more dysfunctional than even the tabloids say, though. The father is one of the most loathsome characters to come along in a while; his wife is so psychologically abused that she can’t leave and can’t protect her children from him; and daughters Willa and Laika are relentlessly mocked and bullied by the horrible man. As the book opens, we find Willa as an adult, barely hanging onto the life she’s cobbled together while agonizing over whether her sister is still alive, where she could be, and what happened to her all those years ago. Moving back and forth in time, Collins puts the media and family ties under a magnifying glass, in the process reminding readers that just as things don’t break on their own, they don’t have to stay broken.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Secrets of Rose Briar Hall

by Henrietta Thornton

Millie Turner is the envy of 1908 New York. She nabbed the catch of her season, marrying devastatingly handsome financier Charles Turner. They’ve moved to Oyster Bay, Long Island, and live in a house Millie inherited, which is now decorated too ostentatiously for her liking—there’s a taxidermied zebra!—but what Charles wants, Charles gets. Millie is nervously but happily hosting a lavish party when suddenly everything changes—she wakes up to a freezing, dark house, with the party over and the guests gone. Nobody will tell her what ’s happened, but she slowly learns that after a crime was committed at the party, she took a weeks-long “rest cure”—a drug-induced sleep prescribed at her husband’s wishes. Millie has had a terrible upset, they say, and since hysteria “can lead to immoral behavior [and] make you ungovernable,” there’s no time to waste: she must enter an institution. Thus begins Millie’s fight for her life. The first-person narrative, told from the young woman’s point of view, is both shocking and exciting, moving from grand ballrooms to flophouses and from shady business dealings to the honesty of pure love. A lengthy court battle will keep readers deliciously on edge in James’s (The Woman in the Castello, 2023) shocking and gripping drama.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Out-of-Town Lawyer

by Henrietta Thornton

This legal thriller’s title is reminiscent of The Lincoln Lawyer, and Rotstein’s ace storytelling will also bring vintage Grisham to mind. The lead character, Elvis Henderson, even lives out of a vehicle—the camper van that he parks outside the run-down motel where his coworker, Margaret Booth, stays while they defend the case that has Alabama rapt. Destiny Grace Harper is accused of murdering her twin babies, but not by any action she took. She didn’t save them because her strict Christian church doesn’t believe in medical treatment. When her babies were discovered to have a lethal condition in utero, one that could be reversed with a simple surgery, Destiny Grace ran away rather than succumb to the court-ordered procedure. Now Elvis is up against pro-life locals, his client’s refusal to cooperate in her own defense, and a judge that’s just as stubborn. Both his wily arguments and the prosecutors vigorous rebuttals are spellbinding enough, but the story also digs into the rot that’s sometimes behind nice-family facades and small-town politeness. With James Patterson a former co-author of Rotstein’s (in The Family Lawyer), this has a ready-made audience, but newcomers to Rotstein will soon want more too.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Article

Danielle Trussoni on The Puzzle Master

by Henrietta Thornton

The following interview was published in firstCLUE on June 8, 2023

June 13, 2023 will see the release of Danielle Trussoni’s The Puzzle Master, which, as I said in my review in our March 2 issue, is the best book I’ve ever read. I’m still recovering! Below, author Danielle Trussoni answers some questions about The Puzzle Master, her writing process, and her forthcoming work.—Henrietta Verma

Author photo copyright Leonardo Cendamo

With reviews, it’s hard to give away enough to engage readers but not provide any spoilers. Now I have the chance to see how you’ll tread the line! Please tell our readers about your book.

It’s true that it’s hard to give the flavor of a novel without giving away too much, but let me try.

The Puzzle Master is a contemporary thriller set in New York. We open as the protagonist, Mike Brink, an ingenious puzzle solver, arrives at a prison upstate. He’s been called there because an inmate—a woman named Jess Price, who’s been convicted of murder—has drawn a mysterious puzzle that has baffled her psychiatrist, and she believes Brink can solve it.

But when he meets the incarcerated woman, Brink is pulled into a mystery, one that revolves around an ancient prayer circle known as The God Puzzle. What he soon learns is that this prayer circle is very important to a very powerful man who will do anything to get it. Needless to say, Brink has gotten himself into something he wasn’t expecting!

The Puzzle Master centers on a character whose ability to make and solve extremely challenging puzzles started with a brain injury. You formed a fascinating character whose acquired savant syndrome is central to the plot, but without creating a Rain Man-like caricature. Can you tell us about writing the character of Mike Brink?

Mike Brink is the hero of the novel, and he’s really the lynchpin around which everything happens, both in terms of action and the larger philosophical point of the book.

What drew me to create him was, as you mentioned, Savant Syndrome, a medical condition in which a person develops new talents after a traumatic brain injury. Once I began reading about this syndrome, I was completely fascinated.

I learned that while it is rare, the abilities people develop are astonishing—being able to play classical music, being able to speak foreign languages, and—like Brink— astonishing mathematical and mnemonic abilities. Brink’s ability to solve puzzles is more than just a party trick. He needs to engage his brain in the process of solving puzzles. It’s almost like an addiction, and indeed, the same chemicals that are involved in addictive behaviors are involved in Brink’s puzzle solving (most prominently dopamine).

While I was fascinatedby this element of the brain, I felt very strongly that Brink is like all of us.

Our ability to think, perceive, and experience reality are such rich gifts, but we only fully understand a tiny fraction of what’s going on inside our heads.

Brink struggles with the fact that he’s got this nuclear brain power and is also someone who longs for human connection, something that his injury makes difficult.

I think that the character that emerges shows the struggle that all of us face when balancing the cerebral with the irrational, the material world with the spiritual, and the physical nature of being human with our need for love and connection.

Your book is uncanny in its ability to see inside readers and bring our fears and secret beliefs to the page. I’m almost afraid to ask, but how did you do that?

When I’m writing, I want to feel that I’m exploring strong emotions—fear, wonder, love, desire, awe. The characters I choose and the stories that most attract me act (in some ways) as vehicles for these feelings. It seems to me that if I feel something intense or inspiring about the story I’m writing, then readers will too. So I guess the answer to your question is: I explore my own fears and my own secret beliefs, and it resonates with readers.

On the Mysteries, Chills, and Thrills panel of Penguin Random House’s recent Book and Author Festival, you talked about visiting Will Shortz at his home. Can you tell us about visiting the real puzzle master?

When I began writing about Mike Brink, I knew that I needed to do some intensive research. I’m not a puzzle savant, and I’m actually quite bad at math.

So a friend introduced me to Will Shortz, the real puzzle master who is editor of the New York Times Games Page, and I asked him if he might be open to talking to me about his life. As it turned out, he invited me to his home and took me on a little tour of his puzzle library. There were puzzles everywhere!! Crosswords and books of number puzzles and antique puzzles. A first edition of the first book of crosswords ever published. It was amazing to see how someone who is totally immersed in the world of puzzles and conundrums lives and works. Meeting him was enormously helpful in making Mike Brink feel real. 

You also mentioned that you were in Japan researching your next book. Anything you can give away about that title?

I was in Japan in April doing research for the next Mike Brink novel. It’s called The Puzzle Box [it will be published on September 3, 2024], and in it we find Mike Brink invited to Japan to solve one of the world’s most elusive and difficult puzzle: The Dragon Puzzle Box.

This puzzle box was constructed in the 19th century by the emperor of Japan, and has since then been locked hut The treasure inside is valuable in ways that Brink could never have imagined and, like the puzzle in The Puzzle Master, opens up a dangerous situation for Brink.

What excites me most about this book is that I’m able to explore Brink’s character, and the repercussions of his abilities, more deeply, while also writing about Japan, a place I love. 

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail