Author

Henrietta Thornton

Review

A Whale of a Murder

by Henrietta Thornton

Taylor’s debut cozy hits all the beloved genre touchstones. There’s an offstage murder in a small town, baking, cats, a small business…cozy indeed! But the author adds a little spiciness to the relationships, making the book ideal for fans of the subgenre and those who love Taylor’s romantic-comedy What’s Not trilogy. The action takes place in Chatham Crossing, Massachusetts, where the self-proclaimed first lady is…well, that’s the subject of a friendly rivalry. Carole Duffy, the mayor’s wife, seems to have the most legal claim to the title. But if vivacity crowns the winner, the title would go to Venus Bixby, owner of a local vintage record and bake shop, Oldies and Goodies (home to cats Sonny and Cher and to Carole’s delicious cookies). Everyone who’s anyone is ready for Venus’s 50th birthday bash at the town’s big attraction, the Sofia Silva Whaling Museum, but the festivities grind to a halt when Venus falls over a distinct pair of orange platform shoes in the garden, shoes that are being worn by the dead owner of the museum’s gift shop. The sleuthing is on, with Venus, friends, and rivals excelling at small-town bitchiness even as suspects are ticked off the list. Watch for this fun first in a series, which comes with recipes and a playlist.

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Review

Blessed Water

by Henrietta Thornton

Perhaps only in New Orleans can there be a gay novice nun who is also a novice private detective and who offers up prayers like, “Hail Mary, share with me your divine vision, because I can’t see a fucking thing.” The nun in question is Sister Holiday, who teaches in a private school, runs a support group for survivors of Catholic Church sexual abuse, and on the side partners with a former cop to run Redemption Detective Agency. When the two hit the banks of the Mississippi to meet a new client, Holiday finds herself wading into the water to catch a body before it floats away. It’s her parish priest, and that awful discovery isn’t the last. Returning to school, the nun finds that another priest is missing. He seemed a kind young man, not one of the priests that Holiday loathes for their fake piety and fondness for their parishioners’ money. While a storm rages, Holiday must face the contradictions that are her life and life in New Orleans as well as help her brother and others face their demons, all while trying desperately to solve the mystery of the missing priest. Douaihy’s first in the series, Scorched Grace, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, among other accolades. Fans of that book, as well as all who love an irreverent and smart lead, will happily join Sister Holiday for her second outing.

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Review

The Five Year Lie

by Henrietta Thornton

When nasty boss Edward Cafferty hires his spoiled, beautiful daughter, Ariel, to work at Chime, the video-doorbell business he runs with his much calmer brother, the rest of the staff keeps back. That maniac’s daughter? No thank you. But one colleague, Drew, isn’t afraid, and before you can say digital privacy invasion, the two are falling hard for each other. Fast forward five years and Drew is long gone, having abandoned Ariel and the job, ending the affair through email. Ariel later found his obituary and it seemed that was that. She’s now raising the child he never knew he had and struggling…well, not financially, given that Chime is a household name, but to keep up with the ubermoms at school and to give her sweet son the happiest upbringing possible. Then the bombshell: a text from Drew asking her to meet, a message that leads to an upending of everything she thought she knew about the man and a dangerous journey to find out the truth and save her family. The marriage of surveillance technology and the legal system is closely examined here to thought provoking results, as are the effects of technology on our personal lives. Ariel is a character who readers will root hard for, and they’ll follow her narrow escapes until late into the night on a just-one-more-page quest to see her to safety. A satisfying rollercoaster.

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Review

Wordhunter

by Henrietta Thornton

Many of us remember an early teacher fondly, and for Maggie Moore it’s Ms. Barker, the seventh-grade teacher who taught Maggie to diagram sentences. Maggie’s now studying forensic linguistics—the kind of analysis that allows researchers to determine if Shakespeare was the real author of a given work—and is by far the best student in the program. She’s thrilled when Professor Ditmire invites her to be his research assistant and recommends her to the local police, whose broke department can hire only a student to uncover the author of vicious notes that are being left at crime scenes. Maggie is glad of the work: she’s facing graduation soon with no job prospects, and more importantly to her, she might now be able to get the police to investigate the disappearance of her best friend years before, a case they never took seriously. Grammar lovers and anyone who likes a quirky protagonist—Maggie’s no stereotypical nerd, she’s a foulmouthed, tattooed diner waitress who drinks way too much—will find Maggie’s sentence-diagramming habit and her brilliant mind fascinating while following her to a linguistic triumph. Sands’s other books are true crime, and fans of that genre who want a fictional readalike can do no better than picking up Wordhunter.

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Review

Miss Austen Investigates: The Hapless Milliner

by Henrietta Thornton

Jane Austen’s throngs of fans will adore this series starter that introduces the writer as a lively amateur sleuth; a treasured member of a large, loving family; and as a woman of her time—feisty but too often kept from her potential. The marriage market among Jane’s circle looms large, of course, with Jane hoping for a proposal any day from a young Irishman while those around her assess one another in terms of their potential as financial insurance. When an alliance is about to be announced by a local family, their façade of gentility is threatened when a young woman is found murdered in their home. Jane recognizes her as a milliner she’s bought from lately. The local magistrate seems content to blame “gypsies” for the crime, an accusation Jane disputes as no traveling people have been seen in the area lately, but she’s soon sorry when another is accused: her mentally disabled brother, George. It’s now up to our literary hero to find the real killer and bring George home. The large cast of characters here keeps things lively; there’s often humor too, both in Jane’s wry comments throughout and in her witty letters to her sister about the case’s progression.

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Review

What Have You Done?

by Henrietta Thornton

Lapena’s psychological thrillers never disappoint. In her latest, set in Fairhill, Vermont, a farmer investigating vultures over his field finds the dead body of a young woman. This kind of thing never happens in Fairhill, and when the horrified local police realize that the victim is a local teen, Diana Brewer, the town reels in shock and grief. “Trying to make sense of something that will never, ever make sense” are Diana’s bereft single mother, who worries others by telling them she still communicates with her daughter, and the young woman’s best friends, Riley and Kelly, who are determined to find the killer. But even in a small town, it’s not easy to figure out who could have done this awful thing, and readers will enjoy sleuthing along with the characters as suspects emerge, each with something dark to hide. Supernatural elements enter in several ways here, adding to the edginess and puzzlement. If you like Chris Bohjalian, this one’s for you, not just because of the Vermont setting but also the small-town drama.

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Review

One of Our Kind

by Henrietta Thornton

In many ways, Kingston and Jasmyne Williams are living their dream life. Their little boy, Kamau, is thriving. They have another baby on the way. And Kingston, or King, is making oodles of money in finance. But King is eager for a next step: moving them to Liberty, a controversial suburban Los Angeles community of very, very rich Black people that comes with all the trappings. A sumptuous spa—sorry, wellness center. Lavish homes with three living rooms each (one for everyday, one for company, and a den, of course). And an excellent school for Kamau where every teacher is Black and they won’t have to worry about him fitting in. From the moment she reluctantly agrees to this transformation of their lives, Jasmyn is nervous about abandoning her community and her belief in giving other Black people a hand up. And she’s right: Liberty turns out to be one sinister place, in ways readers will never guess and that will keep them on edge right up to the last gasp of surprise. Yoon’s first adult novel has some of the hallmarks of her YA background: a character who feels like it’s her against the world, a shifting sense of who can be trusted, and a feeling of not fitting in. This will be a great crossunder read for young adults as well as a hit with fans of Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl.

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Review

Smothermoss

by Henrietta Thornton

Alering’s striking, dark debut novel mixes magical realism with crime and dire poverty. Sheila, 17, and Angie, 12, are sisters living on the absolute edge in 1980s Appalachia. Their father is dead, their brother in prison, and they and their mother live with an elderly relative, growing vegetables and keeping rabbits for food. Sheila keeps her side of the room neat, Angie very much doesn’t, and the differences only begin there, with the most significant being in their dubious magical gifts: Sheila is burdened and chafed by a rope around her neck, visible only to her, that grows thicker and longer over time. Angie draws sinister tarot-type cards that she carries everywhere, with figures like “A creature made of root and sinew [with] a crooked crown of worms” that give her frighteningly accurate messages. Outside the squalor the girls live in are the hikers, whom they think of as impossibly rich, trekking the nearby Appalachian trail with their fancy equipment and cluelessness. When two of them are killed, Angie takes on the investigation, much to her sister’s exasperation. This is one of those novels whose setting and characters take the front seat—readers won’t soon forget Sheila and Angie and the lengths they go to to survive and find peace.

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Review

Good Half Gone.

by Henrietta Thornton

For me, the best kind of thriller is one with high emotional stakes, and this fits the bill, featuring a family that’s been torn apart by addiction and an unsolved crime. When they were 15, Iris and her twin sister, Piper, were tricked into meeting older boys, a tryst at which Piper was abducted. The police believed that Piper ran away, the trail went cold, and today lris is a bereft adult, living with her son and grandmother and still wondering what happened to her sister. The twins’ mother, an addict, gave up on finding Piper long ago. But, clinging to hope, Iris has landed an internship at Shoal Island Hospital, a facility in Seattle’s San Juan Islands whose sign has a space where the words “…for the Criminally Insane” used to be. Readers are gradually let in on who she’s there to meet, and along the way, flashbacks return to the time of the abduction as Iris sleuths and grieves in the present day. A closing twist adds fear and drama, but those are present in spades along the way too. This fast read will be a hit with those who enjoy a female-led thriller that features an at-first-powerless protagonist who must seize the reins.

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Review

The Last Note of Warning

by Henrietta Thornton

Fans of Schellman’s previous two books in this exciting series, Last Call at the Nightingale (2022) and The Last Drop of Hemlock (2023), will find this trilogy closer a satisfying end to the roller coaster of Vivian Kelly’s life as a seamstress by day, flapper at a queer-friendly speakeasy by night. Vivian now delivers dresses to her boss’s wealthy clients, waiting around mansions until the clients deign to join her for a last check on their new dresses’ fit. On one such visit, Vivian is invited by the gentleman of the house to sit a while and warm up, during which time he’s called away. She then finds him dead, and as she’s the only person around, she’s on the hook for the killing. She’s given a week to find the real killer, with the police seemingly aware that she probably didn’t do the crime but happy to have a handy suspect to charge. The tumultuous week forms the bulk of the book, and sees our hero display her signature moxie, smarts, and the love she hides for her family and her police-officer paramour, their relationship troubled by his family ties to the commissioner who’s happy to put Vivian away. Life among the haves and have nots of the Roaring Twenties is a heady setting and Vivian a character well worth getting to know—you can enjoy this without having read the previous two books, but do yourself a favor and add them to your library’s hold list anyway!

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