Author

Henrietta Thornton

Review

Fire Exit

by Henrietta Thornton

In his debut novel, prizewinning short-story author Talty (a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation) brings us to just outside the border of the Penobscot reservation in Maine. Charles Lamosway lives within sight of the reservation, also within sight of a house where his daughter, Ellie, lives. Most people, including Ellie, think that her mother’s husband is Ellie’s father. Charles knows “what it [is] like to feel invisible inside the great, great dream of being,” with Talty succeeding beautifully in portraying a man who’s cut off from his own life and from the world around him, even as he cares for his mother, who is slowly slipping into dementia—a situation that brings Charles and readers some moments of dark comedy—and faces his stepfather’s violent death. Then—it seems almost inevitable, given Charles’ lot in life—his daughter goes missing, and secrets can no longer hold. The beauty of this book lies in following Charles as he tries to pierce the barriers that keep his love from mattering, a relentless struggle often mirrored in long phrases with repeated words (“and only then did the man leave and only then did the doctor come to the heavy wooden door”). There’s a satisfying ending here, and sure to be further prizes ahead for Talty.

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Review

Finding Mr. Write

by Henrietta Thornton

At first, Finding Mr. Write reads like hearty rom-com fare: Daphne McFadden, a struggling writer who can’t get an agent, hires a dishy man to pose as the author of her book. She wants to hate “Zane Remington” but can’t, and complications ensue, not to mention increasingly lingering looks. While the enjoyable rom-com type misunderstandings and drama continue throughout the book, there’s also more here. Crime and mystery come into play when Daphne’s publisher and the book’s rabid fans get ever closer to finding out that Zane isn’t really the author of the wildly popular “dark zombie thriller with a teen girl protagonist,” and Daphne worries about her legal future. There’s also a lot to absorb about the economics, biases, and general messed-up-edness of the publishing industry, with an overworked publicist, one in a long string of underpaid young women, one of the tale’s quiet heroes. This well-plotted look at a maybe-romance and the bizarro world writers inhabit is a fun mix of mystery and romance, and well worth a read.

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Review

When She Left

by Henrietta Thornton

There were so many times when I wanted to yell DON’T DO THAT! at the characters in this dark tale of trying to do right by the ones you love but being tripped up by hapless choices at every turn. The cast is stuck, in various ways, in the orbit of the ruthless Winters crime family. Melissa Cruz, who’s “[smothering] her guilt in justification and Xanax,” is running from an abusive relationship with a member of the family, accompanied by her real love. The Winterses are not taking this betrayal lightly, and they’ve sent Lucky Wilson to find the couple and…well, Lucky is a professional assassin, even if his day job is real estate, so things don’t look good. Then there’s Lucky’s family: his wife, who he believes is having an affair, and his teenage daughter, who’s very much not into boys her own age. The fast-moving and sometimes-comic tale unfolds the back stories of the various characters, beautifully illustrating how bad decisions can be the product of fierce love and how what seems like the worst path might be a redemption. While waiting for this book, you’ll want to go back and try Aymar’s No Home for Killers and They’re Gone, as his writing is just great.

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Review

The Trials of Lila Dalton

by Henrietta Thornton

This brilliantly disorienting debut takes place on Assumption Island, a cold, rocky British outpost in the north Atlantic. Lila Dalton finds herself in an island courtroom being addressed by an impatient judge who clearly expects her to argue for her client. Lila has no idea how she got to this courtroom, how to be a barrister, what the case is…she doesn’t know anything, including who the stranger in the mirror is. Things take a turn for the (even) worse when she gets anonymous notes telling her that she’d better win acquittal for the murderer she’s representing if she ever wants to see her daughter again (that would be the daughter she didn’t know she had). The various characters working for and against Lila (we’re often unsure which direction a character is leaning, adding to the dark, compelling tale) are well drawn, with each adding complications and drama. Spare but gripping dialog propels the strange story to an appropriately dizzying conclusion. For fans of Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly.

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Review

Trust Her

by Henrietta Thornton

This sequel to the Northern Ireland-set Northern Spy (2021), in which Tessa Daly desperately searches for her sister, Marion, who has either been kidnapped by the IRA to work for them or is actually a terrorist, finds Tessa hiding in Dublin from the terrorists who want revenge. She’s enjoying a quiet, if lonely, life with her four-year-old son when she’s kidnapped by a gang that includes a childhood friend. He’s now in the IRA and wants Tessa’s help to turn an MI5 agent toward the Republican side. That starts a terrifying ordeal for Tessa, who walks a tightrope between British officialdom and homegrown extremists while keeping her son safe and pursuing a forbidden romance. As in the previous book, Berry portrays a modern Ireland that’s a maelstrom of contradictions, grief for the past and hope for the future, and fear that the country’s core can never really change. But there’s still hope for the Daly family, whose caring and exasperation toward one another makes this local drama into a universal fable of love overcoming all.

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Review

Invisible Woman

by Henrietta Thornton

A filmmaker whose heyday is past, Joni Ackerman has grown used to living in the shadow of her successful TV-show creating husband, Paul, as well as accustomed to the idea that she can’t make material for the small screen herself because that’s his territory. She drinks too much and is overall unhappy, with small bursts of joy when her daughter Alex returns home and life seems complete (there’s a twist-and-a-half in store there). She often thinks of her broke, early days living with roommate Val in Los Angeles, when they attended a party full of Hollywood glitterati at which Val was raped by a celebrity. Neither told anyone and both tried to move on, growing apart in the process. But now the past is back as the rapist has been outed and whispers abound about a mysterious second man he works with. What follows is a psychologically savvy look at the many victims and the long life of sexual assault, as well as a satisfying tale of coping through taking action. Joni is a lovably flawed but determined character and her decisions and determination will keep readers rooting for her and racing through this fast and absorbing drama.

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Review

Smoke Kings

by Henrietta Thornton

When cousins Joshua and Nate view Joshua’s brother lying in the morgue, having been beaten, they swear that Darius won’t be “just another dead black boy.” Two years later, grief has solidified into a plan: Nate, Joshua, and friends Rachel and Isiah have taken Scott York, a white man, captive. They confront him about when his grandfather and three other white men threw a Black man off a bridge to his death. “Pawpaw? Impossible,” is the reaction, but the verdict is the same: Scott must each week deposit $311.54 into an account the group provides. They’re enacting a reparations program, and Scott’s nonchalance about the crime and incredulousness that the group would care about the dead man spur them on. Tensions caused by colorism and racial differences—Rachel is Black but often taken for Latina and Isiah is Korean American–and disagreements about whom to target introduce interesting ambiguities as the audacious plan unfolds and leads to mayhem. Mayfield’s foreword explains that he was inspired by Kimberly Jones’s video How Can We Win?. Readers can learn more about reparations and the history that makes them necessary by reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’sThe Case for Reparations and Bryan Stevenson’s (an author and activist who’s mentioned in the book) searing Just Mercy. A compelling and exciting debut.

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Review

Last Days in Plaka

by Henrietta Thornton

Lazaridis’s previous work, Terra Nova (Pegasus, 2022), alternated between men trekking to the South Pole and the fight by one of their wives back home to win attention for suffragists. On the surface, this title is very different, taking place in “violently hot” Athens, Greece, where a young Astoria, New York woman is shyly finding her feet in her parents’ homeland. But she’s an explorer in her own way, and an intrepid one, “[uncoiling] the spring of opportunity” that her parents created for her and traipsing toward the traditional center of Greek life: the church. Anna’s parea—her friend group—won’t understand her need to find God, she tells herself; she also (correctly) surmises that they’ll be puzzled by her new choice of friend: an 82-year-old woman whom she meets when Father Emmanouil gives her fresh figs to bring to the woman’s home. As Anna gears up to…well, commit a crime, but one that has a kind motive, readers are immersed in her longing to find out who she really is, where she belongs, and whether she will ever find her way home. What Lazaridis calls her “strange little novel” is a wonderful mix of coming of age, immigrant stories, and the pain that lurks behind crumbling facades.

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Review

One of the Good Guys

by Henrietta Thornton

I want to be a fly on the wall when this explosive drama is discussed in book clubs. The “good guy” whose behavior they will pick apart is Cole Simmonds; he’s recently separated and has left London for the rural English coast. There he’s picking up the pieces from a marriage that went wrong when the couple’s attempts to have a child, including the trials of IVF, were all for nothing. Cole’s wife Mel—he’s dragging his feet on the paperwork that will tie up all the loose ends—now seems to hate him and he can’t understand where it all went wrong. Mel’s point of view, meanwhile, only coincides with Cole’s in that both would agree that they’ve split up. He’s trying to move on and meets Lennie (he insists on calling her Leonora, our first hint at his controlling ways), an artist who also seems like a lonely soul. Both are pulled into the fray when young women on a nationally publicized walk to highlight the problem of male violence go missing near Cole’s home. The social-media firestorm ignited by all this will be matched by the conversations in those book clubs I want to lurk in, as Hall looks at toxic masculinity from every angle: the oh-so-innocent man who’s only controlling because he cares so much, the enraged men commenting about the case online, the system that ridicules women if they wait too long to report a sexual crime while torturing them once they do report. A gripping and controversial suspense.

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Review

The Nature of Disappearing

by Henrietta Thornton

When Emlyn was a little girl and her father left, she dove into the dictionary, studying and learning words as a coping mechanism. Resilience and words are still at the heart of her life; after meeting a person, she works to find the single word that best embodies them. All the while, she’s pushing through a lonely life as a wilderness expert, one who repels the people around her since she broke up with Tyler, the love of her life, and lost her best friend, Janessa, to a bitter argument. Now her worlds are colliding as Tyler needs her help: both Janessa, who now works for Tyler, and Janessa’s renowned outdoorsman partner are missing. Tyler and Emlyn must face the Idaho wilderness to find the couple, a journey that becomes more treacherous as they encounter an unexpected and deadly situation. Social media fame meets the elements here as the past and future collide and form unexpected eddies. Who can be trusted, whether past goodness or evil can change, and how to accept love are dilemmas readers will enjoy facing with Emlyn, a downtrodden character whose troubles are relatable and whose grit when it matters is satisfying. Podcasts and other social media are having a moment in crime fiction now, and wilderness fiction is also big. Here’s a fast, suspenseful tale that combines both and even throws in some romance.

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