Author

Henrietta Thornton

Review

Darling Girls

by Henrietta Thornton

WHAT a rollercoaster. The “darling girls” in question–Jessica, Norah, and Alicia–are “foster children,” stuck being referred to that way even now that they’re adults. They aren’t biological sisters, but the mistreatment meted out at Wild Meadows by their foster mother, the psychologically cruel and unpredictable Miss Fairchild, has forced them into a lifelong bond. These days, Jessica is a housecleaner who steals her clients’ prescriptions and is being pursued by the relentless Debbie Montgomery-Squires, who wants her Valium back. Norah is on probation for her latest attack, one in a long string of anger-fueled outbursts. And Alicia is barely holding it together as a social worker who’s terrified to pursue a relationship with a female friend who could be more. The three are thrust back into their awful past when the police call to say that a body has been found buried at Wild Meadows, one that appears old enough to have been from their time at the “home.” What ensues are flashbacks to the children’s bizarre, cliff-edge lives as wards of a tyrant, while the darkly funny present-day tale looks at women who fight the system and their circumstances tooth and nail to avoid being victimized again. This is the rare story that’s equally character and plot driven, with the “sisters” portrayed as distinct and lovable and the plot just packed with twists. Hating Miss Fairchild is the icing on the cake

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Review

Geneva

by Henrietta Thornton

This fast-paced debut takes on the world of biotechnology, focusing more on the attendant politics and celebrity than the tech itself. The celebrity in question is Professor Sarah Collier, who’s retired after winning a Nobel Prize. She’s so reclusive that she didn’t even pick up her Nobel in person, but her husband is desperate for her to get back out there and help his faltering neuroscience career. He’s increasingly frustrated by her unwillingness to travel with him to Geneva, where a mysterious new technology will be unveiled at the Schiller Institute, with, the institute hopes, Sarah’s endorsement. The promise that the new technology could help Sarah’s newly diagnosed Alzheimer’s makes the endorsement tempting, but steely pressure from the institute’s directors and its frightening head of security is exhausting. As Sarah becomes ever more forgetful and disoriented, the risks to her marriage and even her life multiply while the billions of dollars on the line make malevolent forces ruthless. For fans of actor-author Armitage and of John Marr’s biotech-infused thrillers.

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Review

The Mayor of Maxwell Street

by Henrietta Thornton

Nelly Sawyer’s father is a Kentucky horse breeder and the richest Black man in America. The family is in prohibition-era Chicago for Nelly’s coming out, when she’s expected to meet the country’s most eligible young Black men and find one to marry. She doesn’t fit in at the events, disdains the whole charade, and just wants to be alone to grieve the recent death of her brother. She’s also eager to pursue a career in journalism, not easy for a woman, let alone a Black woman who’s been raised in genteel isolation. Outside the cotillion and other events are no better, as white Chicagoans take the young woman for a servant. Nelly is soon distracted, though, when she’s surprised by potential love interests: Jay Shorey, a mysterious, beautifully dressed speakeasy manager, and the more suitable, at least in society’s view, Tomás Escalante y Roche, a Marquis who is this season’s catch. When Nelly is challenged to find and identify the dangerous Mayor of Maxwell Street to keep the newspaper job she’s threatened with losing, both men and Nelly herself are thrown into a vicious game of deceit that adds high suspense and sometimes terrible danger to the politics-laden season. An evocative and thought-provoking debut, and just look at that cover!

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Review

The Darkness Surrounds Us

by Henrietta Thornton

Can a house hold evil? Can it hold memories? Nellie Lester fears the worst when she accepts a nursing job in New Harmony, Michigan, an island town where she spent her early life. But she’s desperate to get out of the flu pandemic that hit her Chicago hospital and everywhere else, in the aftermath of the Great War. Perhaps even more compelling is her need to find out who her father was. The only remnant of the man is a photograph that might show Nellie and her parents years ago in New Harmony. Arriving, the nurse finds that Ravenwood Manor and its owner, William Thiery, hold forbidding reputations in the area—the house is haunted, they say, and William is a frightening man who cares little for his wife and the baby that Nellie is there to deliver. Then a body is found with a fatal head wound, and Nellie doesn’t accept that the death was an accident. She’s not there to be a detective, her boss is quick to point out, but the danger is mounting. Nellie must solve mysteries from the past and in the present to save herself and, she hopes, get out of New Harmony. Supernatural elements —scariest is a death portrait of a child in which the subject seems to progressively rot—add to the domestic drama and historical wrongs, creating a gothic suspense and a feisty protagonist to remember.

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Review

While We Were Burning

by Henrietta Thornton

Elizabeth is in a rut. Her job isn’t so satisfying, and her marriage is on the rocks. Her every move seems to trigger a report by her husband, David, to their therapist. She feels ganged up on and adrift, which is bad enough. That descends into depression, which others believe is paranoia, when she finds her neighbor Patricia dead. Others say it’s suicide, but Elizabeth is sure it was murder and is determined to find the culprit. She has a willing sidekick in her sleuthing in Brianna, the assistant that David insists his wife take on to help out at home. Brianna, who is Black, is all too willing to be white Elizabeth’s new best friend, Watson to her Sherlock, and de facto therapist, given that Brianna has a strong motivation to insert herself into her employers’ upscale Memphis neighborhood: someone there called the cops on her son and they killed him. As the plot twists and turns, deceptions build, and though readers have the benefit of a birds’ eye view of the story, surprises are in store. This is reminiscent of Elizabeth Day’s Magpie, with its suburban setting and overcrowded marriage; the effects of gentrification and racism also loom large. For fans of Magpie Murders and novels that pack in the psychological drama.

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Review

The Bliss House

by Henrietta Thornton

In the rural Ontario Bliss House live 17-year-old Cam; his cousins Wes, who’s in his late twenties; and Dorie, who’s five and is a distant relative Gramp and Gran took in. Gran died a few months ago and her abusive, alcoholic spouse not long after, but Gramp is not quite gone, his corpse hidden under a tarp in the house’s cold room. With no will leaving the house and farm to the remaining family, what else can they do? Wild-child Dorie is able to keep Gramp’s death a secret, as well as her knowledge of the game Cam and Wes play in Wes’s bedroom, the same one, she thinks, the nasty neighbor boy, Kyle, wanted to play with her in the barn. The ramshackle family is just starting to believe things are safe when Kyle’s mother sets the Misses Gurney on them. Beulah and Audrey Gurney are with Bethel Baptist and Dorie’s attire—or lack of it—when she plays in the yard is, they say, “the Lord’s business.” They brush Kyle’s behavior aside (“They’re Pentecostal”) but cannot see their way to ignoring Wes and Cam’s “sin,” launching the Bliss boys on a startlingly violent and engrossing path to keep their family and love safe from the state. Young adults as well as adult readers who aren’t squeamish (terms like “corpseooze” stand out) will root hard for this loving family and stay up to find out how their bizarre, Murphy’s-law-ridden odyssey turns out. Playwright Bartley’s previous fiction is set in Balkan war zones, making this memorable work a fresh start.

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Review

This Plague of Souls

by Henrietta Thornton

This dark, introspective work, which unexpectedly reveals a golden-hued motivation on the part of its main character, reads like Scandinavian noir. But this gem is by an Irish author and follows his Booker Prize-longlisted Solar Bones. McCormack brings us to the west of Ireland, home of Nealon, a man returning from prison, though at first all we know is that he’s been away. He finds his home unexpectedly empty, the electricity switched off, and his wife and child gone. Right away, he gets a call from a stranger who, in a tone so jaunty it’s sinister, congratulates Nealon on his homecoming and offers to tell him where his family is in return for a meeting. As Nealon whiles away the days—after firmly declining the meeting—in a strange limbo, contact with the stranger continues and the former prisoner finds that the motivations for his crime may come to light. West of Ireland weather sets the tone, as “a huge, bruised cloud moves across the sky, with leaden sheets of rain peeling from its underbelly.” But it’s the anonymous, yet intimate, comments from the needling stranger that keep the writing on its toes and Nealon facing “a massive cessation of all that passes for the run of things.” For fans of Donal Ryan and David Malouf.

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Review

Midnight is the Darkest Hour

by Henrietta Thornton

Ruth Cornier is that rarity in fiction: a woman who had the chance to get out of the town that’s too small for her—in this case, Bottom Springs, Louisiana—but stayed. Growing up, everyone knew her as the preacher’s daughter, and nothing’s changed, except that she’s no longer under her father’s thumb. She is still, however, the subject of her downtrodden mother’s malice-filled plans to drag her back to the snake-handling church’s fold. What’s so objectionable about Ruth? It’s her firm friendship with Everett Duncan, her Heathcliff-reminiscent best friend, who’s returned to town after Ruth thought him gone for good. While Ever is the kind-hearted son of the mean town drunk, locals think he’s an apple from a no-good tree, and even suspect him of being the Low Man, a supernatural being who drags people into the swamp. When a skull is found in that same swamp, Ruth and Ever are thrown back into dark days of their youth while also desperately trying to find what really happened before Ever gets what locals think he deserves. As in Winstead’s In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, sharp writing, compelling dual timelines, and sympathetic characters will keep readers turning the pages.

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Review

Fever House

by Henrietta Thornton

In his acknowledgements, Rosson calls this “a wild fever dream of a novel,” and he nailed it. Where to start with this feral read? Since it’s a horror/suspense novel, the first gory moment seems apt: when a crime boss’s enforcers threaten a man with a drug addiction who owes a payment and the man asks, “What’re you gonna do? Knock my teeth out?” He then goes on to do the job himself, with his own filthy fingers. The enforcers find a severed hand during their work, one that causes those nearby to feel the need to do tremendous violence, the urge “[slithering] in. It floats on a dark wave.” The gore gets more sophisticated—“make me a necklace from the heads of your children…make me a red veil from their latticed veins”—only adding to the supernatural head-spinning. At the same time, we follow the life…if he or it is alive…of a being called Saint Michael, a secret captive of the U.S. government. Saint Michael can sometimes see visions of future events, especially when periodically “encouraged” by the agonizing process of government agents trimming his wings. In counterpoint to the government actions we meet a musician, Katherine Moriarty, who was very successful in her day but now is agoraphobic, her closed-in life perhaps related to the bizarre goings-on elsewhere in the novel. All converge in a terrifying episode in Portland, Oregon, that will surely be a highlight of the movie that is already being made of this terrific novel. Every word here is crafted to impart just the right level of revulsion, fear, and, at times, wonder. Get ready for awards nods for this work as well as comparisons to the works of Cormac McCarthy and Justin Cronin.

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Review

Where You End.

by Henrietta Thornton

Judith and Katherine, or as they prefer, Jude and Kat, are mirror-image identical twins (they have the same features on opposite sides of their bodies, such as the same birthmark on opposite shoulders). But there is one big difference. Jude can remember all of their 22 years, but Kat has recently survived a terrible car accident that has left her with amnesia. Experiencing everything “again for the very first time,” she relies on Jude to tell her their life story, because, Jude says, their mother is dead and their father took off years ago. Some things seem puzzling, such as why the photos of their before-the-accident European trip don’t show the sisters at all, only landmarks. Readers learn why in those sections of the book that look at life before the crash, when the girls and their mother left mainstream society to live with the controlling King Bash, whose mantra was “What you think, is.” The pressure to will happiness and satisfaction into being, and the child abuse led by Bash, brews a toxic storm that Jude tries to keep in their past. But the past threatens to explode when a mysterious figure starts turning up at random places in the present. Kahler has a quietly compelling way of revealing secrets and of portraying a close sibling bond, creating an unusual debut novel (as Karen Abbott, Kahler is an Edgar Award nominee for Best Fact Crime for The Ghosts of Eden Park) that will be a hit with those who enjoyed the recent religious-cult documentaries Shiny Happy People and Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey

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