Author

Henrietta Thornton

Review

The Twelve Books of Christmas

by Henrietta Thornton

No sooner does San Francisco bookbinder Brooklyn Wainwright get a break from sleuthing at a Scottish castle than she’s invited back to Scotland for a wedding and must again save the day. On Christmas Eve, Brooklyn gets a call announcing that her friends Claire and Cameron—Laird McKinnon, thank you—are getting married in a week. Brooklyn, her partner, and her parents are soon off to Castle McKinnon, on the shore of Loch Ness. At first only Brooklyn’s (meticulously described) book-restoring skills are in demand, as the bride-to-be wants a precious volume from the castle’s extensive library repaired for her beau. Then Claire also confides that 12 books, all of them set at Christmas and some very valuable, are missing from the shelves. But that investigation soon takes a back seat as a young man who works at the castle is found dead, not the last to meet a sad end. There’s a lot packed in here, from yummy food descriptions (there might also be a drink or two) to a family whose members are intent on grabbing a noble title and from archery competitions to Scotland’s Hogmanay traditions. It all comes together beautifully to create an atmospheric puzzle that fans of the author and newcomers will find festive and engaging.

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Review

A Nutcracker Nightmare

by Henrietta Thornton

Alex Wright and her sister, Hanna Eastham, co-owners of Murder and Mayhem: Killer Chocolates and Bookshop, are hard at work preparing goodies in their Montana store for the Festive Foods Chocolates Competition. It’s just their luck that at the same time as they’re hard at work preparing sweets for the local high-school reunion they’re also smack in the middle of their busiest season, the winter holidays. Still, they’re muddling through until a murder at the reunion stops the community in its tracks. A man who was unpopular in school and has increased his enemy count by being “gropey” at the reunion (Hanna suspects he has “an octopus in his bloodline”) meets his not-so-sweet end. And unbelievably, Hanna is suspected in the killing. The elements we love in a cozy are all here: tight family relationships, romantic interests with law enforcement, off-screen killings, food, and bookstores. What’s not to love? This one has rich characterization to boot and a story that will keep readers guessing till the last Strychnine Strawberry chocolate is but a gooey memory.

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Review

The Lover of No Fixed Abode.

by Henrietta Thornton

This strange, beautiful tale wedges readers into the crowded boats and alleys of Venice while whisking them along on a three-day romance with a Roman princess and the down-at-heel tour guide she falls for. The two seem to float above the city’s watery fray even before meeting. After meeting, they withdraw completely into their own emotional realm, “literally liquefied” by their fascination and passion for each other. Time is immaterial, they agree, as they find themselves “precariously suspended between being and non-being,” contemplate “intimate perplexities on who is who, where the I ends and the you begins,” and eat “a variety of little inventions.” The love story, which as the translator’s note explains, features more robustly in the book than the crime tale related to the princess’s work as an art dealer, soon provokes questions in the reader. Where is the tour guide from? Why must he leave Venice despite his grief over losing the love he has just stumbled upon? The answer to the mystery is startling and brings up many questions about the nature of life and how the past, and past injustices, can resonate today. Try this after Danielle Trussoni’s The Puzzle Master; you’ll come back to Earth eventually

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Review

American Girl

by Henrietta Thornton

This American Girl has nothing to do with dolls, and her life is anything but toy-store quaint. Pennsylvania high-school-senior Charlie is autistic, a reality she’s learned to mask by carefully studying TV characters and everyone in her life. She’s developed rules, ways for “a child like that” to understand the world, but some things remain unfathomable. People get harder or easier to look at, for example, depending on their behavior. Grandma threw Charlie and her mother out, because “whores get what whores deserve.” And making a friend is hard when adults fear that Charlie’s mom might not “[run] a home with the right values.” But she finally finds a haven in the Triple S, a sandwich store where she fits right in with the downtrodden coworkers, who are all struggling to stay afloat while avoiding the handsy, loathsome boss. When he’s found dead, and security camera footage shows Charlie witnessing something off camera that horrifies her, she’s placed firmly in the spotlight. This is an uncomfortable position and readers will root hard for her to leave, not least because MIT is waiting for this gutsy girl. Teens as well as adults will enjoy this smart kid’s inner life and Walker’s wry observations about small-town life.

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Review

The Night of the Storm

by Henrietta Thornton

The scene: Hurricane Harvey hitting affluent Sugar Land, TX, in 2017. Readers will fear the worst, knowing how bad the storm became, but Jia Shah feels she’ll be safe at her sister Seema’s sprawling, ostentatious house. Her brother-in-law, who luckily knows everything, assures all that nothing can happen to his house. Misogyny’R’Us mother-in-law and overbearing sister notwithstanding, Jia believes that once she and her son ride out the storm—and her family’s endless comments about her dire fate as a divorcee—they can get back to life as they knew it. Then Jia notices that the neighborhood seems curiously empty. Except, that is, for a neighbor who stares in the window. Soon things become far more than just creepy as the bodies start to pile up. Debut author Parekh builds tension wonderfully as the storms outside and inside the house threaten to wipe out everything Jia holds dear; she also excels at provoking exasperation at the backbiting family’s antics while crammed into an inescapable nightmare. For those who like locked-room and closed-circle dramas.

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Review

Crook Manifesto

by Henrietta Thornton

Pulitzer Prize-winner Whitehead’s second Ray Carney book begins in the 1970s, when Ray’s Harlem furniture shop is firmly established. But, given the chaos that it engendered in Harlem Shuffle, his stolen-goods—sorry, “previously owned merchandise”—sideline is no longer. Readers of the previous book will find the setup turned inside out: instead of conquering Harlem, Ray has been ground down by it. He now sits precariously atop his small empire, the relentless engine that is the city seeming to churn the ground beneath his feet. Also different: this time Ray endures the relentlessness of several decades of upheaval compared to the relatively short and, in retrospect, gentle, time when he was a striving young man in the ‘60s. The neighborhood doesn’t want to let him retire his fenced-goods work and the Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army are competing for dominance, a fight Ray wants to sidestep. A crackdown on police corruption sees him dragged into worse and worse actions as his former associates get desperate. Ray’s troubles and determination mirror the fighting spirit of his neighborhood; his saga is New York City’s, with the shocking and sad tale displaying moments of hilarity alongside heartbreaking lows. Whitehead’s writing is fantastically evocative as usual, and his rebuilding of recent decades of New York City life, and of the unforgettable Ray Carney, is a treat to read.

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Review

I’m Not Done with You Yet

by Henrietta Thornton

The bitchiness we loved in Dial A for Aunties is back with a vengeance. This time, the author takes us, via flashbacks, to the nervous, early days of an American student at Oxford University. Jane Morgan’s mother has drilled into her daughter that she can’t write and can’t do anything else right either, and Oxford isn’t for the likes of her. So it’s a relief when Janemeets the confident, beautiful Thalia Ashcroft. For Jane, it’s obsession, if not love, at first sight. She’ll do anything to keep Thalia’s friendship, and is desperate to keep her from Ami, a blithely rich student who looks like competition for friendship with Thalia. It’s a struggle—everything’s so hard for Jane, who must continually remind herself that her sociopathic behaviors—“antisocial (check), hostile (check), irresponsible (check)”—must be kept under wraps if she’s to get ahead. Then everything unravels, a situation hinted at in the present-day section of the book as the time Jane left Oxford after an unnamed disaster. What happened, and how the women confront each other and the event’s aftermath all these years later, is a thrilling tale filled with twists, unreliable narrators, and absurdness of the best kind. For Dial A for Aunties fans and anyone who likes a friendship drama.

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Review

Christmas Presents

by Henrietta Thornton

“Everybody knows everything about you in this stupid town. And they know nothing.” What people in Madeline Martin’s rural New York town know about her is that she’s the daughter of the town’s longtime, beloved sheriff and she owns The Next Chapter, her dream bookstore. They also know, but rarely mention, that she survived a brutal attack ten years before, one that saw her friend Steph murdered and two other friends, sisters Ainsley and Sam, disappear. What they don’t know is that Maddie’s never recovered emotionally and longs to know what happened to her friends. There’s still no word on the missing teens, and it’s a few days before the anniversary of the attack, which also means Christmas is a few days off and the bookstore is humming. Superstar author Harley Granger chooses this as his moment to visit and start his research on whether the man doing time for the crime is guilty, what happened to Ainsley and Sam, and, most urgently, where a newly disappeared exotic dancer could be. All breathlessly documented on social media, of course. Fans of Unger will know her thrillers match top-notch writing with gripping stories; this one won’t disappoint in that regard and offers the bonus of a satisfying family story in Maddie and her father.

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Review

The Bitter Past

by Henrietta Thornton

The high desert of eastern Nevada is Borgos’s setting for this series debut, and it opens with the most violent death Sheriff Porter Beck has seen. A retired FBI agent, Ralph Atterbury, looks to have been tortured for hours, his skin removed in strips and his nipples blowtorched. It can’t be a routine break-in, but what could the man have done that would inspire such rage? Flashing back to supposedly a more apple-pie time, Nevada in the Cold War, we meet Freddie Meyer, a young man who’s humble enough to go steady with Kitty Ellison, a bookish girl who “wasn’t the most striking” of her friends. In due course, Kitty’s physicist father helps Freddie get a job—he’s just so gosh-darn grateful!—at the nearby atomic testing site’s top-secret project. Readers are let in on the audacious, almost unbelievable plan that unfolds, one that Beck slowly uncovers as he seeks the identities of Atterbury’s killer and a Russian spy who he believes worked at the testing site all those years ago. Beck has the nice-guy relentlessness that readers love in an investigator. His love interest, present-day FBI agent Sana Locke, adds wiles and beauty, and the Cold War storyline is gripping. I can’t wait for the next from Borgos.

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Review

Some of Us Are Looking

by Henrietta Thornton

O’Connor’s second tale starring rural Irish veterinarian Dimpna Wilde at first has all the markings of a cozy. A female protagonist whose job is a magnet for drama, animals—including a talking African grey parrot called Bette Davis,who plays a major role in the story—and a love interest who’s in law enforcement. But cozies usually involve a sanitized crime, and this is where O’Connor takes a decided swerve out of the gentle side of the genre. The murder mystery that Dimpna finds herself enmeshed in is the killing of a young woman, Brigid, who early in the story shows up at the vet clinic with an injured animal. It’s a hare that has a cut on its leg from someone, Brigid says, trying to remove its foot. The gruesome motif is repeated when Dimpna finds Brigid tied to a tree, dead and with her hand cut off. At the same time, chalked graffiti around the town asks, “Who put Bella in the witch elm?”, just one of the intertwined puzzles facing Dimpna and the man she’s falling for, Inspector Cormac O’Brien, as they investigate the town’s many intriguing residents and visitors. While this absorbing story stands well on its own, you’ll want to go back to the first in the series, No Strangers Here, to spend more time with this smart, kind vet and her knack for attracting trouble.

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