Author

Henrietta Thornton

Review

Long Gone

by Henrietta Thornton

Annalisa Vega is back in the second of Schaffhausen’s series, looking at the inner life of a troubled Chicago PD detective. In the first book, Gone for Good, Annalisa pursued the killer of a family friend, ultimately finding uncomfortable truths far too close to home. (No spoilers!—you don’t have to read the first book to enjoy this one, but it’s well worth the read while you wait for book 2). Now, the detective is still partnered at work with her ex-husband-with-benefits, Nick, and doing her own sort of time as other cops give her the cold shoulder for fighting against crookedness within the force. The book opens with a headscratcher for Annalisa and Nick. Not only is a successful officer (who has perhaps too nice a home and car for his salary) shot dead in his bed while his wife is untouched, she claims that the killer was “a frogman,” a murderer wearing a scuba-diving suit. What follows is a look at Annalisa’s life as someone who can’t let things go—bad enough when it’s Nick, much worse when she’s ordered off cases and still won’t stop. Schaffhausen again weaves family dynamics, terrible decisions, and long-festering secrets with love and bitter regret to create a riveting story. The delightfully exasperating main character and cast are a bonus.

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Review

One of Us Is Dead

by Henrietta Thornton

Rose (The Perfect Marriage) brings to life the rich, overly botoxed women of Buckhead, GA. Mainly showpieces for their uber-wealthy husbands, they spend their passive-aggressive days at Glow, a membership-only beauty salon where the women commit to several treatments per week. Jenny, Glow’s owner, is stuck being nice to Olivia, the queen bitch of Buckhead, who has mastered the “kinsult,” or kind insult (“your skin is glowing…I can barely notice the lack of elasticity today”). Olivia’s abused minions include Shannon, the saddest woman in the book, whose politician ex-husband, Bryce, left her for a younger woman. The “girls,” and perhaps readers, want to hate Crystal, “Bryce’s midlife crisis,” but Rose doesn’t take the easy way out, creating in Crystal a more layered character than at first expected. Then there’s Karen, a luxury-real-estate lawyer who keeps the book and the “friends” as grounded as they can be. Chapters narrated by each of the women alternate with ones in which Jenny is being questioned by police about what exactly happened at Bryce and Crystal’s housewarming, an opulent event that featured a murder. Rose’s writing is pitch perfect when it comes to both keeping readers gripped and making them want to tear Olivia’s (beautifully done) hair out. If you enjoyed Clueless and other mean girls movies and books, this is for you.

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Review

I’ll Be You

by Henrietta Thornton

The number of all-caps texts I sent about THE TWISTS IN THIS BOOK!!! were…many. Those twists concern the misdeeds of identical twin sisters Elli and Sam Logan, who are estranged because of a shocking betrayal. They’re former child TV stars, with Sam back then enthralled by their minor fame while Elli hated every moment. As adults, Elli is a mom while Sam sees reproduction as “a monetizable bodily function.” While Ellie explores empowerment in a self-help group, Sam is a barely sober alcoholic and drug addict whose possessions consist “primarily of emotional baggage.” The twins’ paths have diverged, but when their dysfunctional parents call Sam for help looking after a child–one she didn’t know her sister had–she drops everything. The first part of the book looks at the past and present from Sam’s perspective, and the second at the same events from the point of view of her sister. This reveals that identical events can be experienced through a gulf of misunderstanding, hurt, and fear and that damage and love will find ways out. Brown’s insightful language and the emotional brutality and fortitude shown as Elli and Sam are forced to see themselves and each other anew will stay with readers. If twins in fiction are of interest, also try Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half.

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Review

A Rip Through Time

by Henrietta Thornton

In too many historical mysteries and science fiction novels, other times and places are strangely devoid of anyone who’s not straight and white. Not so the science-fiction-tinged Victorian era envisaged by prolific author Armstrong (A Stitch in Time series). The book opens in 2019, with Vancouver, BC detective Mallory Atkinson visiting Scotland to tend to her dying grandmother. Hearing a woman cry out for help in an alley, she intervenes in what turns out to be an apparition of an attack, only to enter the vision and wake up in 1869 as a teenage housemaid. She lands in the Edinburgh home of undertaker Dr. Duncan Gray, who’s using his trade to become an early forensic scientist. Gray and his widowed sister, Isla, are somewhat cut off from society, Gray because he was born from an affair his father had with a woman whom the family believed to be Indian—it was all kept hush-hush—and his sister because she’s a Victorian woman of means, expected to stay home. Readers will enjoy watching Mallory as she struggles to fit in and help Gray find the man—a serial killer, though that term is unknown—who’s posing bodies in sensational ways around the city. For those who enjoy Julie McElwain’s Kendra Donovan series, in which an FBI agent time travels to 1816 London.

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Review

Her Last Affair

by Henrietta Thornton

When kindly retired nurse Skyla Hull finds divorced Englishman Teddy Cornwell as a tenant for the identical house her late husband built next to their upstate New York home—long story—the two click. Skyla, who is almost blind from macular degeneration, gets a welcome companion in Teddy, and soon he’s encouraging her to explore unresolved issues in her past. At the same time, we look at other relationships in the past and present: teens Linelle and Teddy meet and fall for each other while sneaking cigarette breaks from their jobs as Disney World characters; later, Linelle is married to Marcus and we find her taking a photo, one that certainly wouldn’t be allowed at Disney, to send to her man on the side. A “one that got away” romance also features, with the couple now years older and wondering “what if?”. When the various loaded pasts and presents come together, what is at first a character-driven plot takes a suspenseful and violent turn and readers will move from cringing at what the characters do for love to fretting over who will get out alive. With much of the action taking place in the shadow of a defunct drive-in theater, the Stephen King vibes are strong here, but so is the Fannie Flagg. An unusual and satisfying tale.

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Review

A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poisons

by Henrietta Thornton

University College London, just after the Great War, is where bright young Saffron Everleigh pursues her botany studies and, as an assistant researcher, is the only female employee in her department. While Saffron’s beyond enthusiastic about her field and a gifted botanist, she endures sexist put-downs and even a lewd attack by a professor who has retired in place and lives on pipe smoke and sexual harassment. The botany department’s men are gearing up for a research expedition to the Amazon (the gentlemen never mention seeking input from any Brazilians as to local flora, adding to the musty flavor of the academic setting). Before they leave, disaster strikes: a professor’s wife collapses at a department party, perhaps a victim of poisoning. This series debut, also the author’s first foray into historical fiction, sees Saffron and her love interest, Alexander Ashton, sleuthing their way through department politics, botanical facts, and the sadder aspects of human nature as they figure out whodunit and learn more about their field along the way. Readers will learn more too, but unobtrusively while they cheer for Saffron and Alexander to for God’s sake have that kiss. Especially recommended for fans of Sujata Massey’s Perveen Mistry series, which stars another pioneer, the only female lawyer in 1920s Bombay.

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Review

This Might Hurt

by Henrietta Thornton

The first crime here is psychological abuse of two sisters whose father, named only as Sir, is obsessed with building their resilience (“Lord knows you’re not going to get by on talent or gifts”). Sir’s isolated, scared little girls can’t go to bed at night unless they achieve enough points. Chores count, but they must also endure “tests” like sitting in the snow without a coat for an hour, holding their breath for two minutes, and kneeling on broken glass. The abuse leads the younger sister to become obsessed with Houdini and perfect a show based on his escapes, with the psychological underpinnings of that quest not lost on her or on readers. Fast forward to adulthood and there’s possibly a new crime afoot, or at least a mystery, as one sister, Natalie, visits a Maine island where she suspects her sister, Kit, is captive in a cult led by the reclusive, mysterious Teacher. The markers of a cult are glaring, but is Kit being held against her will and what’s behind the other residents’ willingness to obey? The solution is satisfying here, and getting to it will bring home to readers Teacher’s declaration of the book’s central truth: “The difference between a cocoon and a straitjacket [is] perspective.”

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Review

The Younger Wife

by Henrietta Thornton

Quirky meets romantic meets WTF in this Australian import that’s brimming with character. Two very different sisters are at the center of the maelstrom. Rachel is a beautiful and successful baker who spends a week perfecting tiny roses on a wedding cake but eats two tiers of it by the fistful hours before delivery. Her sister, Tully, married with two little boys, is consumed with anxiety and a compulsion to steal. The younger wife of the title is Heather, who’s marrying Rachel and Tully’s father, Stephen Aston, and whose big day opens the novel. Stephen’s ex-wife roaming the altar during the vows is bad enough, but when the couple moves to the sacristy, a scream is heard and the celebrant reappears in the church covered in blood. Hepworth (The Secrets of Midwives) then chronicles the leadup to this chaos, a saga that involves a hot water bottle stuffed with $100,000, romance with cake-pun-loving delivery man, and hilarious observations about the million ways we sabotage ourselves. The Astons also face their share of heartaches and worse (Alzheimer’s disease, rape, and domestic violence are part of the story). For fans of domestic suspense and of the Australian show Offspring, which also features loving sisters and their interesting choices.

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Review

The Favor

by Henrietta Thornton

This is one of the best-plotted thrillers I’ve read in ages; it’s also a great portrayal of why women experiencing domestic violence are stuck. We meet Leah Dawson during her carefully choreographed routine of visiting a different liquor store every day. She hides the booze from her violent husband, Liam, a lawyer who has coercive control down to an artform. Leah’s legal career came to an end recently because her husband didn’t like her reading a work email at dinner, and took action. At the liquor store, something compels Leah to follow a fellow shopper, pediatrician McKenna Hawkins. Soon Leah’s routinely watching the woman, who’s also needlessly unemployed, from the street outside McKenna’s clinically clean home. The reason Leah felt drawn to McKenna is quickly apparent: McKenna is just like Leah, or rather McKenna’s husband, Zach, is just like Leah’s Liam. Both have ego to spare, enjoy speaking slowly to their wives to make them feel stupid, and are financially abusive. These guys have it all, until they don’t. No spoilers here, but get this book for the very original storyline, true-to-life characters, and a searing look at the pain and mind games endured behind too many closed doors. For more on why “she can leave any time” is ridiculous and insulting, read the afterword by Murphy, an attorney who’s represented survivors of intimate partner violence.

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Review

The Mitford Vanishing

by Henrietta Thornton

The Mitford sisters, six eccentric socialites and political renegades in the interwar years in England, encountered a frightful number of murders in their day, at least as told in Fellowes’s glamorous historical series, now in its fifth installment. This time, Decca, second-youngest daughter of patriarchal Lord Redesdale and his long-suffering wife, Sydney Bowles, is missing. The family suspects that the 18-year-old has run off with her second cousin, Churchill’s nephew Esmond Romilly, to marry him and fight on the side of the anti-facists in the Spanish Civil War (which Decca and Esmond did in real life). Enter the Mitfords’ former maid Louisa and her husband, Guy, proprietors of the Cannon & Sullivan detective agency. Hired to look for Decca, Louisa nervously embraces the fledgling rights of women in 1937, using her maiden name for work and leaving the couple’s baby with sitters. Indeed, she’s far more advanced than the Mitford “girls,” whose blithely colonial ways color their every move. Fellowes’s at times very sad, often funny story stands out for its unusual, Spanish Civil War backdrop; it also offers pleasingly scathing treatment of Nazi sympathizers, exciting chases from England to Spain and back (repeatedly!), and an extraordinarily tense closing scene. While this works as a standalone, go back to the earlier books for a treat.

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