Author

Henrietta Thornton

Review

Secret Identity

by Henrietta Thornton

Anyone who’s worked in publishing will recognize the low pay, deadline whirlwind, and scramble for recognition facing Carmen Valdez, a Miami transplant in New York. Worse, she’s a secretary trying to advance in a man’s world within a man’s world—comics publishing in 1975. Male colleagues sometimes show up drunk and their work is barely passable. Still, Carmen’s boss, whose father started the company, reminds her that “in the real world, we grant jobs based on experience and merit” when she gives him her comics scripts. Then her smoking buddy at work, Harvey, proposes to help by submitting a project by the two of them, but mainly by her, as his, and to reveal her authorship once it’s a success. Things don’t go according to plan, with not only Carmen’s professional future but also her safety jeopardized by a killer targeting her circle. Complementing this puzzling whodunit is a major plus for comics and graphic novel readers: Segura’s insider view of the comics industry and its history, as well as his spot-on chronicling of the too-frequent backstabbing among striving artists. For fans of Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl, another look at a young woman trying to make it in publishing

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Review

My Darling Husband

by Henrietta Thornton

Get ready to care far more than you thought you could about fictional strangers. The three in question are Jade, the busy, pampered wife of Atlanta celebrity chef Cam Lasky; and her children, Beatrix and Baxter. This book wastes no time on background, and we get to know these characters as they enter a domestic horror scene. Arriving home from violin-prodigy Beatrix’s music lesson, they are met in the garage by a masked gunman who takes them hostage for a day of psychological terror. He wants $734,296, an odd demand that Jade gives her flashy husband when she can get a word in over the phone, starting him on a desperate quest. The overextended, secretly broke businessman, who’s not the most sympathetic character, is brought to his knees while his family’s love and strength are pushed to the limit. Each character is meticulously drawn, and presented from multiple angles, as the story plays out from the alternating viewpoints of Jade, Cam, and for a short time, the kidnapper. In a clever device, much of Cam’s narrative involves him answering questions in a post-event sensationalist TV interview, which allows Belle (Dear Wife, The Marriage Lie) to parcel out information bit by tantalizing bit. Read something mellow after this, you’ll need it.

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Review

The Key to Deceit

by Henrietta Thornton

Á la Anna Lee Huber’s Verity Kent and Stephanie Graves’ Olive Bright, Electra (Ellie) McDonnell has taken on a “man’s job” while much of the male workforce is away fighting World War II. Ellie is a heroine with a difference, though: she’s a former thief, from a London family that has called its safe-cracking ways to a halt. They’re now working as locksmiths and, in Ellie’s case, using those skills to aid the war effort. Ellie’s government handler, posh Major Ramsey, comes calling again in this second in the series (after A Peculiar Combination, 2021) when a young woman is found dead wearing an unusual, locked bracelet. Locksmithing again comes into play when a key turns up as part of the case, but it soon takes a back seat to Ellie’s other skills. This memorable, tough sleuth continues her investigation into the young woman’s death and her own mother’s long-ago imprisonment as the Blitz starts and a cousin at the warfront hasn’t been heard from. Happily, romance enters the picture, with Ellie pursued by both the major and a more down-to-earth family friend, Felix Lacey. The mysteries, danger, and emotional hills and valleys that are life in wartime will keep readers rapt here and wanting more from this almost-honest woman and her loving, protective circle.

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Review

Who Took Eden Mulligan

by Henrietta Thornton

Perhaps inspired by the real-life disappearance of Northern Ireland mother Jean McConville, Dempsey invites us inside two crimes. The first is a murderous attack on five roommates, and then there’s the cold case resurrected by the message scrawled on their wall: Who Took Eden Mulligan? Eden’s children, now adults, have been adamant in the decades since her disappearance that she wouldn’t leave them, but the woman was an enigmatic outsider in “a pit of savagery and subterfuge.” A Protestant living in a Catholic area of Belfast, she looked a mite too good for neighbors to care about her fate. Detective Danny Stowe has lots to lose in his inquiries—he’s on thin ice after smashing a perpetrator’s head against a wall and needs this win. For that, and more personal reasons, he persuades his best friend from college, a forensic psychologist who’s enduring her own issues, to join the investigation. The old and new cases, and the broken families involved, bring forth the weariness of living in sectarian strife, a mundanity that’s broken by moments of horror. Dempsey excels in portraying the anger that emerges when the dreamy veil of struggle lifts to reveal political violence as “a cover for psychopaths.” Read this for both a satisfying puzzle and an inside look at a culture turned sour.

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Review

The Resting Place

by Henrietta Thornton

When young Swedish woman Eleanor finds her manipulative, angry grandmother Vivianne dying of a stab wound, she’s more depressed and bewildered than sad. Vivianne raised Eleanor on a steady diet of scorching belittlement after the girl was left an orphan. Eleanor’s now working to overcome the hurt while learning to cope with prosopagnosia, or face blindness (she can’t recognize faces, even her own in the mirror). The story quickly moves to Solhöga, Vivianne’s country mansion, where Eleanor, her boyfriend and aunt, and Vivianne’s lawyer aim to inventory the contents. The chore becomes a terrifying ordeal when various members of the party come to mysterious harm; the somber house and sad diary entries detailing the lonely days of a long-ago maid at Solhöga add to the forbidding atmosphere. Sten’s character-driven, psychologically immersive puzzle will keep readers guessing until the end about who killed Vivianne and what’s behind the mysteries at the house. Eleanor’s face blindness adds an interesting and thankfully not overused element to the tale; an apt complement to this is Sarah Strohmeyer’s Do I Know You? (Harper, November), which features a “super-recognizer” who remembers for years the faces of people she sees even once in a crowd.

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Review

The Anomaly

by Henrietta Thornton

As well as offering a peculiar and captivating story, this winner of France’s Prix Goncourt prize, for the “”best and most imaginative prose work of the year,” stands out as wonderfully French. Le Tellier describes his characters in gutting detail while maintaining a distant nonchalance, inviting readers to share in his weariness at how emotionally finished these people are. Among them is Victor Meisel, who resembles “a healthy Kafka who made it past forty” and is writing a book called The Anomaly; André, an architect who’s desperate to hold onto the love of his much-younger girlfriend, and Lucie, that girlfriend, who’s drifting away; David, who’s facing a deadly illness; and Slimboy, a famous singer who spends all his energy maintaining the facade that he’s straight. Their shredded emotions are on display in the lead up to a Paris-New York trip, with each then depicted as one of a handful of strangers on, and the pilot of, a flight that experiences near-lethal turbulence with a bizarre aftermath. Emotions are just one of the problems faced by the survivors, who find themselves captive in a situation that involves not only the CIA and FBI but even the President of the United States (“a fat grouper with a blond wig”). Viewers of Netflix’s hit series Manifest will recognize some elements of this story, but the book and the show are unrelated and the aftermath of the flight is different enough to enthrall fans of the show and to keep them reading to the end.

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Review

Hold Me Down

by Henrietta Thornton

Simon, prolific author of the Witch Cats of Cambridge series, here mines her past as a rock critic. The tale looks at former rockers visiting their own past when they reunite for a benefit after former bandmate Aimee dies. During the concert, Gal Raver, frontwoman of the band and of the book, sees a familiar face in the crowd. It’s TK, the band’s old roadie, who’s later found dead in an alleyway behind the club. Walter, Aimee’s husband, is charged with murdering TK and seems curiously apathetic when Gal tries to help him fight the accusation. Finding out what happened involves numerous murky flashbacks to Gal’s past as a messy, angry drug and alcohol addict, and her behavior and the battle for fleeting success give the book a feeling of darkness. Simon’s evocative writing puts readers inside sweaty clubs that stink of beer and vomit (so much vomit!), and reaches its first height when describing the moment the fledgling band finally gels onstage. The music fades in the last part of the novel, which explores hard truths and the differing ways they can be remembered, with Simon’s depiction of Gal’s slowly unfurling memories a second high point. Note that rape is described here in some detail. For readers who enjoy dark stories and fans of music-themed mysteries.

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Review

Find Me

by Henrietta Thornton

Hope Miller, as she’s known these days, is stuck in a legal no-man’s land. After she was found injured in a car crash, she never regained her memory, doesn’t know who she is, and has continued to live, for years, as a kind of foster daughter of a whole New Jersey town. Police pretend not to notice that she’s driving without a license. She works cash jobs. And her best friend, defense lawyer Lindsay Kelly, who found Hope in the wreck of her car all those years ago, carefully tends to her friend’s safety. Lindsay tries to understand when Hope moves to the Hamptons and asks for no contact for a while, but she’s frantic when the vulnerable woman disappears from the Hamptons home. Looking for Hope, and trying to remain loyal to her while uncovering disturbing truths, has Lindsay examining the case of an already-captured serial killer who stalked women a thousand miles from New York decades before. She’s assisted in the investigation by gutsy NYPD detective Ellie Hatcher, whom readers will know from the previous five books in this series. Also familiar will be Burke’s talent at gripping storytelling, creating thought-provoking characters that make readers squirm with ambivalence, and oh-so-clever endings. There’s no need to read the other books to follow this one, but you’ll want to.

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Review

The Lightning Rod

by Henrietta Thornton

Meltzer, Brad. The Lightning Rod (A Zig and Nola Novel #2). March 2022. 432p. William Morrow.
The intriguing setting here is life around Dover Air Force Base’s mortuary, where fallen soldiers are prepared for burial. In the opening title in this series, Escape Artist, Dover mortician “Zig” Zigarowski helped the Army’s Artist-in-Residence, Nola Brown, who was on the run. Now, Nola, a master at sabotaging the military’s plans for her, clandestinely attends a funeral at Dover, and the action revs back up. Meltzer’s thrilling plot veers from flashbacks to Nola’s dangerous childhood to glimpses inside the military’s orchestration of public knowledge about threats to our lives. Meltzer’s talent for detail makes even idle moments leap to life. While Nola waits for a computer program to load, a gust of wind rolls a beer can into a shopping cart that’s on its side; a nurse who encountered Nola has a necklace with a charm for each of her children, all boys. These mundane moments also highlight the casual viciousness that faces characters at every turn. Personalities, too, offer extreme contrasts: Zig prides himself on having done a loving job with the care of dead soldiers, while his foes care for nobody and stop at nothing to win. Fans of military thrillers should clear a weekend for this; it’s gripping.

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Review

Like a Sister

by Henrietta Thornton

From the outside, Desiree Pierce had it all. Famous hip-hop producer father, starring role on a rich-kid reality show, a huge audience following her every diamond-studded move on Instagram. But her sister, Melina, or Lena, has waited years for the phone call saying that drugs have finally killed Desiree, and that moment is here. Fed up as she is with donning her metaphorical Super Black Woman cape, Lena drags it on, again, to start picking up the pieces. But the background to Desiree’s supposedly accidental death starts to look off. For starters, she was terrified of needles and never would have injected heroin like the police say. And what was she doing in Lena’s residential Bronx neighborhood, miles from her glitzy lifestyle? Lena’s fast-paced investigation of what she believes to be a murder takes her back to painful episodes with her family, a clan tight-knit enough to care deeply about one another but that at the same time can get exasperated to the point of estrangement. Twists combine with deft writing and compelling characters—especially the relatable Lena—to create a memorable novel that’s perfect for those who like tales of flawed love and strong women.

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