Category:

Review

Review

First Lie Wins

by Jeff Ayers

Ryan Summer helps a young woman named Evie Porter with a flat tire, and shortly afterward, they are inseparable in Elston’s twisty thriller. He falls head over heels for her, but in Evie’s case, the relationship is an assignment from her mysterious boss she has never seen, Mr. Smith. Her orders are to get close and obtain information about Ryan’s business. As time passes, she finds herself falling for her mark, and one evening, while meeting some of Ryan’s friends, she meets Lucca Marino. Evie’s real name is Lucca Marino, and this woman is using Evie’s real-life identity and background. It’s clear her boss has put a target on her back, and she will have to use all her manipulative skills to stay alive, even if that means she has no realistic chance of returning to her old life. Retirement is not an option. Elston has crafted a story that stretches credulity a bit, but works. Readers will be dying to finish this fast enough so they can decipher what’s going on, and it’s a guarantee that they’ll find the truth unexpected. Fans of Hank Phillippi Ryan and Megan Miranda should seek this out.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Death of an Author

by Brian Kenney

ou don’t have to struggle to find reviews of Death of an Author, a crime novella written with several sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) programs. The claim is that 95 percent of the book is computer generated, mostly using ChatGPT, and reviewers are transfixed by the notion that AI can produce anything that halfway functions as fiction. Especially since the AI-produced fiction we already have is pretty miserable. But the real question is: how does it hold up as a mystery, the genre the title clearly lays claim to? Surprisingly well, actually. In no time at all, mystery readers will encounter the tropes that assure them they’re in familiar territory, with enough mild plot developments to keep the pages flipping, if not flying, and language that ranges from the clunky (diction!) to the lovely. Scholar Gus Dupin is invited to the funeral of Canadian literary star Peggy Firmin, “a pioneer of using artificial intelligence to manufacture literary artifacts,” who was murdered in the outskirts of Toronto. While he never met Peggy, Gus has spent the better part of his life writing about her. Her funeral turns out to be an exclusive affair—with some fun walk-ons, like Michael Ondaatje—and feels as though it’s lifted right out of Agatha Christie, if the Dame had access to avatars. And guess who’s the prime suspect? The story moves on, becoming a bit too meta, too smarty pants for this reader. But let’s just agree that it’s fascinating and fun. I reviewed it as an ebook, but the publisher produces primarily audiobooks.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
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.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Just Another Missing Person

by Brian Kenney

What do we know about lying? That one lie often begets others. That lies find a way of escaping their boundaries. And that knowledge of a lie can give you power over the liar. DCI Julia Day is leading the investigation into the case of a young woman who’s gone missing. A brilliant detective, Julia is slightly suspicious of this case—the pieces don’t quite fit together—when she’s carjacked and forced to agree to lie about the alleged perpetrator. Except the story hardly ends there. As the investigation unravels, more cold cases come alive and more lies are exposed. McAlister brilliantly leads us into the lives of parents, driven mad by grief, and Julia’s own relationship with her daughter, the well-spring of so many falsehoods. Readers will appreciate a police procedural that is deeply embedded in character. That moves adroitly between the lives of cops and civilians. And that explores the difficulty of making sound moral choices. McAlister is the author of Wrong Place Wrong Time, a Reese’s Book Club Pick.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

After That Night

by Jeff Ayers

Nothing was ever the same for Sara Linton after the night she was attacked. Though the police apprehended the culprit, Sara has struggled to deal with the trauma ever since. She’s now engaged to GBI Special Agent Will Trent, and they are crafting wedding plans. When Sara promises to pursue justice for another young woman, who dies, she has no idea that this will force her to confront the darkness and memories she has been avoiding for years. Will wants to help, and what they uncover leads to connected attacks with ties to recent incidents. Slaughter is a master of telling a story with horrific elements and spinning it to be both clinical and compelling. She dives into the characters we love and provides more insight into what has made them who they are, which makes them come alive on the page. The ABC television series Will Trent was recently renewed for a second season, and its popularity will steer readers to pick up this book. Whether a newcomer to the series or a fan who has read the previous entries, readers will find this one of the best to date.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died

by Brian Kenney

Flower does a magnificent job of opening up the world of mid-19th century Amherst, the Dickinson family, and especially young Emily, who has yet to become the eccentric recluse of her later years. In this volume, Austin and his wife have returned from their wedding trip and moved into the mansion next door to the family home, just in time to welcome their houseguests Ralph Waldo Emerson—who has come to lecture at Amherst College—and his secretary, Luther. Narrated by Emily’s maid Willa Nobel, we’re privy to all the family gossip, while Emily seeks a way to share her writing with Emerson. But the death of young Luther, who’s found in a bed of black-eyed Susans, sets Emily and Willa on a path to satisfy the great Emerson’s questions, quell the vociferous speculation, and clear the Dickinson name. This series is historical crime fiction at its best, balancing insight into the past with a fast-moving investigation into the crime.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Malibu Burning

by Henrietta Thornton

You’ll find it hard not to root for both sides in two-time Edgar winner Goldberg’s latest, which pits arson investigators against a Robin Hood-like ex-con who sets a wildfire to consume what his enemies hold most dear: their possessions. The investigators are Walter Sharpe, a veteran of California fires who’s nicknamed Sharpei for his don’t-care physique and his newbie partner, Andrew Walker, who’s eight-months-pregnant wife begged him to take this job so that he will get home for dinner every night. But things get, ahem, hotter than the duo plans when con-man Danny Cole is released from his time in prison, which he spent as a firefighter, with years of nothing but planning under his belt. While this is a series debut, the fire depicted is the same one that featured in the author’s Lost Hills; fans of that book should know that this one looks at the inferno from a different perspective and involves a different crime story. Both fans and newcomers to Goldberg’s work will enjoy the fast-moving, at times terrifying, tale and its close look at firefighting and arson-investigation techniques. A bonus is the companion buddy story featuring likable new police-procedural partners and their unusual focus

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

This is How We End Things

by Henrietta Thornton

A toxic workplace implodes as Jacobs (Always the First to Die) puts deception and its fallout under the microscope. The workplace, which darkly echoes the setting of the recent Netflix series The Chair, is North Carolina’s Dorrance University, but more specifically a six-person project within its psychology department. A professor and five graduate students, who embody the worst of what happens when coworkers see one another as family, are conducting an odd experiment. They fool students into thinking they are missing credits and must participate in an (unknown to them, mock) psychology study to graduate. The real purpose of the interaction is to gauge how willing students will be to lie when under pressure. That deception is just the beginning of the lies and manipulations that emerge in this story after one of the too tightly knit group is murdered, with further violence not far behind. Jacobs succeeds wonderfully in portraying a hothouse-type atmosphere in which everyone’s a suspect and the suspicions are just the latest inspiration for backbiting, accusations, and pettiness. Readers won’t see the ending coming and will relish the red herrings and twists along the way.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Board to Death

by Jeff Ayers

Ben Rosencrantz leaves his job as an English professor and returns home to Sugar House, a suburb of Salt Lake City, newly divorced from his husband and ready to help his ailing dad run the family’s game shop. The store is struggling financially, so Ben’s initially torn when Clive, a customer known for unscrupulous methods, offers a chance to buy a rare board game worth thousands of dollars. But when Ben tells the seller no thanks, Clive is livid. The next time Ben sees Clive is when his dead body lands on the store’s doorstep. Ben and Ezra, the cute florist from next door, decide to investigate on their own but quickly learn that the case is no game. Connor’s large and charming cast of characters is so engaging that the mystery, while fun to solve, is just icing on a multi-layer cake. Many cozy mysteries have recipes in the back of the book, but this one has rules for a fun game and questions for your next book club meeting. Whether you are a fan of LGBTQ fiction or not, this is a terrific debut.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Blood Betrayal

by Henrietta Thornton

Khan’s latest features extremes: fast moments of violence and the long years of condemnation and recriminations that follow, and found families—good and evil—in contrast with those we’re born into. Blackwater Falls, CO, Community Response Officer Inaya Rahman is facing a ghost from her Chicago PD past: John Broda, an officer who badly beat her. Now he wants a favor. Broda’s son, another officer, is accused of shooting an innocent young man, and Broda knows that Inaya is both smart and caring enough to find out the truth. In return, he’ll give her a recording she’s long wanted of another officer implicating himself in a racist crime. It’s not Rahman’s case, and she clashes with her boss, Qas Seif. Inaya and Qas’s feelings for each other, and the family ties that are a highlight here, only complicate matters. Further difficulties are added by a parallel crime, this time one Inaya is officially working on: a white officer who’s near retirement shoots a young Black man, and the community is seething. Khan excels in creating multifaceted characters whose engrossing stories bring up social questions to which there are no easy answers. As in the best crime fiction, the solution here is both satisfying and unexpected.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail