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Review

Review

Murder at an Irish Bakery

by Henrietta Thornton

We don’t normally review the 11th book in a series, because typically after a few titles the series needs no further introduction. But I grabbed this one from the (virtual) pile because 1. It’s set in Ireland, my former home; 2. It’s set in a bakery, my spiritual home; 3. Murder. The Ireland here is a thoroughly modern one, with the tale set around a baking-competition reality show. Famous cookbook author Aoife McBride is the one to beat, as the contestants vie to impress the judges with elaborate chocolate constructions, fancy layered creations, and to-die-for tea cakes, all to win twenty-thousand Euro and a boost to their baking-career ambitions. The producers throw in reality-show-required conflict, of course, but get more drama than they bargained for when a protester (“Sugar kills! Stop the show!”) outside the studio mysteriously drops dead. His is not the last face to fall in the flour, so to speak. Gardaí (police officers) Siobhán O’Sullivan and Aretta Dabiri and Siobhán’s new husband, Detective Sergeant Macdara Flannery, must solve the mystery while the cameras roll and the baking puns fly. This has more than the contestants’ groan-worthy puns, though, with O’Connor (No Strangers Here) giving readers a healthy balance of whodunit and bitchy competition, not to mention a cute relationship in still-in-the-honeymoon-phase Siobhán and Macdara. The closing recipe for Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Guinness Cake alone is worth the book price.

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Review

The Last Word

by Brian Kenney

Emma Carpenter is house-sitting in near-total isolation on the Washington coast. For company there’s Laika, her Golden Retriever; a retired alcoholic author a half-mile up the coast with whom she exchanges brief messages; and the occasional delivery person. Something’s bugging Emma. After all, you don’t take a gig like this unless you’ve got a project you’re working on or some issues you need to resolve, and for Emma it’s the latter. She keeps herself occupied by walking Laika and reading thrillers, plowing through two ebooks a day until she comes across a novel so misogynistic, so poorly written, she can’t help but give it a negative review, setting off an online dialog with the author, who demands the review be retracted. That’s when things start to get weird—and tension starts to heighten—as every evening the security lights switch on and off, or Emma hears footsteps in the house, or the CCTV catches an intruder outside her door—complete with ghoulish mask. Could it possibly be the author Emma has been arguing with? Whomever, it is, Emma is no damsel in distress, and she’d rather fight than run. From there the narrative speeds up, the terror mounts, and the layers of plot begin to unfold until the reader feels like they’re strapped to a one-person luge, runners greased and no way to get free. Perfect for the nail biters.

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Review

How Can I Help You

by Henrietta Thornton

Clear your calendar, silence your phone, and settle down to enjoy Laura Sims’ latest book in one joyous sitting. You deserve it and I guarantee you’ll thank me. Set among library workers in a small public library—no author has ever gotten library culture as right as Sims—this book is as unsettling as a Shirley Jackson novel with the same crazy stalker energy of a Patricia Highsmith tale. It’s time to move on for ex-nurse Margo, who leaves in her wake scores of suspicious deaths in a handful of hospitals. A library clerk position at the Carlyle Public Library gives her a chance at redemption, along with a new name, hair color, and wardrobe. And she can still help people, “not the way I helped them before, at the hospital, but still.” She’s able to keep the lid on her urges, for the most part, until two years later when Patricia, a new reference librarian, is hired. The two strike up a friendship of sorts—they live in the same apartment building—but when an elderly patron dies in the bathroom, and Margo becomes way over-excited, Patricia finds herself becoming obsessed with Margo and begins documenting her actions. The narrative alternates between the two women as the novel grows deeper, darker, and creepier, ending in a stunning, perfect climax.

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Review

Gone Tonight

by Henrietta Thornton

Catherine Sterling’s personal and professional worlds are beginning to collide: she’s a nurse who cares for patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and her mother is starting to show classic symptoms. The two live together, making the forgetfulness hard to miss, with Ruth Sterling looking very confused when recent events are discussed and forgetting words—calling ice cubes “water squares,” for example. Ruth is reluctant to get any scans that could confirm the likely diagnosis—her mother died of Alzheimer’s, she says, and she knows what’s ahead. But then Catherine makes a discovery that causes her to doubt that her mother’s problems are real. As the point of view shifts between the two women, readers get Ruth’s first-person point of view; her odd behavior is hiding an explosive past that Catherine knows nothing about. Readers are in for a wild cat-and-mouse game as this tight duo (boundaries, what are they?) faces terrible odds when Catherine delves into her mother’s past and Ruth hides the pair from an encroaching threat. There are some very sad moments here, related to dire poverty and child sexual abuse. Overall, it’s an eye-opening look at how “our minds…talk us out of things we don’t want to know.”

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Review

I Have Some Questions for You

by Brian Kenney

This book is centered on one question: back in 1995, did Omar Evans, then a twenty-five-year-old Black man and athletic trainer, murder high school student Thalia Keith? And it’s narrated by one woman, podcaster and Thalia’s roommate, Bodie Kane. From there this novel extends in myriad directions, covers over twenty years, takes us across the country, and dives into Bodie’s past and present, as well as the questionable memories of a whole cast of characters. Yes, it’s a lot, but it’s also brilliantly successful and absolutely riveting. In 2018, Bodie was invited back to teach for two weeks at The Granby School, the elite New England boarding school she attended over 20 years ago. Her students are creating podcasts, with one choosing to revisit Thalia’s murder, a topic Bodie has kept at arm’s length. But gradually Bodie wonders if the police arrested the wrong man and the murderer is walking free. Ultimately convinced of Omar’s innocence, she reaches out to classmates for memories, photographs, any records that could help piece together that evening over twenty years ago. In many ways, what Bodie does is reopen a cold case, without any help from the cops, one that’s rich in newly found details, tacitly informed by #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. While addressing much of the book to a suspect we never meet, over the next several years, Bodie and her students raise enough questions to be taken seriously. Overlaying all this is Bodie’s personal life, including trauma from her past and a break-up with her husband, an artist accused of sexual harassment. Add to this the murders of other women that Makkai tucks around the main narrative, giving Thalia’s murder ever greater context. This is one of the books I’m most eager to share with a book group. It demands discussion.

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Review

Tina, Mafia Soldier

by Henrietta Thornton

My first impression of this 1994 Italian novel was that the translator must have gotten quite a workout, with, for example, a character described as exhibiting “childish mischievousness…elusive, playful provocation” and the setting called “contaminated, ruined, corrupted, infested, dirty.” Next came the confusion over the story’s era. It takes time to grasp that we’re visiting the 1980s in Sicily, which is one part of what makes the book so rich; the island is an anachronism. The Sicilian words sprinkled throughout also seem fermented relics of a bygone time; words like scassapagghiara, thugs, and spasciamarroni, guttermouth. Growing from this arid dystopia is a masculidda, or tomboy, called Tina (she creates this nickname for Cettina because it’s “short, hard, a bit foreign”). Time is again confused here, with Tina acting both much older than her teenage years, such as when she takes over a band of boy mafia trainees, and much younger, in her obsession with impressing grownups so that she can become “respected,” i.e., a mafia member. The narrator, who’s writing a book about Tina, leads us to the Bronx, as Tina’s run-down neighborhood is called by locals. Our protagonist is strangely absent from the town and readers aren’t sure until the end if she’s on the run, in prison, or maybe dead. Through the book we get a look at the notorious, shocking life of the girl who defied her father’s saying that “A night [is] wasted when you make a girl” to satisfy violent ambitions. Well worth the read, especially for those who enjoy stories of women smashing barriers.

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Review

The Boys from Biloxi

by Henrietta Thornton

The 48th novel from the biggest name in legal thrillers is a departure for him, with the book taking place over generations and lots more of it outside the courtroom than usual, all to great effect. The boys of the title are two sets of fathers and sons on very different sides of the law in Biloxi, Mississippi. Their saga starts with a look at the founding of the hardscrabble city by Croatian fishermen. By the time we reach the 1950s and meet Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco, the sons in question, the city has thriving clubs with prostitution, gambling, and all the violence and intimidation that go alongside. Hugh’s father, Lance, is the head of organized crime in Biloxi, able to grow his awful interests with the help of corrupt police. Fighting against him and his ilk is Keith’s father, Jesse, a lawyer whose education and climb we’ve witnessed and who dreams of becoming DA and cleaning up his city for good. As the two sides becomen entrenched, Grisham takes us on side trips that follow the various small-time and not-so-small-time criminals whose work feeds the Rudy-Malco divide, with the story building toward an epic legal showdown that pits honor against evil. There are no major female characters here, and the book may not pass the Bechdel test, but readers who can overlook that will be treated to vintage Grisham: a great story, characters to cheer for and loathe, and gripping legal drama. Fans of Jeffrey Archer as well as of Grisham will love this.

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Review

Device Free Weekend

by Brian Kenney

Get-togethers with college friends can often be bittersweet, although as we age reunions tend to be more mellow. Except in this novel, in which a weekend with your now-middle-aged friends doesn’t just end in acrimony. It leads to unimaginable destruction, and I’m not talking about damage to the wine cellar. Über billionaire Ryan Cloverhill—substitute him with your least favorite tech CEO—has invited his six closest college friends to an all-expenses-paid weekend on his private island in Puget Sound. Although they haven’t been in touch much lately, this group lived together throughout college, dated one another, and roomed together as adults, with the assumption that they would always be there for one another. After Ryan collects all their devices and locks them away—painful!—the weekend kicks off with plenty of wine, glorious food, and a sunset cruise. But the next morning, the six wake up, bleary-eyed, only to discover that Ryan is gone, they’re locked in the mansion, there’s a tablet computer teasing them (“Unlock Me!”), and they need to work together to discover the code. Yes, it’s another locked-on-an-island mystery, but the ingredients are so unusual and the plot so outrageous that this is completely unique. Readers will love the fast pace, the wonderful integration of technology, the mad Ryan—somewhat reminiscent of Dr. No—and the development of the hostages.

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Review

Killingly

by Brian Kenney

A haunting tale set in the rarefied world of Mount Holyoke college, the oldest of the Seven Sisters, and inspired by a true story. It’s 1897 and Bertha Mellish, a quiet and rather odd junior, has gone missing, last seen walking into the woods that surround the college. As days go by, her disappearance draws to campus her sister and father—an enfeebled minister from Killingly, Connecticut—the police, and a private investigator hired by the family. But the one person who likely knows what happened to Bertha is Agnes Sullivan, and she’s being incredibly circumspect. Agnes is poor and Irish, a promising scientist, and Bertha’s closest friend…or lover? At a time when women in an environment like Mount Holyoke could establish romantic relationships, and display affection, Agnes and Bertha were such a couple—in fact, they planned after graduation to live in a Boston Marriage, the name for two women who set up a household together. So why is Agnes so tight-lipped? Rape, incest, abortion, vivisection, and insanity swirl around the narrative, as does the imagining of the precarious lives of women, even when privileged. Beutner does a wonderful job of pulling the reader into this world then locking the door behind us, keeping us engaged until the very last page.

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Review

The Personal Assistant

by Henrietta Thornton

@UnapologeticallyAlex is Alex Hutchinson’s wildly successful Instagram account, one that is moving toward a million followers until she and her personal assistant AC hit the booze and the next morning her following has turned rabid. Through her hangover haze, Alex sees that she has fifteen thousand notifications that give her in ALL ANGRY CAPS the information she dreads: last night, she trashed another online celebrity in a three-paragraph-long diatribe that might or might not have used the words “attention-seeking slut.” And that’s only the beginning. Alex and her handsome, financial-guru husband, Patrick, who has a successful TV show, along with their twin daughters, find themselves suddenly locked in a spiral of misfortune. Alex’s personal assistant—the one person who could fix this Insta nightmare—is missing. The police discover evidence of a crime in their carriage house. And the normally well-behaved twins are in trouble at school for drinking. Can it get worse? Oh yes, it can. Join Alex for this wild ride—you won’t be sorry!—and get ready for a look at the real world of online fame, which is made to seem both frighteningly exposing and frighteningly isolating by the masterful narrative and especially the inner dialogs of Alex, AC, and Patrick. While this is a thriller with tech as a catalyst, anyone who likes a great story will eat it up (the heaping spoonful of schadenfreude doesn’t hurt).

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