Tag:

Psychological

Review

Little Nothings

by Henrietta Thornton

Liv, a bored stay-at-home mother, is leading a double life. She’s been friendless for years, so when she meets other women at an overly earnest children’s music class who also think the event is ridiculous, she’s all in. Liv and her husband, Pete, are parents to a little girl, but soon Liv spends most of her spare time with Beth and Binnie, and then with a new addition to the group, Ange. The friends’ partners and children often take part too but are very much beside the point to the women, who seem almost to be reliving their teen years. The suffocating peer-pressured friendship is made worse when Ange joins, as she’s fond of backstabbing comments that are posed as jokes, and Liv walks on eggshells, fearing she’ll be rejected from her only friendship. Soon Liv and Pete, who are struggling financially, get into massive debt keeping up with expensive dinners and designer outfits that their friends insist they deserve. The pinnacle is a three-week trip to Corfu that is set up at first as a locked-room mystery, but then another person enters the drama, leading to a tantrum-and-booze loaded tragedy. This feels like a movie that you watch from between your fingers as everything goes dreadfully wrong, fast. Try if you enjoy girls’ trip stories.

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Review

Daisy Darker

by Brian Kenney

An homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None that is both wryly humorous and deadly serious. The setting: a Victorian gothic house, named Seaglass, located on a tiny island off the Cornwall coast, accessible only during low tide. The cast: matriarch Nana, her son and ex-daughter-in-law, three adult nieces, a grandniece, and a family friend. The occasion: Nana’s 80th birthday, predicated to be her last. As the sun goes down, the tide rushes in, dinner is served, and then it’s time for Nana to read her will. Our narrator, and very much the center of the book, is Daisy, Nana’s youngest and favorite niece, who was born, in Daisy’s word, “broken,” with a heart condition she could die from at any moment. Nana—a wonder of a character—is a famous children’s book author, and Seaglass overflows with her designs and eerie, Edward Gorey-esque poems. The novel shifts between the family’s painful past and the nerve-wracking present, and as the night grows longer, and the revelations unfold, the carnage increases. The ending manages to shock, and while some readers may feel cheated by the turn of events, others will enjoy having to rethink the whole book. This book isn’t twisty, it’s demonic.

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Review

The Old Woman with the Knife

by Henrietta Thornton

This startling work upends every stereotype of old ladies and killers. Known as Hornclaw, our protagonist is only 65 but welcomes the invisibleness of appearing elderly so as to better function as a disease control specialist: a hired killer. Under her baggy, mismatched clothes, Hornclaw has such a fearsome body that a TV producer at the gym asks her to be on a show about unusual people. But she fears being forced into retirement soon, a euphemism for being killed by the other specialists at the disease control agency. As we observe the abusive childhood that led Hornclaw to obsessively love her dog, Deadweight, but blithely kill strangers, we’re led toward a hairpin turn in her personality, when she finally cares for someone but it is part of a deadly trap. The story, which immerses readers into everyday life in Seoul, is made unforgettable by Gu’s language as she draws readers into the chilling, beautiful wanderings of Hornclaw’s mind, which flits from contemplating someone eating a peach (“she watches a perfect small world being smashed inside his mouth”) to considering the home of a newly butchered man (“the hallway to the living room seemed to loll like a dead person’s tongue”). For lovers of literary fiction and book clubs that will try something different.

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Review

The Lying Club

by Henrietta Thornton

The recent college-admissions scandal comes to mind when meeting the rich, competitive seniors of Colorado’s Falcon Academy High School and their even more fiercely cutthroat moms. Former friendships are thrown to the side when Mia and Sloane, best friends since grade school, both try for a soccer scholarship to UCLA. Their moms, who’ve spent countless hours together at soccer-pitch sidelines over the years, are increasingly at war too. It’s all eye-rolling entertainment for the staff at the school, who must please the moneyed families no matter how ridiculous their obsessions. Probably the most jaded by these mind games is Natalie, a secretary to the principal who has a front seat to the show and whose personal life is slowly being followed down the drain by her professional one. With so many dysfunctional characters and moral rollercoasters, readers won’t know whom to point at or root for when a body is found in the gym. Ward (Beautiful Bad, 2019) does a great job of portraying the disarray caused by meanness and greed, and when characters show unexpected sides, she deftly makes that switch. Note that there’s sexual abuse “off camera” here. For Liane Moriarty’s legions of followers.

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Review

The Lies I Tell

by Brian Kenney

Ingenious grifter. Con-artist extraordinaire. Feminist Robin Hood. Add to this just plain old brilliant and you have the incredible character of Meg Williams. When her mother gets conned out of the family home by a sleazeball boyfriend—then dies shortly afterwards—18-year-old Meg vows this will never happen to her, and she flips the narrative and figures out how to steal from men. She begins small—seducing a high-school principal—but slowly works her way up the food chain as she deftly separates men, one more despicable than the last, from their money. When enough of their assets are in her accounts, she suddenly disappears, off to another city, another persona, another man. While Meg thinks she’s getting away with it all, one woman, journalist Kat Roberts, is watching her. Kate has her own reasons to expose Meg, and the two of them dance around each other as Meg lays the groundwork for her biggest con yet, worth millions of dollars and putting a political career at risk. With two super-strong characters, a remarkably credible and terrifying depiction of high-level scamming, and a pace that’s relentless, Julie Clark has given fans of the domestic thriller a real treat.

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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

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 Shadow House

by Brian Kenney

If you arrived at your new house and found a package at the entrance, containing not some welcome brownies from a neighbor but a grotesquely mutilated bird, what would you do? If you’re anything like me, you’d head for the hills. But Alex, a single mother-of-two, is made from tougher stuff. Escaping from an abusive partner in Sydney, she’s trying out Pine Ridge, an ecovillage out in the boondocks. She’s committed to making it work, especially for her teenage son, who got up to some nasty behavior online. But the bird is only the beginning, as the creepiness includes more horrifying presents, vandalism, and surveillance. It turns out that Alex’s experiences aren’t all that different from those of another family six years ago, but unlike many a thriller protagonist, she’s no victim, and sets out to confront the evil before it destroys her and her family. This is a wonderfully written work of suspense that succeeds in being both completely terrifying and totally believable—no easy feat. For fans of Lisa Jewell and Ruth Ware.

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Review

The Secrets We Share

by Brian Kenney

A bold, ambitious novel with a big, multigenerational story line, a busload of characters, and a smart balance between mystery and suspense. Natalie Cavanaugh and Glenn Abbott are sisters, but not the least alike. Natalie is a tough-as-nails Boston cop, while Glenn is a food blogger and now a book author. What they have in common is what they never talk about: the murder of their father, who was bludgeoned to death in the woods behind their house. But through a series of incidents in Glenn’s life today, the women are drawn back into their shared past, and the story line opens up to include Glenn’s husband, her tween daughter, Natalie’s colleagues on the police force, and many more. It’s remarkable that Hill can keep so many subplots afloat while at the same time creating such a level of suspense that the reader feels as though they are being catapulted to the knock-out conclusion. Hill is the author of the more cozy-ish Hester Thursby series, and librarian Hester makes a few delightful cameos in this book. For fans of Robert Bryndza and Karin Slaughter.

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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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