Tag:

Suspense

Review

Dead of Winter

by Brian Kenney

Have we been holding back on the raw carnage? If so, this book will more than make up for that. It’s winter, and Christa, our narrator, and her boyfriend, Kiernan, join a tour group of eight headed to a splendid lodge in the Rocky Mountains. But en route the weather turns nasty, a huge pine tree blocks their road, and they are forced to seek shelter in an abandoned hunting cabin as the snow piles up. Alarm bells ringing yet? The plot is squarely in the tradition of locked-room mysteries, more often locked mansions or islands these days, and we can expect our eight participants to slowly get bumped off thanks to poison, asphyxiation, or other genteel means. Well, that’s half correct. For most of the novel, the characters are locked in, thanks to the storm, unable to stray much beyond the cabin. But death in this novel is anything but genteel. In fact, it’s downright terrifying. But even more disturbing is Christa’s plight; obsessively assessing her peers to determine whom, if anyone, she can trust. Coates is also a horror author, and there’s a good dollop of that genre woven through this novel of high suspense. Keep a cat or two on your lap when reading this one.

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Review

The Puzzle Master

by Henrietta Thornton

I’ll be 51 this Sunday and I read two books a week. It adds up, and this is the best I’ve ever read. As it’s very far from an ordinary read , I can’t write a review as I normally would. The plot and characters are fantastic, compelling, memorable, surprising…but the book is more than anything a magic box. Trussoni also has an unsettling ability to mention everything of interest and everything that has come up lately. I thought about making a website that would emulate the ability of a pile of transparency sheets to create a composite image, and that process is mentioned. I learned about the idea of the singularity this week–the possible future time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable–and it’s there. A central theme is a kind of mythical creature I had mentioned to me recently. And the characters, and of course the author, see into the reader in other ways, with the bizarre turns in the tale perfectly allowing every nuance of the strange folks within to emerge, but also startling the consumer of this sorcery on every page. What’s the book about? Everything, but there’s a framework. A puzzle maker, who, through a brain injury, gains the remarkable ability to see “that particular kind of order that [distinguishes] a puzzle from everything else on the planet,” meets a prisoner who hands him a drawing, a puzzle he can’t even begin to unlock. It leads him to letters and a diary that describe a dangerous quest to “lift the veil between the human and the Divine and [stare] directly into the eyes of God.” There’s homework before you read this so that you can be in the right frame of mind to take in its wonder. Read Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, Aimee Pokwatka’s Self Portrait with Nothing, and Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. And then clear a weekend.

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Review

Vampires of El Norte

by Brian Kenney

It’s clear that Isabel Cañas wants all the genres—speculative, historical, horror, romance, mystery—and why not? She does such a magical job of blending them together, as this follow-up to the Gothic The Hacienda makes clear. Set during the Mexican-American War, known in Mexico as intervención estadounidense en México (United States intervention in Mexico), at its core this is a Romance. Nena, daughter of a Texas rancher, and Néstor, son of vaqueros, are young teens who’ve grown up together. During a late-night excursion on the ranch—in search of lost treasure—Nena is attacked by a beast that drains her of her blood. Feeling no pulse and assuming she’s dead, Néstor flees. But Nena survives, and years later, amid the war, they meet again. He’s a member of the calvary, she a curandera, or healer. Their reunion shocks them both, with Nena unleashing her anger at Néstor for abandoning her. But soon there are bigger issues at hand, including attacks from the Yanquis and bloodthirsty creatures lurking in the dark. Compelling, steamy, and with a wonderful perspective on the War, this unique tale is not to be missed.

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Review

A Twisted Love Story

by Henrietta Thornton

Never has a book been more accurately named. Downing introduces a couple, Wes and Ivy, who are playing a dangerous love/hate game: they can’t stay away from each other but are mutually destructive, willfully so. When Wes receives a visit at work from a detective and finds out she’s from the sex-crimes unit, he knows there’s only one person who could have false-reported him: Ivy. Just for fun, she’s come back into his life after one of their multiple breakups. Also for kicks is her reporting of Wes as a stalker, and she’s languidly irritated when tenacious Detective Karen Colglazier wants to pursue an investigation. Ivy is done with the stalking ruse and needs the police to let it go, but for once she’s not calling the shots. Wes is losing control as well, not only because Ivy has come back into his life against all his friends’ wishes, but because, unknown to him, he has a coworker who may be an actual stalker. Bianca is a super-efficient assistant who arrives at work before everyone else and leaves after them, using her skeleton key and type-A façade to keep tabs on their personal and professional lives. The purpose? Keep reading for one of several delicious twists. This has “fantastic suspense movie” written all over it. While you’re waiting, try Downing’s For Your Own Good (2021).

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Review

What Never Happened

by Henrietta Thornton

Overtown, as California’s Catalina Island residents call the mainland, Disneyland has been closed. On Catalina, the ferries have stopped and even the St. Patrick’s Day karaoke is off. COVID is on the way, if it isn’t there already. But Collette “Coco” Weber has bigger worries. She’s back on the island where her parents and brother were murdered years ago, a crime against the only Black family on Catalina. Coco herself escaped as she had sneaked out against her parents wishes. She’s hardly in line with others’ wishes now, either. Aunt Gwen—famous for stealing trinkets from rich tourists—has been living in the house Coco inherited when her parents died, and isn’t thrilled to share it. And Coco’s determination to continue owning the house clashes with someone’s plan: there’s a housing shortage on Catalina, and she’s violently pressured to sell. At the same time, island widows are being found dead, alone in remote spots that they wouldn’t likely have visited without coercion. As Catalina gets ever more dangerous, a peril nicely juxtaposed against Coco’s job as an island newspaper obituary writer, readers will fall deeper into the compelling mysteries of who killed the protagonist’s family years before and who’s behind today’s mayhem. Hall’s writing of a PTSD-stricken protagonist rings true, with her “warts and all” presentation offering veracity, resilience, and exasperation in equal measure. Those new to the author will want to go back to her previous, also fast-moving puzzles such as last year’s We Lie Here.

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Review

The Golden Gate

by Henrietta Thornton

Depression-era San Francisco’s Claremont hotel is a wonderful playground for sisters Isabella and Iris Bainbridge Stafford, six and eight years old, respectively, who roam through it while their wealthy mother plays tennis. The luxurious hotel has a seven-story-long spiral slide that guests can use as a fire escape, one that Iris might think she’s entering to play when she fatally plunges down a laundry chute. Years later, tragedy visits the hotel again—many say it’s been cursed all along—when Presidential candidate Walter Wilkinson is found murdered in his room (murdered twice, in fact—the book explains all). Police officer Alejo Gutiérrez, passing as Al Sullivan, is the slightly jaded, but still caring, investigator who must sift through the jumble of rumors, racism against Asian hotel workers and city residents, and secretive behavior by rich characters who think the law doesn’t apply to them in his efforts to discover who killed the politician. This saga—the story has as many twisting corridors as the hotel–allows Chua to dig deep into the privileges and invisible barriers at work in any haves-and-have-nots meeting, with memorable results. Pair this with the information on the treatment of San Francisco’s Chinese citizens in David Quammen’s excellent Spillover for a sobering and enlightening view of that community’s history.

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Review

What the Neighbors Saw

by Brian Kenney

What’s the scariest place in crime fiction these days? Yes, that would be the suburbs. Alexis and Sam, her husband, buy a run-down house in a super-posh neighborhood in the DC suburbs. They love what the home could become, but for now it just feels like a bottomless money pit. Alexis is pregnant with the couple’s second child, and with little help from Sam—he’s trying for partnership at his law firm—motherhood is no picnic. To say the two grate on each other is an understatement. It doesn’t help that most people in the neighborhood assume that brown-skinned Alexis (she’s part Honduran) is one of the help. But the women in the neighborhood, chardonnay in hand, do try to make her feel welcome, while pumping her for gossip. When their neighbor Teddy is found dead by the nearby Potomac River—he was out for a run—everything takes on a sinister patina. In the ensuing weeks, Alexis grows close to Blair, Teddy’s widow, offering support while Blair fills her in on the lives of their neighbors. They’re a creepy crew if there ever was one, forever loitering in each other’s backyards, peeking into windows. Could Teddy’s death be linked to one of them? In the armful of suburban domestic thrillers publishing this summer, this debut—with its wild, super-spin of a plot, in which everything is turned upside down—is one not to miss.

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Review

Between Two Strangers

by Brian Kenney

Kate White’s suspense novels always provide me with the perfect imaginary getaway—and Between Two Strangers does not disappoint. Struggling artist Skyler Moore gets summoned to a posh Scarsdale law firm on a matter of private business, only to discover that she’s to receive a large inheritance. We’re talking millions here (feel free to take ten minutes and imagine this happening to you). The catch? She has no idea who Christopher is, the guy who left her such a sum. Only after research and days of reflection does she realize he was a one-night stand from over a decade ago, when she was a grad student in Boston; she has had no contact with him since. It’s not surprising that Skyler suppressed memories of that evening as it was just a few days later that her younger sister, also a student in Boston, went missing. While being harassed by Christopher’s family, especially his wife, who’s convinced Christopher and Skyler were having an affair, Skyler has to keep it together for an important exhibit she has coming up…but can’t help being drawn back to that one fateful weekend. What was Christopher trying to tell her through the trust he left her?

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Review

The Rescue

by Henrietta Thornton

Parker, author of one of last year’s most memorable crime novels, A Thousand Steps, is back with something different, but with echoes of the best of that book. It opens with a gunfight between Tijuana, Mexico drug cartels that ends in human loss but, more importantly for this story, the shooting injury of a dog who’s rescued by a passing boy. Later, waiting for adoption in a shelter, the dog becomes the unexpected star of a viral video made by Bettina Blazak, a California journalist who can’t resist him; she names him Felix after the vet who saved the dog’s life and takes him home. Bettina quickly sees that this might not be the street mutt everyone thinks. He is used to being on a leash and understands commands in both Spanish and English. Enter the multiple characters who have seen the video and want Felix for themselves. The dog is a former drug and currency sniffer for the DEA, and lately his superior skills have been used by a drug gang to find and steal their rival gang’s wares, hence the opening shootout. They want him back, and another previous owner, the child who first discovered Felix’s superior ability to find anything by scent, has also seen the video and is sending Bettina heartbreaking emails. Who will win? It takes some violent scenes to find out, and along the way we’re treated to a look at the world of sniffer dogs—it’s fascinating!—and, even better, a look at love, loyalty, and resilience through canine eyes. Sounds odd? It is, but it’s also heartwarming with a side of fear and thrills.

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Review

Everyone Here is Lying

by Brian Kenney

It’s Tuesday afternoon in suburban Stanhope, and all is as it should be. Family man Dr. William Wooler is at a local motel with one of the hospital volunteers. Except it turns out that today she’s decided to dump him. Furious, he heads home, only to discover his nine-year-old daughter, Avery, in the kitchen, having skipped out on choir practice. As “difficult” as she is mouthy, she’s sucking down Oreos and doing a good job of pressing her father’s buttons. But when Wooler strikes her with a blow to the head that knocks her to the floor, it’s still a shock, to both of them and the reader. Dad-of-the-year hightails it out of there—he goes for a drive to cool off—and when the Woolers’ son gets home from basketball practice, he finds the house empty. Where’s Avery? Thus begins this intense domestic suspense novel in which an entire community is taken apart and turned inside out. Families are interviewed, oftentimes iteratively, histories are resurrected, houses are searched, motives are examined, and what the cops don’t expose, the media does. All the pieces come together brilliantly in a shocking finale.

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