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Suspense

Review

Her Deadly Game

by Henrietta Thornton

Keera Duggan has had her fill of being pushed around. She had to leave her promising job in the Seattle prosecutor’s office because her one-time romantic interest couldn’t take no for an answer She’s now reluctantly taken her legal skills to Patrick Duggan & Associates, a move she swore she’d never make. Patrick is her alcoholic father and the associates are Keera and her long-suffering sisters.

As the newbie, Keera’s paying her dues on small-time cases until the last straw: her father is too drunk for court and she must step in. So, when a big case comes up on a night when she’s on phone duty, she grabs it and verbally elbows her family out of the way the next day. An ultra-rich money manager is accused of killing his wife, a disabled woman (she uses a wheelchair and is unfortunately described throughout the book as “confined” to it). She couldn’t have killed herself, even though she’s found at home alone, shot in the head, with a gun beside her. The only possibility seems a SODDI defense (some other dude did it).

Then Keera, a skilled chess player, gets an email from a stranger warning her that, “You’re in the game of your life, so play like your life depends on it.” As well as following an entire game of chess, move by move, that Keera plays with an online opponent, readers will eagerly follow the wonderfully obstinate Keera as she refuses to let up on this case even as the obstacles, puzzles, and twists keep coming. Dugoni’s afterword explains that legal thrillers are his roots, and with the intricate plotting and winning characterization here, readers will be glad he returned to them.

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Review

We Love to Entertain

by Brian Kenney

Praise to Strohmeyer for creating a novel both so funny—the behind-the-scenes details of the HGTV-like show To the Manor Build are a hoot—and so frightening. When a character is locked in a root cellar, I had to remind myself that this wasn’t Scandi Noir and she would survive.

The setting is Snowden, Vermont, where Holly and Robert Barron are one of three teams that are renovating fixer-uppers, with the public voting on the winning home. Lots of money hangs in the balance, both for the winners and for To the Manor Build through endorsements.

It would seem that the attractive Barrons have the lead—nauseatingly, they actually get married on the show to help boost ratings—when things start to fall apart. And I’m not talking about the late delivery of the blue, $16,000 French stove. Holly and Robert disappear, leaving a trail of blood in their wake.

Quick to be blamed is twenty-something Erika Turnbull. A daughter of Kim, the town clerk, she was working as the Barron’s assistant—no job too menial—and had a pretty major crush on Robert. Small-town Snowden is lit up with gossip.

To clear her name, Erika’s forced to work with her most unlikely partner, her mother, and the two of them—along with some truly memorable hangers-on—head off to solve the murders, shut up the obnoxious To the Manor Build producers, and resolve a secret of Kim’s that might provide the answers they need.

This book should appear to a broad range of readers, from twenty- and thirty-somethings to cozy fans and those looking for traditional mysteries.

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Review

Girls and Their Horses

by Henrietta Thornton

The Parker family started off as regular Texans, but now financier Jeff just can’t fail and they are Rolling. In. Money. His wife, Heather, seems unaware of how he makes such a fortune, but who cares? Home is now a California mansion where they have a few shelves of books in an otherwise empty library; the rest of the house is almost empty as well, but with Heather determined to spend their fortune as fast as possible, the minimalist look won’t last.
Daughter Piper, 18, misses her old friends and hates her mom’s relentless efforts to live through her children, primarily by making them into champion horse riders. Piper has rejected that life and Heather’s focus is now on younger daughter Maple, who’s terrified of the huge horses she’s forced to ride and a terrible equestrian, but desperately trying to improve. Her tortured lessons quickly become a cash cow for Kieran Flynn, the cult-leader-like boss of the $10,000 per month (PER MONTH!) stables near the Parker’s behemoth home.
What starts as dysfunction becomes much more serious when a body is found at the stables. Stories of Mable’s horse-obsessed, mean-girl acquaintances and their horse-obsessed, mean-girl moms alternate with interviews by the steely Detective Perez, who wants none of these characters’ nonsense. Get ready to enter another world and a perplexing puzzle: we don’t even know who’s dead till near the end of the book, let alone who the killer is. A great summer read

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Review

Prom Mom

by Brian Kenney

Laura Lippman’s standalone novels are tremendously smart, descend deeply into the lives of a small cast of characters, and slowly build the readers’ anxiety to a nearly unbearable level. Prom Mom doesn’t disappoint.

Amber Glass left Baltimore decades ago, and for a good reason. The night of her prom, Amber gave birth, alone and without fully understanding she was pregnant. The baby died, and Amber, burdened with the tabloid moniker Prom Girl, was briefly incarcerated. Meanwhile, her prom date and crush, Joe Simpson, escaped largely unscathed, free to pursue the girl of his dreams.

When circumstances align to bring Amber back to Baltimore, she can’t stop thinking of Joe. Both have full lives. Married to a plastic surgeon he adores with a younger girlfriend on the side (yes, he’s that guy), Joe runs a busy commercial real estate firm, while Amber is using an inheritance to create a surprisingly successful gallery. Yet encounters are inevitable—Baltimore’s a small town—and slowly the two are drawn into a relationship they seem powerless to stop.

Set during 2020-2021, when the pandemic was at its peak and so many lives were being upended, Prom Mom brings us somewhere so shocking, yet so credible, we’re left contemplating this story for days to come.

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Review

The Centre

by Brian Kenney

London-based Anisa is a translator—she provides subtitles for Bollywood movies—but dreams of translating great works of literature. Her spare time is spent hanging out, talking politics, and complaining about her rather useless white boyfriend, Adam, himself a highly successful translator. In fact, on a trip with Anisa to visit her family in Karachi, Adam reveals that he’s also become fluent in Urdu, speaking it better than Anise. Anise goes into a tailspin. “This is shady as fuck.” There’s no way that Adam could become that fluent in years, never mind days. When she presses him for details, he lets her in on the Centre, where after thousands of dollars and ten days of study—living there, avoiding all contact with others, and listening only to your chosen language—you emerge completely fluent.

Skeptical but eager to give it a try, Anisa enters the Centre to learn German—and indeed, after several days of study she has a breakthrough. Along the way, she becomes close to Shiba, who manages the Centre and whose father was one of four men who, while Oxford students, developed this radical approach to language learning. But how radical is it? On a trip to New Delhi with Shiba, Anisa finally learns how the Centre works—and the discovery is shocking.This is a debut, but Siddiqi writes like a pro, slowly building the character of Anisa, so that when the big reveal is made, it’s all the more meaningful.

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Review

Second Shot

by Henrietta Thornton

DC resident Helen Warwick is ready for the quiet life now that she’s retired. Her frequent, moments-notice travel as a state-department trade specialist all but ended her marriage, and her grown children have had it, too. What they don’t know is that Helen (like author Dees) was actually a CIA operative, and all those times she was absent were because she was involved in “wet work”—killings—rather than diplomacy.

Helen is determined to put it all right and win her family back. But when she arrives at her son’s house to babysit his dog, her plan goes up in gun smoke as the windows are shot in and, oops!, she’s forced to kill intruders who themselves seem like trained killers. The unique habitat that is DC comes to life here as Helen tries to figure out who’s after her, or who else the killers may have been targeting—perhaps there’s another family member with a clandestine background?

At the same time, she’s drawn into investigating a separate case that her lawyer-son asks for her smarts on—that of the DaVinci killer, who emulates artworks with the bodies he sadistically kills (there is one VERY gory scene here). The pages fly by as Helen dashes through family spats and deadly maneuvers toward and away from killers, while enduring realistic turmoil regarding her exasperated family.

Look forward to more from this engaging, still-got-it character! This, the first in a series, ends on a cliffhanger; it will also be a TV series starring Sharon Stone.

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Review

The Spare Room

by Brian Kenney

It’s the early months of the pandemic, and Kelly Doyle—who has recently moved to Philadelphia to live with her fiancé—finds herself with few friends and no job. But when her spouse-to-be calls off their wedding, Kelly hits a new level of despair. Her one bright spot is her childhood friend Sabrina; the two recently renewed their friendship thanks to the socials.

Sabrina has it all: a career as a best-selling romance author, a Virginia mansion right out of Elle Decor, and a handsome albeit hyper-masculine husband. So when Sabrina invites Kelly to move in with them—yes, it’s a little weird—Kelly is desperate enough to say yes. Before you can say “throuple” (why wasn’t that the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year?) the three are in bed together—this ain’t no cozy—and quickly establish a threesome. Until Kelly comes across the naked photos of another woman, who could well be her doppelganger, and learns that she is a former lover of the couple who has mysteriously vanished. Will Kelly be next?

A sexy read in which no one is right, no one is wrong, and everyone is lying. By the author of We Were Never Here, this is the ultimate summer read.

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Review

Where the Dead Sleep

by Brian Kenney

In this second in the series, Assistant Sheriff Ben Packard is juggling two major incidents. One is the death of his mentor, Sheriff Stan Shaw, which raises the question of whether Ben should run to replace Shaw as Sheriff of Minnesota’s Sandy Lake County, several hours north of the Twin Cities and a popular vacation spot. For someone who’s lived in the county for only a year or so, Ben’s got plenty of supporters, but he isn’t sure he’s ready to give up being a detective. Plus, he’s anxious about how being gay is going to play out at the polls. The other incident is the death of Bill Sanderson, shot multiple times in his bed. Nobody loved Bill—except maybe his ex-wife, who’s the sister of his new widow—but nobody seemed to hate Bill enough to actually kill him. Not his business partner, not his gambling buddies, not his spouse. To solve Bill’s death, Ben goes even deeper into the Sandy Lake community than ever before, peeling off the many dark and gritty layers, deciphering the complex family relations, and at one point putting his own life at risk. This novel works fine as a stand-alone, but readers of the first in the series, And There He Kept Her, will appreciate seeing Ben’s development and piecing together the disquieting world of Sandy Lake.

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Review

Speak of the Devil

by Henrietta Thornton

Jamie Spellman is dead and nobody’s sorry. The women in his life are not only fine with the loss, we find eight of them sitting in a disused room above a Manchester pub with Jamie’s head on the table before them, a smell of “rot and pennies” in the air. One of them probably did the gruesome deed, but it’s hard to tell who when the story of each woman’s awful interactions with loathsome Jamie gets underway. It could have been his wife, Sadia; god knows he treated her badly enough. But Kaysha, the journalist investigating the story, knows that even though it’s always the spouse, the other women had equally valid reasons to hasten Jamie’s end. Another possibility is the teenager he was stringing along. Or maybe the mother who’s lost a daughter thanks to Jamie. Everyone’s got a story, and as they unspool, a lot is squeezed in, from infertility to alcoholism and from anger-fueled affairs to vicious gaslighting. It all comes together to link the women, whose stories converge in a way that will appeal to Kate Atkinson’s readers, and to create an ending that brings us back to that head on the table, but in a twisting, unexpected way. This debut author is one to watch.

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Review

The Lost Pope

by Brian Kenney

A wonderfully constructed thriller with several narratives, ranging from the 1st century to the present, that eventually come together in the most satisfying of ways. At the outset we have a newly elected pope who has created havoc within the Church with his appointment of a nun, Elisabetta Celestino, as his secretary of state. At the same time, a strip of ancient papyrus that comes from the long-lost Gospel of Mary Magdalene is discovered in a Cairo museum; just a snippet, it still manages to contain shocking information about the role of women in the early Church. It’s stolen and sold to a powerful, conservative U.S. billionaire—and collector of early Christian writings—who wants nothing more than to suppress the content. Alternating with the present-day narratives is the story of Mary Magdalene herself as we follow her from Jerusalem to Egypt to Ancient Rome. At the book’s center is Harvard Divinity School professor Cal Donovan, the protagonist of several of Cooper’s novels, the lynch pin who connects all the narratives. Often thrillers with historical backgrounds like this get weighed down with too much information and overly elaborate plots. But readers will move through this book like a hot knife through butter. For fans of Dan Brown and Steve Berry.

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