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Suspense

Review

The Paris Apartment

by Brian Kenney

From Émile Zola’s Pot-Bouille to George Perec’s Life: a User’s Manual and from Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog to many more than I can list here, novels set in ancient, cavernous Parisian apartment buildings comprise their own sub-sub-genre, one that Foley’s latest novel can join with head held high. Jess needs to get out of England—her job as a bartender has grown pretty sour, she can barely make enough money to survive—so she informs Ben, her half-brother, that she’s coming to crash with him in Paris for a bit. Except when she arrives, Ben has disappeared, his super-luxe apartment is way beyond what journalist Ben can afford, and one detail after another points to the fact that whatever happened to Ben, it isn’t good. As the hours, then days, go by with no sign of her brother, Jess starts her own investigation, centered on the odd residents of the apartment building, all of whom behave incredibly suspiciously. Eventually, Jess comes to realize that it’s not just Ben she has to save. She has to save herself as well. Claustrophobic, and creepy as hell, this thriller is sure to please Foley’s many fans.

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Review

My Wife is Missing

by Henrietta Thornton

On a family trip to New York City, Michael Hart returns to their hotel from a pizza run only to find his wife and children gone, with only a left-behind teddy bear showing they were ever there. Readers will viscerally feel Michael’s panic and incredulity as he frantically searches the hotel and realizes they are …nowhere. Soon we switch to his wife, Natalie’s, point of view. She and Michael see these events very differently, but readers can’t be sure whether her story is accurate or a product of the terrible insomnia she’s endured for months. What if Natalie’s narrative is all a delusion? What if Michael’s is all a lie? Maybe they’re both lying, or maybe neither is and someone else is behind the terrible events that unfold in the present—a coworker of Natalie’s is murdered—and are revealed as part of one partner’s past. Palmer deftly combines perhaps-unreliable narratives with twists and a heart-tugging chase with children in tow; the explosive ending is both unexpected and satisfying. The author is the son of the late medical-thriller author Michael Palmer, and their work has the same just-one-more-chapter-even-though-it’s-2 am quality. This is a great read for any thriller fan, but is especially recommended to those who enjoyed Alice LaPlante’s Turn of Mind, in which a murder may have been committed by a woman with Alzheimer’s disease.

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Review

Dark Circles

by Brian Kenney

A foray into the wacky world of wellness led by my favorite character of the year, Olivia (Liv) Reed. Thirty-something Liv, an actor starring in a long-running TV series, is a bit down on her luck. The paparazzi caught her making out with a man who is not her boyfriend, and photos of her ensuing meltdown on the streets of Manhattan were published everywhere. Liv’s also a bit too hands-on with the booze and pills, and her relationship with her one friend, also her publicist/handler, is on the ropes. Begrudgingly, she agrees to check in to the House of Light—don’t call it rehab!—in upstate New York, which bills itself as a spiritual center. But before you can say namaste, the body of a young woman turns up in the adjoining lake—she had ties to House of Light—and when Liv learns she’s just the latest in a series of what are being called suicides, she’s off and running. Smartly, Liv uses her celebrityhood to start a podcast that becomes wildly successful and allows her to present the investigation in nearly real time. Comparisons to Nine Perfect Strangers, the Liane Moriarty book/Hulu series starring Nicole Kidman, are inevitable—and should be helpful in promoting this book—but Dark Circles is even better. After all, it’s got the sarcastic, sophisticated, completely credible, and even sometimes vulnerable voice of Liv Reed.

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Review

One of Us Is Dead

by Henrietta Thornton

Rose (The Perfect Marriage) brings to life the rich, overly botoxed women of Buckhead, GA. Mainly showpieces for their uber-wealthy husbands, they spend their passive-aggressive days at Glow, a membership-only beauty salon where the women commit to several treatments per week. Jenny, Glow’s owner, is stuck being nice to Olivia, the queen bitch of Buckhead, who has mastered the “kinsult,” or kind insult (“your skin is glowing…I can barely notice the lack of elasticity today”). Olivia’s abused minions include Shannon, the saddest woman in the book, whose politician ex-husband, Bryce, left her for a younger woman. The “girls,” and perhaps readers, want to hate Crystal, “Bryce’s midlife crisis,” but Rose doesn’t take the easy way out, creating in Crystal a more layered character than at first expected. Then there’s Karen, a luxury-real-estate lawyer who keeps the book and the “friends” as grounded as they can be. Chapters narrated by each of the women alternate with ones in which Jenny is being questioned by police about what exactly happened at Bryce and Crystal’s housewarming, an opulent event that featured a murder. Rose’s writing is pitch perfect when it comes to both keeping readers gripped and making them want to tear Olivia’s (beautifully done) hair out. If you enjoyed Clueless and other mean girls movies and books, this is for you.

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Review

Can’t Look Away

by Brian Kenney

Not really crime fiction—unless stealing someone’s boyfriend is now considered a crime?—this book is a brilliant portrayal of obsessive love. We start out deep in hipsterville: Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 2013. Would-be-writer Molly is at a concert where she connects with the lead singer, the super-gorgeous Jake Danner. They fall in love, he writes a song about her that becomes a huge hit, things fall apart, they try to patch things up, he’s off touring, trust is an issue, they break up. Jump ahead 10 years and Molly is living in Flynn Cove, CT, married to the infinitely reliable Hunter, with the two parents to a daughter, Stella. Things are O.K.—Molly’s pretty lonely and is a whole lot more boho than the uptight, preppy women in town—then she meets Sabrina, a new arrival from NYC who shares a lot of her interests, and they quickly become friends. Until it turns out that Sabrina and Molly are sharing more than Molly would ever have imagined, and their many secrets come tumbling out. Lovering does a fantastic job at shifting the point of view from character to character and back and forth in time, managing never to confuse the reader and all the while keeping her foot on the accelerator. A super fun and fast read.

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Review

Two Nights in Lisbon

by Brian Kenney

One of the best books I’ve read this year and a brilliant example of how sophisticated and meaningful a thriller can be while still ratcheting up the suspense and anxiety. Imagine you are accompanying your partner on a business trip to Lisbon. After a night of great food and even better sex, you wake up to find that they are gone—no note, laptop and belongings left behind, phone calls going straight to voicemail. What would you do? For Ariel Price, it’s time to mobilize. She starts by quizzing the hotel employees, eventually goading the staff in the American Embassy to help her search for John, her newish husband. But it turns out that to save John, Ariel needs to go far into her past. This novel delves deeply into sexual violence and its life-long ramifications—a rape is graphically described—while continuously upending what the reader believes to be the truth. Hold on to your hat, your head will be spinning. Librarians: purchase multiple copies.

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Review

The Woman in the Library

by Brian Kenney

Four strangers—two men, two women, all twenty-somethings—are sharing a table in the grand reading room of the Boston Public Library when a woman screams. They have no idea who she is, where she is, or why she screamed, but it does break down the barriers among the four, and by the time they leave the library, they are fast becoming friends. The crew includes a novelist; a law student; a psychology grad student; and our protagonist, Winifred, known as Freddie, a novelist who hails from Australia. It turns out a woman was murdered in the library, and the fab four take it upon themselves to investigate. But when one of the four is attacked, they begin to realize that there may be a connection between them and the murdered woman. And that one of them may be the murderer. Meanwhile, each chapter ends with correspondence to the author of The Woman in the Library, who lives in Australia, from a Boston-based friend who’s helping her with language and locale—until his communiques take a sinister turn. Readers who enjoy a playfulness in their fiction will be delighted by this book-within-a-book. For fans of Anthony Horowitz.

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Review

A Harmless Lie

by Brian Kenney

With its nine volumes, the acclaimed Detective Louise Rick series can be off-putting. But the newest title, A Harmless Lie, is actually a good entrance point. Sure, you’re missing plenty of backstory, but Blaedel is careful in not assuming too much knowledge on the reader’s part. Here, Louise is in Thailand, on sabbatical before returning home and taking the position of Copenhagen’s Head of Homicide, when she gets a call informing her that her brother Mikkel has been hospitalized after attempting suicide and that his wife, Trine, abandoned him and their children just days before. Louise heads off to her claustrophobic home town of Osted, only to confront a withdrawn Mikkel, her anxious parents, and the gradual realization that her brother is being investigated for Trine’s murder. Concurrently, her good friend Camilla, a journalist, is looking into the decades-old disappearance of a teen girl whose body has just been discovered, a girl who happened to be a classmate of Trine. While crawling with cops, this book is hardly a police procedural. It’s a deeply emotional dive into family, community, and the power of secrets.

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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 Favor

by Henrietta Thornton

This is one of the best-plotted thrillers I’ve read in ages; it’s also a great portrayal of why women experiencing domestic violence are stuck. We meet Leah Dawson during her carefully choreographed routine of visiting a different liquor store every day. She hides the booze from her violent husband, Liam, a lawyer who has coercive control down to an artform. Leah’s legal career came to an end recently because her husband didn’t like her reading a work email at dinner, and took action. At the liquor store, something compels Leah to follow a fellow shopper, pediatrician McKenna Hawkins. Soon Leah’s routinely watching the woman, who’s also needlessly unemployed, from the street outside McKenna’s clinically clean home. The reason Leah felt drawn to McKenna is quickly apparent: McKenna is just like Leah, or rather McKenna’s husband, Zach, is just like Leah’s Liam. Both have ego to spare, enjoy speaking slowly to their wives to make them feel stupid, and are financially abusive. These guys have it all, until they don’t. No spoilers here, but get this book for the very original storyline, true-to-life characters, and a searing look at the pain and mind games endured behind too many closed doors. For more on why “she can leave any time” is ridiculous and insulting, read the afterword by Murphy, an attorney who’s represented survivors of intimate partner violence.

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