Tag:

Thrillers

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

A Tidy Ending

by Brian Kenney

A quirky, droll, and completely captivating novel about Linda, whose sad-sack suburban life slowly falls apart, only to reveal something far better. Linda’s passions are few, namely housecleaning—she’s a bit obsessive compulsive—and her part-time job in a thrift shop. Her contacts are equally meager, mainly her mother, who’s skilled in finding new and creative ways to put down her daughter, and husband Terry, best ignored, which Linda does. When she and Terry move into a new home in their housing estate, Linda becomes fascinated with the advertising catalogs—think West Elm—that are still being delivered to the previous occupant, Rebecca. Linda decides the best way to achieve this lifestyle is by tracking down Rebecca and ingratiating herself, and in some of the funniest yet most cringe-worthy scenes in the book, she succeeds in doing just that. Meanwhile, a serial killer is loose in the estate while Terry’s work hours suddenly become extremely erratic. Cause for concern? Not for Linda, who’s more taken in by BFF Rebecca than anything nefarious that Terry might be up to. A wonderful novel that reminds us that life is rarely what it seems, and outcomes can seldom be predicted.

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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 Cartographers

by Henrietta Thornton

One of the most original books I’ve read in a long while, and one that brings up fascinating questions about the relationship between maps and the places they depict. From the beginning of their studies at the University of Wisconsin, the friends who call themselves the Cartographers live to make maps come alive. After grad school, they begin work on The Dreamer’s Atlas, which will feature “fantastical recreations of real places, and…realistic ones of imaginary places”—for example, the magic-tinged maps from Lord of the Rings will be made to look real and actual places will be given the fantasy treatment. The work is soon abandoned and the friends’ lives take a very wrong turn when they become obsessed with something outside the atlas. Move forward twenty-something years and Nell, daughter of two of the Cartographers, is struggling in a job she hates after being fired years before from the map division at New York Public Library by her father, a legendary archivist there. She and her father haven’t been in touch in all those years, but she’s forced back to the library when he’s found dead at his desk, starting a series of very odd happenings that Nell must get to the bottom of if she doesn’t want to be murdered next. The library crimes here, while shocking, take a welcome back seat to the Cartographers gripping adventure, as Shepherd (The Book of M) lays bare how reality and wishes, passion and pain can coexist and become explosive. For fans of Zakiya Dalila Harris’ The Other Black Girl, which also swerves into unexpected waters.

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Review

And By Fire

by Henrietta Thornton

As it destroys, fire creates mysteries in Hawtrey’s past and present-day London. The Great Fire in 1666 is the fulcrum of the historical story. Before the devastation, we find Christopher Wren politicking as he seeks to build his dream dome at St. Paul’s Cathedral, while stingier planners want to continue the never-ending repairs to the existing roof. Initially outsiders to any drama, courtier to the queen Margaret Dove and Etienne Belland, Margaret’s forbidden love (he is both a foreigner and, as the king’s fireworks maker, a lowly tradesman), find themselves drawn into the fray. When their friend is killed in St. Paul’s during the fire, there may have been more to it than met the eye, and the two continue their romance while looking into what really happened. In the modern city, Nigella Parker and Colm O’Leary are police officers assigned to investigate what becomes a deadly series of fires, by an arsonist who arranges both burned wooden bodies and then real charred victims in poses that seem to mock churches. Like Margaret and Etienne, these two shouldn’t be together—they tried it once and nope—and like their 1666 counterparts, they must fight what appearances seem to dictate and what their instincts tell them to be true. Adding to the atmospheric, absorbing mystery is the depth of research Hawtrey has obviously done on both the Great Fire and St. Paul’s and its famous creator. Try this alongside Robert J. Lloyd’s The Bloodless Boy, which also recreates 17th-century London.

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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

Beach Wedding

by Henrietta Thornton

Having moved from Hamptons townie to hedge-fund millionaire, Tom Rourke spares no expense for his wedding; the mansion where it is held rents for “five” a month—that’s five hundred thousand dollars. Tom’s brother Terry, a Philly police officer, and his family are a bit exhausted by it all but doing their best to relax into the pampering. Those plans are upended when Terry is drawn back into a past injustice. The father of the Rourke clan was the head assistant DA for the county when Noah Sutton, a member of the local elite, was murdered. The man’s wife, Hailey, was brought to trial, a case that drew even international attention and ended with the Rourkes as local outcasts. Terry seeks to make locals eat their words and to find justice for the murdered man, a mission that puts him and his family in danger and takes twists that will keep readers puzzled till the satisfying, unexpected conclusion. Ledwidge (coauthor with James Patterson of Now You See Her and The Quickie) shines in portraying the simmering culture clash that is life in rich towns as well as the best parts—love, humor, protectiveness—of life in close clans. The Patterson connection sells this, but it’s also good for fans of Jane Harper’s The Survivors, which features a long-ago killing in a Tasmanian beach town.

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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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