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Tag:

Thrillers

Review

There Are No Happy Loves

by Brian Kenney May 19, 2022

What a wild ride this book is. The third in Olguin’s series set in Buenos Aires, it features the tough-hitting, brazen, flawed, but brilliant journalist Verónica Rosenthal, who loves her whiskey, her lapdog, her ex-boyfriend, and great sex, preferably with strangers. As the novel opens, there is a horrific car crash followed by an explosion, leaving one survivor, Darío, who becomes convinced that his wife and child didn’t die in the conflagration but survived and ran away. Is it possible? Later, a truck is pulled over in Buenos Aires, thought to contain drugs. But the cache is far more gruesome: a load of human body parts. Verónica pursues the missing wife and child, ultimately publishing a feature about a right-wing Catholic organization, the Christian Home Movement, which took young children from poor or single mothers and placed them in well-off Catholic families. At the same time, and unknown to Verónica, her ex-boyfriend is after the body smugglers, and eventually the two storylines converge, as do the lovers. But don’t for one minute think this is some linear thriller. This book ricochets from family drama to Argentinian history to the picaresque (Verónica in nun’s garb, infiltrating a convent) to the deeply emotional. While this can be read as a stand-alone, this series builds on itself wonderfully.

May 19, 2022 0 comment
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Review

The Bequest

by Henrietta Thornton May 19, 2022

Isabel Henley leaves Boston for the remote coastal Scotland college of St. Stephens, ready to immerse herself in a feminist perspective of Catherine de Medici’s court. She’s chosen St. Stephens so she can work with Professor Madeleine Grainger, but arrives to find that Madeleine has fallen from cliffs near the school and died. There are whispers that it wasn’t an accident, but Isabel hopes they’re just drama—St. Stephens is quite the gossip hothouse. Isabel’s other contact, Rose Brewster, a student she knew in Boston, soon disappears mysteriously, leaving Isabel both socially bereft and unsure of her future at the school. Then things take a turn, both for the better and the much worse. Isabel takes over Rose’s dissertation—it’s funded!—and she’s off to Genoa, Italy, to research the history of a family still living there, the decidedly odd Falcones. Isabel is locked into their home’s archive every day by the debonair son of the house, deciphering letters written during the Renaissance that offer a tantalizing look at past life and politics (a Falcone was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate French king Henry III) and a chance to save Rose. Also tantalizing is Margaret’s language, which immerses us in Genoa’s “intestinal alleys” and Renaissance passive aggression (“I know I can expect nothing in return except for your contempt” is a winning line in one love letter). There are two attractions here: the present-day academic whodunit and the olden puzzle revealed in Renaissance letters; viewers of the Netflix series “The Chair” will eat this up, as will readers of Philippa Gregory and Robert J. Lloyd.

May 19, 2022 0 comment
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Review

Sometimes People Die

by Brian Kenney May 12, 2022

If you open this book thinking it’s a medical thriller—which is how it’s marketed—then you’ll be terribly disappointed. But take it on its own terms and it is one of the most evocative and heart-rendering tales you’ll have encountered in quite a while. A young Scottish doctor, caught stealing and using opioids, is deemed fit to return to practice and lands in St. Luke’s—one of London’s roughest hospitals and a place that’s desperately in need of staff. Author Stephenson was trained as a doctor, and this book goes deeply—and fascinatingly—into life in the hospital. Add to this a great cast of characters, including George, an orthopedist, rugby player, and teddy bear of a man who rooms with our protagonist, helping to keep him grounded. The criminal element comes into play when it’s discovered that several of St. Luke’s patients have died from opioid overdoses, clearly at the hands of medical personnel, with our narrator suspect number one. Woven throughout the book are the stories of doctors throughout history who doubled as serial killers—these sojourns away from the narrative will drive some readers crazy but I found the context they provided fascinating. In the end, the book comes down to just a few characters and a couple of questions: How does medicine, “a dark and a terrible knowledge,” force its practitioners to see things differently? And what’s the impact when they do see differently?

May 12, 2022 0 comment
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Review

Race : A Caleb Moon Thriller

by Henrietta Thornton May 12, 2022

Reflecting the dark days of summer 2020, this book opens with Black reporter Caleb Moon covering the police killing of a Black boy and the local anger that has ensued. His editor is tiptoeing around the coverage and wants to cut the inflammatory detail that the police also shot the boy’s pet (“It’s just a fucking dog.”) He knows it’s relevant, though, when Caleb explains that the animal that three police officers found such a violent threat could fit in a colleague’s tiny purse. This is a case of overkill, and Caleb wants justice. He’s at first naïve enough to think that it might be in the cards, but then he attends the police chief’s speech about the situation, where white interlopers throw a bottle at the cops and disappear. Hope is close to vanishing; it evaporates entirely when a Black colleague is lynched. Things can hardly get worse, but Caleb soon finds himself in jail when he won’t plead guilty to causing trouble at the speech. His experiences in jail, coupled with the growing mystery of who’s behind the racist corruption eating away at his unnamed small town, paint a stark picture of a world built on greed and white supremacy. Readers will be eager to meet this understated, determined young protagonist in further mysteries. The book doesn’t reveal SLMN’s identity, but notes that he is a New York Times best-selling author and a movie producer.

Originally reviewed as Race: A Black Lives Matter Thriller

May 12, 2022 0 comment
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Review

How to Kill Your Family

by Brian Kenney May 12, 2022

Best title of the year, amirite? And the best antihero as well. Grace Bernard was raised in London by her loving but impoverished single mom. Her father, a multi-millionaire, won’t have anything to do with them, even when Grace’s mother is dying and begs for support for their daughter, then a young teen. But by her mid-twenties, Grace is ready to take matters into her own hands and avenge her mother’s hard life. Grace doesn’t want to just polish off dear old dad. She slowly and meticulously plots the murders of everyone on the paternal side of her family, with her father last on the list, having watched his parents, children, and in-laws die before him. Yes, it’s dark, but it’s also deliciously wicked and brilliantly plotted, so much so that Grace is a bit wistful that no one except her will enjoy the genius of it all. Thus this book, which is meant to be locked away and discovered by future generations. Until something most unexpected occurs, upending Grace’s brilliant plan. Grace is sophisticated, urbane, droll, and at times risible. I could listen to her voice forever.

May 12, 2022 0 comment
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Review

City Under One Roof

by Brian Kenney May 5, 2022

How’s this for a setting: a 205 unit high-rise building in rural Alaska that houses the entire town’s population as well as stores, offices, and more. Welcome to Point Mettier, a pretty creepy village to begin with that only gets worse when body parts—a foot, a hand—wash up on the frozen shore. The local cops seem ready to shrug off the remains—lots of tourists fall off those cruise ships!—when they’re joined by Anchorage detective Cara Kennedy, who takes the matter a whole lot more seriously. What was meant to be a quick visit becomes a much longer excursion as the first brutal storm of the season moves in, closing off the tunnel, the one way in and out of town during winter. With time to spare, Cara digs deeper into the community, only to discover that almost everyone in Point Mettier has a secret to hide. A simmering romance with one of the other officers provides Cara with much needed distraction, but soon enough a violent gang, hanging out in a nearby Native village, takes center stage. This is a successful, well-paced first novel that juggles a range of cultures, a handful of strong characters, and a nuanced protagonist, delivering a very satisfying ending. And get this: Point Mettier pretty much actually exists. Check out Whittier, Alaska.

May 5, 2022 0 comment
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Review

Such a Good Mother

by Henrietta Thornton April 28, 2022

Rose O’Connell’s never been confident. At her downmarket English school, she was bullied as “Rotten Rosie” after her father was publicly disgraced. While her life has since improved, her husband struggles to find work and they’re deep in debt. Then she gets her son, Charlie, into The Woolf Academy, an exclusive school in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood she grew up in. In fact, it’s her old school, but it’s now completely unrecognizable, as is the house she grew up in, where Amala Kaur, the CEO of the new school, lives. Woolf Academy seems too strict with Charlie yet indulgent of the other children, and while Rose is determined to do whatever it takes to help her son, she quickly finds that the mean girls she faced years ago have nothing on the circle of snooty women in charge here. It’s complicated and confusing when things begin to thaw and Rose is invited into the inner circle after the mysterious death of one of its members; slowly readers will begin to wonder if there’s anything she won’t do to please Amala and her ice-queen clique. By the time Amala wants something that made me gasp out loud—just the first of several gut-punching twists—it seems too late for Rose to salvage her marriage, her career, and even her sense of self. For readers of mean-girl titles and those who enjoyed The Hawthorne School by Sylvie Perry.

April 28, 2022 0 comment
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Review

Bad Fruit

by Henrietta Thornton April 21, 2022

Lily lives in Greenwich, England with her Singaporean mother and white English father, but really she lives entirely in a world of her mother’s creation and control. The teen must wear only pink sweaters to please mama, and she even dyes her hair black, wears colored contact lenses, and uses makeup to look more Chinese instead of the ang moh gui, or white devil, her mother accuses her of being. She’s also forced to taste-test spoiled orange juice to make sure it’s just the right level of rancid that mama enjoys, a bizarre task that will be readers’ first signal that something is seriously off here. The emotionally and sometimes physically abused teen is about to get out as she’s been accepted at Oxford University to study law—guess who chose that—but her subconscious seems to have other plans. What at first look like panic attacks turn out to be flashbacks to traumatic events—but ones that happened to mama. How Lily can have memories of her mother’s past, what made mama this way, and whether Lily can ever thwart her nightmare mother and useless father are puzzles that will keep readers rapt right till the end of Singaporean author King’s dark exploration of “the terrible economics of responsibility and blame.” This is one case in which the characters don’t have to be likable for the book to be brilliant. From the awful-mother-tiptoeing-daughter dynamic to weirdness with oranges, Bad Fruit is a perfect readalike for Joanne Harris’s Five Quarters of the Orange.

April 21, 2022 0 comment
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Review

The Perfect Crime

by Brian Kenney April 21, 2022

An anthology of 22 short stories that are selected to witness, as Maxin Jukubowski writes in the introduction, “an explosion of crime and mystery writing by writers of all colours and ethnic backgrounds, winning awards and enjoying critical acclaim, as well as opening up a whole new readership in the process.” And this marvelous collection certainly doesn’t disappoint, with crime stories from diverse cultures, featuring works by S.A. Cosby, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Rachel Howzell Hall, Sanjida Kay, Walter Mosley, and so many more. It’s fun to encounter authors you think you know trying out something entirely new, such as Abir Mukherjee, who leaves behind 1920s India for a very contemporary tale of crime that ends in a most pleasing way. In fact, many of the stories are full-blown mysteries, just boiled down to their essence, with the shocking, O. Henry-like twists that readers love. Oyinkan Braithwaite’s “Jumping Ship,” a brilliant recounting of a love affair that goes way, way off the rails is so surprising it demands the reader give it a second, or even third, reading. A surefire way to introduce readers to authors, The Perfect Crime is a required purchase for all public libraries.

April 21, 2022 0 comment
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Review

The Wheel of Doll

by Brian Kenney April 21, 2022

This is turning out to be one of the most unique, captivating, and above all emotionally engaging crime fiction series being published. Happy Doll—yes, that’s his real name—is 50-ish, ex-military, and a former LAPD cop who lost his PI license and now calls himself a “security consultant.” Yes, Doll has many of the noirish trappings of your classic LA detective, from his worn-down office to his status as a regular at a dive bar. But he’s also a fledgling Buddhist who’s in love with George, a half-Chihuahua, half-terrier mix, is in psychotherapy, and is incredibly generous to those he comes across—provided they’re not trying to kill him. In this story, Doll is approached by a young woman to search for her mother, Iris Candle, who’s likely to be homeless. Candle and Doll, it turns out, were lovers years ago, and Doll can’t turn down an opportunity to see her again. After a week of searching, Doll finally locates Candle—worn down by drugs and years of living on the streets—and their reunion is one of the most poignant passages I’ve read in years. It also sets off the book’s real narrative, complete with some horrific, but highly entertaining, violence and a quest that brings Doll to the edge. As much as I love Ames’ novels and comic memoirs, Happy Doll is his most innovative and successful character yet. Fans of aged, semi-hard-boiled, humorous Los Angeles detectives will also enjoy Andy Weinberger’s The Kindness of Strangers.

April 21, 2022 0 comment
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