Tag:

Psychological

Review

The Dark Hours

by Danise Hoover

Julia Harte, retired from the Irish police, has effectively hidden herself away from her infamous past in a sleepy village. As a young Garda, she was instrumental in solving the most notorious serial-killer case of the day, with both emotional and physical scars to show for it. After her successful police career, she writes what is intended to be a textbook for police training, only to have it become a bestseller for true-crime aficionados. Thirty years later and days after Cox, the serial killer, dies of natural causes, there is another frighteningly identical killing, drawing Julia and her former mentor into the case as consultants. The author artfully intertwines the stories from the past and present, creating a palpable sense of dread and foreboding. While we know Julia solved the past crime, we don’t know how. The gradual revelation of the past informs the solutions of the present, and while the situation is similar, Julia is not the raw beginner she once was. The characters are well drawn, the landscape is integral to the telling, and while this is a debut novel, it doesn’t read like a practice run.

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Review

This Book Will Bury Me

by Henrietta Thornton

The world of amateur true-crime investigators—and what a populous world it seems to be!—is given its own investigation in Winstead’s (Midnight is the Darkest Hour, 2023) latest, with the author using murders at a sorority house to show who benefits from and who’s destroyed by the trend of podcasters as police. Readers enter through the screen of Janeway Sharp (Star Trek fandom plays a big role here), the youngest of a group that calls itself the Real Crime Network. She’s drawn to the work after the sudden death of her beloved father and grows an obsession with true crime even though she feels it is wrong. In the Network, she finds forgiving and encouraging brethren who are only too happy to accompany her into the frightening details surrounding the murder of three sorority sisters who were stabbed and left in a bloodbath. Jane, now called Searcher, and her companions can’t stay away from the college town in question, Delphine, Idaho. Readers are taken to new viewpoints along with them, meeting the families in question, the townspeople who are suddenly besieged by murder groupies, and the police and FBI, who are willing to take the help when the Network starts to be successful. Suspects, twists, and danger add to the media-cult side of the tale, adding up to a smart whodunit with a side of contemplation.

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Review

Cross My Heart

by Henrietta Thornton

Though she works at her parent’s bridal shop, Rosie hasn’t floated down the aisle in a white dress herself. Not that she doesn’t own one: she’s recovering from the heartbreak of getting as far as buying her dream creation, only to be rejected. It’s been a tough time emotionally and physically since Brad became the latest man to find Rosie “just too much.” She’s even had a heart transplant, and joins DonorConnect, a service that allows her to write anonymously to Morgan, the husband of Daphne, the woman whose accidental death saved Rosie’s life. Their discussions quickly—alarmingly so—become deep and revealing, and confirming her “too much” reputation, we soon see Rosie bumping into famous-author Morgan oh-so-accidentally in a cafe. At the same time, readers are getting hints that Morgan might not be as wonderful as Rosie at first thought. Combine a possibly unreliable narrator with a wow twist and side characters with shady motivations and you’ve got Collins’s compelling latest. One for Gillian Flynn’s many fans.

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Review

Saltwater

by Brian Kenney

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. “They are different from you and me.” And Kathy Hays’s Saltwater does a spectacular job of illustrating not just how they are different, but why. Back in 1992, Sarah Lingate—a Lingate by marriage, not blood—took a tumble down the cliffs behind the family’s villa in Capri during their annual vacation. She left behind Helen, her three-year-old daughter; Richard, her madly controlling husband; and other relatives and hangers-on. Was Sarah pushed or did she jump? Pushed is what most of the island thought, but with their vast resources, the old-money Lingates were able to insure that her death was ruled an accident. Thirty years later the Lingates, like so many swallows, are making their annual pilgrimage, as though to prove to the world that they are beyond public opinion. But as one disturbing incident after another occurs—who sent them the necklace Sarah wore to her death?—cracks and fissures begin to show. Written from three points-of-view: that of Helen, who desperately wants to escape from the family; Sarah, speaking right before her death; and Lorna, a personnel assistant who has disappeared, this novel creates a world and then takes it apart, in the most shocking of ways. For readers who enjoy contemplative crime dramas.

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Review

The Ones We Love

by Henrietta Thornton

The Jansen family is newly arrived in LA from Melbourne, Australia. Janus, the father of the family, is sure the screenplay of his successful novel will be their fortune. Things take a very sinister turn when daughter Liv wakes with a hangover and bruises, and her parents seem furious with her. Her bedroom is padlocked shut—it’s the law, Janus and wife Kay say, because there’s a mold issue. Son Casper suspects that there’s something much worse afoot; his parents won’t talk to each other and barely seem aware of him, and that locked room is suspicious. Liv herself can’t remember anything but starts to catch on that there’s a problem when her friend who was out with her on the mysterious night in question won’t return texts. What happened? That’s carefully revealed in a tense psychological thriller that masterfully examines love and fear from every angle. The fully fleshed out teenage characters make this a solid YA crossunder. Get it on your TBR list!

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Review

The Department

by Henrietta Thornton

Get ready to face big questions in Faber’s novel, one that uses a southern college’s philosophy department as a magnifying glass on relationships between haves and have nots; having power and not, that is. Decidedly a have not in this equation is Neil Weber, a professor whose chances at tenure are fading, a situation he’s desperate to change but too depressed to take real action over. Instead, he becomes enmeshed—his friends and the police say obsessed—with the disappearance of student Lucia Vanotti. This young woman, whose narration alternates with Neil’s, is technically a have not, the daughter of Italian immigrants who own a local restaurant. But a chance encounter has Neil placing her on a pedestal and desperate to find her. As he digs deeper into the student’s life and related goings on in the town, and before-disappearance Lucia brings us further into her trauma-ridden life, readers will ask, can love ever be enough? Who is a savior acting for? Humming in the background of the drama is the perplexing question of what happened to Lucia, the answer to which brings delicious twists. An absorbing debut.

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Review

The Inheritance

by Brian Kenney

Succession meets Canyon Ranch in this terrifying family reunion. The deeply complex and über-rich Agarwals family (parents, three adult kids, a daughter-in-law), with homes scattered about the map, have gathered together on an island off Scotland. The estate is owned by Myra, the oldest daughter. She’s putting the finishing touches on the conversion of the mansion into a luxe resort and wellness center, and losing buckets of money in the process. But for now it’s just the Agarwals’ playground. And there’s plenty to celebrate, including the parents’ fortieth anniversary (Shalini, the mother, is very needy) and the announcement by patriarch Raj of his long-awaited succession plan (he’s pretty arrogant). Narrated by both Myra and Zoe, the middle-class daughter-in-law who is a fake influencer, everyone’s dirty laundry gets exposed as they wait to see who gets the biggest cut of the pie. With the addition of some angry Scots—this is their land!—and the arrival of former family members, you have a recipe for murder that is certain to shock most readers. Here’s a clue: if the Agarwals motto is “family first,” where does that leave everyone else?

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Review

The Tokyo Suite

by Brian Kenney

A deep investigation into the lives of two women: a mistress and her maid. Maju is one of scores of the “white army,” maids and nannies in São Paulo; she cares for young Cora, whose parents pay the child little attention. Fernanda, Cora’s mother and a successful TV executive, is uniquely self-involved; even when Maju and Cora disappear one day, Fernanda can’t stop obsessing over an affair she’s having long enough to focus on her own daughter’s abduction. Dad, meanwhile, has pretty much checked out. But once Fernanda does realize her daughter is gone, her whole world begins to cave in. Maju and Cora, meanwhile, have boarded a bus for a multi-day trip that Maju barely plans—they have limited food and money—and that begins to unravel after the first day. Each woman is confronted by a harrowing series of events that forces them to confront maternal guilt, poverty, and society’s expectations.

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Review

Follow the Butterfly

by Brian Kenney

Appreciate dark psychological thrillers packed with twists and turns? Then this book is for you. Clarissa Virtanen, a renowned but troubled therapist, who remains guilt-ridden over the death of a young patient, takes on Ida, another young client. Ida is one disturbing young woman: angry, damaged, messed up, full of suicidal ideations. But Clarissa believes she can help Ida, providing that Ida agrees to refrain from self-harm for six months—enough time for Clarissa to unlock her past, learn her secrets, and save her. But what Ida has in store are murderous secrets that she’s been harboring for years, and that may well be Clarissa’s undoing.

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Review

Gothictown

by Henrietta Thornton

Locals call small-town Juliana, Georgia, “Gentle Juliana.” New York chef Bille Hope calls it her family’s best chance at a new start after the pandemic finished her restaurant. The offer to move to Juliana is incredibly generous: the ad Billie spots says that the family can buy any vacant home in the town—look at those Victorian mansions!—for just $100 if they open a business there. Billie; her husband, Peter; and their daughter, Mere, are Georgia residents before you know it and even purchase a fabulous house that wasn’t supposed to be available. In no time, Billie’s new restaurant is booming, but so is the family’s fear that they have made a bad mistake. The house has a malevolent feeling and Peter is exhausted and depressed by his never-ending search for a dangerous open well that a strange neighbor tells them is on the land. While Billie begins to fall for the owner of the store next to hers, she also starts to investigate what’s really going on in the town and why she and Mere have the same nightmares about trapped, crying children, a puzzle that readers know a little about from the book’s sinister opening chapter detailing an event in the town’s early years. This has just the right amount of creepiness to add a scary but not terrifying element to the promised gothic tale, and the post-pandemic what-do-I-do-now feeling is spot on. Read this alongside Sylvie Perry’s The Hawthorne School and start looking gift horses in the mouth.

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