firstCLUE Reviews
  • Home
  • Review Database
  • Interviews
  • Crime Fiction News
  • Submission Guidelines
  • About Us
Tag:

Thrillers

Review

Sinkhole

by Brian Kenney January 6, 2022

Michelle Miller finally got herself out of Lorida, Florida on a swimming scholarship and never looked back. Now, 15 years later, she’s returning to see her dying mother, and, unavoidably, confront her painful past. Back then, she was poor—she shared a bedroom in a trailer with her brother—and reclusive; she didn’t come alive until she met Sissy, a rich and rambunctious classmate. They were soon joined by Morrison, a queer punk rock kid, and their dysfunctional little family was complete. From shoplifting in department stores to hanging out in gay bars, Sissy offers fun in technicolor, but it comes at a price: possessiveness, dramatic mood swings, and ultimately violence. But it isn’t until she’s at college in Georgia that Michelle begins to understand how much of her youth Sissy destroyed, and how little of it she’ll ever get back. The surprising ending—with some extraordinary revelations—is downright healing. And while there is criminal behavior, it’s on the sidelines of the story, never at the center. A wonderful tale about the power of friendship to transcend evil that young adults should also appreciate.

January 6, 2022 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Patient

by Brian Kenney December 23, 2021

A richly imagined novel in which the elements of suspense grow organically from the characters’ lives. Fifty-something Rachel, a doctor, has a tidy, if dull, life with her husband of many years, a medical practice she enjoys, and a beautiful home in the cathedral town of Salisbury. Her one regret is adult daughter Lizzie, who is totally over her mother (“Take a break Mum, stop texting me!”). When French painter Luc walks into Rachel’s office—he and his family are new to town and he’s experiencing psychological issues—the attraction is immediate, although left unfulfilled. Meanwhile, Rachel suspects she is being followed, her husband is acting weirdly, and Lizzie is keeping something from her. Eventually she and Luc reunite and—professional ethics be damned!—initiate their affair while in the south of France. Affairs can peter out, some manage to live on in secrecy, while others are exposed, creating scandal. But Rachel and Luc’s relationship razes their world—leading to murder, incarceration, and abandonment. Way to throw away those middle-class inhibitions! Readers will be seduced by Shemilt’s ability to gradually build a story, leading us from the mundane to the miraculous.

December 23, 2021 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Little Nothings

by Henrietta Thornton December 23, 2021

Liv, a bored stay-at-home mother, is leading a double life. She’s been friendless for years, so when she meets other women at an overly earnest children’s music class who also think the event is ridiculous, she’s all in. Liv and her husband, Pete, are parents to a little girl, but soon Liv spends most of her spare time with Beth and Binnie, and then with a new addition to the group, Ange. The friends’ partners and children often take part too but are very much beside the point to the women, who seem almost to be reliving their teen years. The suffocating peer-pressured friendship is made worse when Ange joins, as she’s fond of backstabbing comments that are posed as jokes, and Liv walks on eggshells, fearing she’ll be rejected from her only friendship. Soon Liv and Pete, who are struggling financially, get into massive debt keeping up with expensive dinners and designer outfits that their friends insist they deserve. The pinnacle is a three-week trip to Corfu that is set up at first as a locked-room mystery, but then another person enters the drama, leading to a tantrum-and-booze loaded tragedy. This feels like a movie that you watch from between your fingers as everything goes dreadfully wrong, fast. Try if you enjoy girls’ trip stories.

December 23, 2021 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Daisy Darker

by Brian Kenney December 23, 2021

An homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None that is both wryly humorous and deadly serious. The setting: a Victorian gothic house, named Seaglass, located on a tiny island off the Cornwall coast, accessible only during low tide. The cast: matriarch Nana, her son and ex-daughter-in-law, three adult nieces, a grandniece, and a family friend. The occasion: Nana’s 80th birthday, predicated to be her last. As the sun goes down, the tide rushes in, dinner is served, and then it’s time for Nana to read her will. Our narrator, and very much the center of the book, is Daisy, Nana’s youngest and favorite niece, who was born, in Daisy’s word, “broken,” with a heart condition she could die from at any moment. Nana—a wonder of a character—is a famous children’s book author, and Seaglass overflows with her designs and eerie, Edward Gorey-esque poems. The novel shifts between the family’s painful past and the nerve-wracking present, and as the night grows longer, and the revelations unfold, the carnage increases. The ending manages to shock, and while some readers may feel cheated by the turn of events, others will enjoy having to rethink the whole book. This book isn’t twisty, it’s demonic.

December 23, 2021 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Dark Objects

by Henrietta Thornton December 9, 2021

Readers will wish that this standalone were the first in a series (though Toyne has written series that readers can fall back on, such as the Sanctus Trilogy). The book starts with a single killing, a seeming locked-room affair, as a woman is discovered murdered in her fortress-like London home that requires fingerprint and facial-recognition access. Her husband is nowhere to be found and is the obvious suspect, but adding perhaps a red herring, perhaps a path to follow, several objects are placed around the body. One of them is a forensic-science manual, How to Process a Murder, which is by the police chief’s estranged daughter, Laughton Rees. Following the grisly opening, the tale continues with chapters presenting perspectives from Laughton, who as a child survived an attack by a serial killer and has never been the same; nervous, kind-hearted Pakistani-Irish cop Tannehill Khan, who soon finds that the crime stats he dreaded presenting to the press are the least of his problems; and a sleazy tabloid journalist who revels in the three Ms: murder, mystery, and money. The wish for a series mainly comes from observing the Tannehill and Laughton characters, who are both burdened with far too much and believe in themselves far too little. The taut and terrifying ending doesn’t hurt either.

December 9, 2021 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

Geiger

by Henrietta Thornton December 9, 2021

Talk about jumping right into the thick of the story. As Skördeman’s debut opens, a wife says goodbye to her visiting daughters and grandchildren, picks up the phone, and, hearing just the word Geiger, shoots her husband in the head. We have no idea why she would do this nor where she’s headed after immediately going on the run, and what unfolds is more bizarre than we could have imagined. It’s also much weirder than the Swedish public ever thought could happen to the victim, a beloved TV presenter and jolly father figure known as Uncle Stellan. Espionage involving Sweden’s relationship with East Germany during the Cold War and after, and the relationship between Uncle Stellan’s spoiled, mean daughters and their childhood friend and bullying target Sara—now a police officer who elbows her way into the investigation—are highlights of this tale, as are the frequent head-spinning twists. Potential readers should note that child sexual abuse is a major plotline here. For fans of Elizabeth Elo’s Finding Katarina M., which also has echoes of a communist regime.

December 9, 2021 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Couple at Number 9

by Brian Kenney December 9, 2021

A richly layered novel—part mystery, part suspense—but completely satisfying. Saffron and her boyfriend are renovating their dreamy Cotswold cottage to make room for a baby, as Saffy is pregnant. Her grandmother, Rose, once lived here, although no one in the family even knew of the cottage’s existence until a few years back. But when the contractors tear up the back garden to expand the kitchen, they discover not one but two corpses. Questions lead back to Rose, now in a nursing home with dementia, and soon enough Lorna, Saffy’s delightful mom, flies in from the south of Spain—tan, oversized earrings, skinny jeans, Spanish boy-toy—to help sort out what has blown up into a murder inquiry. This novel is overflowing with narrators and stories—we have documents from the past, Lorna’s memories, Rose’s memories, another storyline from a different family—and that’s just the start. But Douglas manages to keep all the balls in the air, the pace brisk, and the ending a total head-spinner. A classic slow burn, this novel will appeal to fans of Catherine Steadman and Lucy Foley.

December 9, 2021 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Old Woman with the Knife

by Henrietta Thornton December 2, 2021

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.

December 2, 2021 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

A Tidy Ending

by Brian Kenney December 2, 2021

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.

December 2, 2021 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Review

The Lying Club

by Henrietta Thornton November 18, 2021

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.

November 18, 2021 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
  • 1
  • …
  • 41
  • 42
  • 43
  • 44
  • 45
  • …
  • 50

Get the Newsletter

Recent Posts

  • The Sunshine Man
  • Just Another Dead Author
  • Two Truths and a Murder
  • Dark Sisters
  • A Place of Secrets

Recent Comments

  1. Nina Wachsman on The Meiji Guillotine Murders
  2. Ellen Byron on A Midnight Puzzle

About Us

firstCLUE© aspires to publish the first reviews of today's most intriguing crime fiction. Founded by Brian Kenney and Henrietta Verma, two librarians who are former editors at Library Journal and School Library Journal.

Our Most Read Reviews

  • 1

    The Murder of Mr. Ma

    October 12, 2023
  • 2

    Murder by the Seashore

    April 6, 2023
  • 3

    The Road to Murder

    July 27, 2023

Get the Newsletter

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Email

©Copyright 2024, firstCLUE - All Right Reserved.


Back To Top
firstCLUE Reviews
  • Home
  • Review Database
  • Interviews
  • Crime Fiction News
  • Submission Guidelines
  • About Us