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Domestic

Review

The Trade Off

by Brian Kenney

Do you look at Britain’s sleazy, salacious and exploitative tabloid culture and wonder: how do they get away with this? If so, this is the book for you. Set in the fictitious The Daily Voice, “the country’s top-selling newspaper”–it’s a whole lot like the real Daily Mail– the narrative alternates between tough-as-nails Stella, just a step away from being editor in chief, and newbie Jess, in from the country with, of all things, ideals. The “trade off” refers to the practice of exchanging one thing, say photographs of a naked leading man being led about on a dog leash, for what the tabloid really wants: a front page interview with him about his failed marriage. When this sort of celebrity manipulation goes awry–the beloved winner of a cooking show is hounded until she kills herself–Stella miraculously finds her much-dented moral compass and reluctantly pairs up with Jess. Inspired by #metoo, the two manage to dismantle the toxic misogyny and sexual harassment that’s at the center of The Daily Voice. Both characters have wonderful voices, and when you’re not cringing in horror you’ll be laughing aloud.

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Review

Shadow Drive

by Henrietta Thornton

Think you’ve made mistakes in your life? Meet Gabe Angueira, who had a rocky time growing up as one of the few Puerto Ricans in Louisville, Kentucky, but has found success as a landlord of multiple properties around the city. He’s divorced—alcohol played a big role with both spouses—but now is living with his ex-wife, Anya, maintaining a kind of truce as they care for their daughter, who’s in a minimally conscious state since she crashed her car, drunk. Gabe’s just trying to get by when he meets a mom who seems to be in the same boat. She’s close to tears when she shows up to see Anya’s for-rent house; she just wants to help her daughter, who’s pregnant and desperate. But Gabe doesn’t have a rental agreement with him when he shows her the property, and on her part, she doesn’t have a check for the deposit. Never mind, thinks Gabe, he’ll pick it up later. Readers can feel a disaster looming, but will in no way be ready for the catastrophe that unfolds…and unfolds..and explodes. This is a gripping, emotional, and adrenaline-filled ride all the way through. I can’t wait for more from this debut author.

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Review

What Never Happened

by Henrietta Thornton

Overtown, as California’s Catalina Island residents call the mainland, Disneyland has been closed. On Catalina, the ferries have stopped and even the St. Patrick’s Day karaoke is off. COVID is on the way, if it isn’t there already. But Collette “Coco” Weber has bigger worries. She’s back on the island where her parents and brother were murdered years ago, a crime against the only Black family on Catalina. Coco herself escaped as she had sneaked out against her parents wishes. She’s hardly in line with others’ wishes now, either. Aunt Gwen—famous for stealing trinkets from rich tourists—has been living in the house Coco inherited when her parents died, and isn’t thrilled to share it. And Coco’s determination to continue owning the house clashes with someone’s plan: there’s a housing shortage on Catalina, and she’s violently pressured to sell. At the same time, island widows are being found dead, alone in remote spots that they wouldn’t likely have visited without coercion. As Catalina gets ever more dangerous, a peril nicely juxtaposed against Coco’s job as an island newspaper obituary writer, readers will fall deeper into the compelling mysteries of who killed the protagonist’s family years before and who’s behind today’s mayhem. Hall’s writing of a PTSD-stricken protagonist rings true, with her “warts and all” presentation offering veracity, resilience, and exasperation in equal measure. Those new to the author will want to go back to her previous, also fast-moving puzzles such as last year’s We Lie Here.

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Review

Perfectly Nice Neighbors

by Brian Kenney

It’s the rare writer who can create an intense, well-paced thriller while taking on one of the greatest social issues of our time. And Kia Abdullah is one of those few writers. Salma Khatun, her husband Bil, and their teenage son, Zain, have just arrived at a new development in the London suburb of Blenheim. They’ve left behind the far more diverse and comfortable community of Seven Kings for fear that Zain may be getting in with the wrong crowd. Will it be a fresh start or a crash landing? Here’s the first clue: the next-door neighbor rips Zain’s Black Lives Matter poster out of the front garden, and when Salma puts it in the window, they paint over the window! Things escalate from there, but in a manner that is free of cliché and grows from the characters, who represent a range of opinions and emotions. In a nice aside, Zain and the boy next door, both budding programmers, manage to strike up a friendship that leads to the development of a software for use by those with hearing impairments. But the story doesn’t end there, and where it does lead us is shocking, tragic, and damning. One of the best books I’ve read this year; I can’t wait to discuss this with a book group

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Review

Wednesdays at One

by Henrietta Thornton

This unexpected and brilliant work examines the work of life: self love, self forgiveness, and the need to have others see us as we really are. Cambridge, MA psychologist Dr. Gregory Weber’s life is chugging along, grumpy teenager daughter notwithstanding, despite Gregory living every day with a horrible mistake he made when he was 17, something he’s told nobody about and that stops every relationship from being whole. All is turned upside down when a patient who claims he asked her to start therapy shows up, a woman he could swear he never encountered before. In no time, he’s deeply in love this intriguing woman and desperate to see every Wednesday at 1:00, even though from the beginning she takes his seat at each session and insists that he’s in the patient role. What happens over time, with old and new secrets increasingly working their way toward the surface, threatens to destroy Gregory’s life as he knows it. The ending here, which includes a startling twist, is both satisfying and teaches readers profound lessons about the nature of what we owe others and ourselves. A must read.

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Review

What the Neighbors Saw

by Brian Kenney

What’s the scariest place in crime fiction these days? Yes, that would be the suburbs. Alexis and Sam, her husband, buy a run-down house in a super-posh neighborhood in the DC suburbs. They love what the home could become, but for now it just feels like a bottomless money pit. Alexis is pregnant with the couple’s second child, and with little help from Sam—he’s trying for partnership at his law firm—motherhood is no picnic. To say the two grate on each other is an understatement. It doesn’t help that most people in the neighborhood assume that brown-skinned Alexis (she’s part Honduran) is one of the help. But the women in the neighborhood, chardonnay in hand, do try to make her feel welcome, while pumping her for gossip. When their neighbor Teddy is found dead by the nearby Potomac River—he was out for a run—everything takes on a sinister patina. In the ensuing weeks, Alexis grows close to Blair, Teddy’s widow, offering support while Blair fills her in on the lives of their neighbors. They’re a creepy crew if there ever was one, forever loitering in each other’s backyards, peeking into windows. Could Teddy’s death be linked to one of them? In the armful of suburban domestic thrillers publishing this summer, this debut—with its wild, super-spin of a plot, in which everything is turned upside down—is one not to miss.

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Review

Dirty Laundry

by Henrietta Thornton

An unnamed village in Cork, Ireland, is a social-media-fueled soap opera in Bose’s suspenseful debut. Ciara lives for her own camera, with her rich husband and three perfectly-dressed-at-all-times children supporting actors in an Instagram fiction. The mostly fawning comments from the neighbors include some from her Indian neighbor, Mishti, who left love in India for an arranged marriage to cold, miserly Parth. Her only joy is her daughter, Maya. Decidedly not fawning is neighbor Lauren, who inherited her home in the wealthy enclave that Ciara rules. Lauren doesn’t fit in and doesn’t care to. She carries a child in a sling almost constantly, while Ciara’s Instagram-approved parenting involves virtually no contact. Lauren’s house is dirty, her clothes are too, and her husband is the furthest man from Parth imaginable. The women’s sniping relationships with each other and their families build to a boiling point, one whose violent outcome is revealed near the beginning of the story in a scene that lingers mysteriously in the background as the drama festers. Mishti’s struggles are a highlight here, sad though they are, with Bose’s writing of a desperate character sadly reminiscent of Parini Shroff’s The Bandit Queen.

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Review

Second Shot

by Henrietta Thornton

DC resident Helen Warwick is ready for the quiet life now that she’s retired. Her frequent, moments-notice travel as a state-department trade specialist all but ended her marriage, and her grown children have had it, too. What they don’t know is that Helen (like author Dees) was actually a CIA operative, and all those times she was absent were because she was involved in “wet work”—killings—rather than diplomacy.

Helen is determined to put it all right and win her family back. But when she arrives at her son’s house to babysit his dog, her plan goes up in gun smoke as the windows are shot in and, oops!, she’s forced to kill intruders who themselves seem like trained killers. The unique habitat that is DC comes to life here as Helen tries to figure out who’s after her, or who else the killers may have been targeting—perhaps there’s another family member with a clandestine background?

At the same time, she’s drawn into investigating a separate case that her lawyer-son asks for her smarts on—that of the DaVinci killer, who emulates artworks with the bodies he sadistically kills (there is one VERY gory scene here). The pages fly by as Helen dashes through family spats and deadly maneuvers toward and away from killers, while enduring realistic turmoil regarding her exasperated family.

Look forward to more from this engaging, still-got-it character! This, the first in a series, ends on a cliffhanger; it will also be a TV series starring Sharon Stone.

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Review

Cutting Teeth

by Henrietta Thornton

I had a moment of “yuuuuup” when I read that Baker’s debut adult novel, Whisper Network, was chosen as a Reese’s Book Club Pick, because more than one of the characters here strongly telegraphs “unhinged woman played by Reese Witherspoon.” The women are uber-mothers at the martyrdom competition that is a private preschool. Everyone’s life is perfect, thank you, no sacrifice is too great, and the mom committee has everything very much under tight control. There is one problem. The four-year-olds like to bite. Not little bites, either. Their parents and siblings are the victims of vicious, prolonged attacks that draw copious blood that the biters seem to enjoy swallowing. Then their teacher is found dead outside the classroom, with a pool of blood surrounding her that has little footprints in it. Everyone knows that their child didn’t do it, but Ms. Ollie is dead, and the investigation is on. This book is at times as funny as it is strange, with Baker hilariously skewering modern parenthood and its obsessions, while also giving us behind-the-plastic-smiles looks at parents’ inner thoughts. (I think we can all agree that “just a month or two break from giving a shit” isn’t much to ask for). Did you like Big Little Lies? This one’s for you.

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Review

The Block Party

by Brian Kenney

A brilliantly structured debut—alternately witty, poignant, and terrifying—that follows a cluster of suburban Boston families through one year, from summer block party to summer block party. The drama unfolds on the well-off Alton Road, a cul-de-sac in the town of Meadowbrook. While the point of view shifts throughout, at the center are Alex Fox, former lawyer, current mediator, and full-time drinker, and her daughter, Lettie, the high-school girl who dresses all in black and is committed to saving the environment. Around them swirl two planetary systems that rarely intersect: one made up of the adult women—there’s more than a touch of Desperate Housewives with this crew, although they somehow manage to keep the peace—and the other made up of teens, who have their own sordid histories and hatreds. As for the dads, they show up only to create turmoil and threaten violence. As the year goes on, the gossip and scandals grow, from the neighbor who’s a star on OnlyFans to the high school girl with the middle-aged lover to the dad who’s hiding a secret obsession. Ultimately, the suspense is too great, and the little world of Alton Road blows up, leaving no one untouched. Readers will love this fresh, satirical take on suspense in suburbia. Perfect for fans of Fabian Nicieza.

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