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Review

Bad Summer People

by Brian Kenney

Yes, it’s only October. But my money is on Bad Summer People as the best beach book of the summer of 2023. Set in Salcombe, a made-up community on Fire Island—not the like the gay Pines, more the reclusive and ritzy Saltaire—this book, in the great literary tradition of Peyton Place, has it all: adultery, fashion, tons of gossip, backbiting, lying, hot sex with the tennis pro, tasteful plastic surgery, alcoholism, and even a corpse. Plus the sort of casual racism and classism liberal one-percenters indulge in. It opens with a prologue, set at the end of August, in which a body is discovered face down off the boardwalk. The book then backs up to late June, as the all-white residents arrive from the Upper East side and Scarsdale for the start of a new season. From there we follow the tumultuous summer in chronological order, moving quite handily among a group of narrators, from the above-mentioned Stanford tennis coach to the Filipino nanny to the gay Yale student/bartender and many more. At the gravitational center of the book are Jen Weinstein and Lauren Parker, the “it moms” who married into Salcombe—their husbands are best friends—and oversee the social action. Not another word from me, lest I spoil any of the fun, except to say the identities of both the victim and the murderer pack quite the punch. This book really hits the sweet spot for popular fiction and will appeal to a broad swathe of readers.

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Review

Gone Tonight

by Henrietta Thornton

Catherine Sterling’s personal and professional worlds are beginning to collide: she’s a nurse who cares for patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and her mother is starting to show classic symptoms. The two live together, making the forgetfulness hard to miss, with Ruth Sterling looking very confused when recent events are discussed and forgetting words—calling ice cubes “water squares,” for example. Ruth is reluctant to get any scans that could confirm the likely diagnosis—her mother died of Alzheimer’s, she says, and she knows what’s ahead. But then Catherine makes a discovery that causes her to doubt that her mother’s problems are real. As the point of view shifts between the two women, readers get Ruth’s first-person point of view; her odd behavior is hiding an explosive past that Catherine knows nothing about. Readers are in for a wild cat-and-mouse game as this tight duo (boundaries, what are they?) faces terrible odds when Catherine delves into her mother’s past and Ruth hides the pair from an encroaching threat. There are some very sad moments here, related to dire poverty and child sexual abuse. Overall, it’s an eye-opening look at how “our minds…talk us out of things we don’t want to know.”

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Review

A Mother Would Know

by Henrietta Thornton

Remember We Need to Talk about Kevin, Lionel Shriver’s dark novel about a mother’s fraught efforts to understand her violent son? Here, neighbors believe Valerie Jacobs has set up her own version of Shriver’s book: her son, Hudson, suspected years ago of a violent crime, is back home and seems eager to live off mom. Valerie’s daughter, Kendra, is against the arrangement. Valerie has always spoiled Hudson, Kendra says between snapping at her mother’s attempts to be a new grandma and pushing miracle cures for Valerie’s seemingly encroaching Alzheimer’s disease. Then a shock crashes into the setup: a young woman is found murdered in the neighborhood and Valerie’s neighbors immediately point the finger at her home. Even Valerie herself suspects Hudson, except when she’s suspecting herself and her memory gaps. Garza (When I Was You) excels at making our heads spin as facts emerge, some from the present and others the past, adding to both the murkiness and the drama. This tale is constructed on a scaffold of slights, family grudges, deceit, and quiet love, all of which build to an out-of-the-blue reveal. This isn’t—thankfully!—as dark as We Need to Talk about Kevin, but it’s every bit as gripping.

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Review

Locust Lane

by Henrietta Thornton

The puzzle pieces that make up the rich town of Emerson, Massachusetts don’t quite fit and in the cracks between, unhappiness grows. Michel is a striving Lebanese restaurant owner, his son Christopher a quiet kid who’s trying his hardest to fit into a very white town, with his most strident effort expended on friendship with bully Jack. Michel’s fancy restaurant often hosts the ladies-who-lunch crowd, most frequently Alice, Michel’s married girlfriend who’s stepmom to volatile teen Hannah. The façade of prosperous goodness collapses in a heap of gossip and accusations when “that girl Eden,” who’s from the other side of the tracks and has a troubled background, is found dead after partying with Christopher, Hannah, and Jack. The usual haves-and-have-nots divide becomes starker as the pressure mounts on the police to solve this quickly, and secrets and bigotries are revealed…but who did it is tantalizingly unclear until the very end. All through the book, the testing and twisting of relationships keeps the drama high and Amidon leaves us pondering the question of what’s worth sacrificing for love. For Celeste Ng’s many fans.

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Review

A Flaw in the Design

by Brian Kenney

Oates, Nathan. A Flaw in the Design. March, 2023. 304p. Random.
Gil and his wife are living their dream. He’s a writing professor at a small Vermont college, she’s an artist, their two daughters are as smart as they are well-behaved. Sure, money is tight, but life is rich. Until his sister and her husband die under distinctly odd circumstances and their only child, 17-year-old Matthew, comes to live with them. To say there’s history here is an understatement. Gil’s sister married way up, well into the realm of the one percenters. While the wealth disparity made for awkwardness, it’s Matthew’s crazy, violent behavior that sets everyone on edge. The last time the two families got together, seven years ago at the sister’s house in Montauk, Matthew tried to drown Gil’s youngest daughter. But Matthew 2.0 is completely different. He charms the daughters, ingratiates himself with Gil’s wife, and even signs up for Gil’s fiction-writing class. But while most of the world is taken in by this brilliant and handsome young man, Gil remains a suspicious outlier. Slowly Matthew begins to undermine Gil, submitting for class stories that fantasize about the death of Gil’s daughters and explain how Matthew’s own parents were killed. Eventually Gil is alone in believing that Matthew is a psychopath, creating a growing estrangement from his own family, who are convinced he’s fallen off the deep end. Yes, this is a thriller, but a deeply thoughtful one that skillfully plays at what is true, what is imagined, and how genius can be used in the evilest of ways.

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Review

The House Guest

by Henrietta Thornton

Alyssa, née Alice, Macallen, has changed her name and subjugated everything else about herself to please her unpleasable husband, Bill, who has left with no explanation. All Alyssa knows for sure is that he’s taking his wealth with him and she has no job and no prenup, which he insisted was unnecessary because he was going to love her forev—you know the rest. Anyway, Bill’s gone and Alyssa’s sitting in a hotel bar nursing her sorrows when she meets a woman who may be even worse off. Bree Lorrance is living at the hotel after getting away from an abusive boyfriend. She moves into Alyssa’s guest house, and soon readers and Alyssa are wondering how things have taken such a fast turn. Far from lonely and terrifying, Alyssa’s days are now taken up with helping her friend, who encounters a new tragedy that sets the women, and another player who becomes involved and moves in, on an exciting trajectory. We’re left wondering whom Alyssa can trust in her new life, if anyone. Are some of these strange new people part of Bill’s team or out to get her for some other reason? Or maybe Alyssa is making everything up and we’ve got an unreliable narrator on our hands…it’s impossible to know until Ryan brings all to a satisfying ending that readers will never see coming. The author’s fans will snap this up; it’s also a must for Liane Moriarty’s readers.

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Review

Dark Rivers to Cross

by Henrietta Thornton

Jonah and Luke Blackwell are teen brothers-by-adoption who are close in age, and close generally. But they disagree on one big thing: whether to find out their origins. Adopting from foster care, Lena Blackwell was planning to take in one child, but on the big day found him holding hands with a smaller boy, and the rest is history. But it’s history that Jonah can’t leave alone. Lena is at first mildly dissuasive, saying only that the adoption was closed for a reason. As time goes on, however, she grows increasingly frightened that Jonah will uncover why she’s a virtual recluse at the Millinocket, Maine inn that she and Luke run while Jonah attends college. Curious too is why the inn is owned by Coop, the Native Penobscot man whom the boys thought was an employee. And why, when a guest arrives at the inn who seems to know Lena from the past, is she bundled off to stay with the competition? As flashbacks that are haunted with fear take readers back to Lena’s long-ago struggles and her arrival in Millinocket, present-day determination, exasperation, and love bring us closer to an unpredictable and scary finale. This fast read is for those who enjoy strong protagonists digging their way out of tough circumstances.

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Review

All the Dangerous Things

by Henrietta Thornton

Isabelle Drake hasn’t been able to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time for the past year. Night and day, she’s obsessed with who stole her baby son, Mason, and where he is now. She’s barely functional, but pushes on with her investigation, hounding the police for news and harassing those she finds suspicious. Her husband has had enough and taken off, leaving Isabelle to ruminate on how their romance, which started when he was her married boss, had such promise but became “like peeling back expensive wallpaper and finding black mold underneath.” Attending a true-crime conference to find more suspects, she meets a podcaster who becomes pivotal to the case, investigating alongside the distraught mother as she spirals further down into sleeplessness and murky flashbacks to a childhood of sleepwalking and family dysfunction. Willingham (A Flicker in the Dark, 2022) draws readers through dark depths into what is much more than a kidnapping tale, with a love that can push its way through even the toughest barriers. Fans of the movie “Memento” will enjoy this unstable main character and her stubborn push for the truth.

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Review

We Knew All Along

by Henrietta Thornton

Jewelann Jordan attends her high-school reunion to nonchalantly run into her former, sort-of-boyfriend, Christian Campbell, and dump him later that night as revenge for his behavior when they were teens. Christian, who reveals that he’s now a surgeon, and who takes more than one reunion attendee back to his hotel room, doesn’t take well to rejection. A few days later, Jewelann’s controlling husband, Ken, announces that he’s renting out their carriage house, has already found a tenant, and by the way he’s here already. You can guess who it is. Thus begins a fraught game. Jewelann believes Ken’s business trips are covering an affair, but she’s scared to confront him. And what if he knows about what Jewelann and Christian used to get up to in that carriage house, activities that Christian wants to continue and is threatening to reveal? The maelstrom of emotions and abuse boils over in the most shocking way, and readers will not be ready for the whoa-that’s-way-out-there ending. Hardy is a pseudonym for author Megan Hart, whose just released Coming Up for Air also opens with reunion shenanigans.[‘

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Review

Someone Had to Do It.

by Brian Kenney

Publishers: Wondering how to keep crime fiction relevant, cutting edge, and appealing to younger millennials and older Gen Z? Then take a page out of the impressive debut Someone Had to Do It. Brandi may have landed her dream job unpaid internship at the fashion house Simon Van Doren, but she wasn’t planning on the microaggressions and reminders that as a young, Black woman she doesn’t fit into the culture (“code for we-can’t-handle-your individuality but-since-we-don’t-want-to-seem-racist-we’ll-invent-this little loophole”). But Brandi’s tenacious—she’s also putting herself through fashion school—and with a little help from dreamboat boyfriend Nate, an up-and-coming football star, she manages to hang in there. When Nate offers to put in a good word with Taylor Van Doren, Simon’s daughter—they go back to prep school—Brandi can’t say no. Taylor’s an it-girl, a model and fashionista who has it all and then some. While Brandi hopes that friendship with Taylor will help launch her career, the opposite happens. Taylor—the absolute best villain I’ve read this year—sets Brandi up for a fall where she risks losing everything she’s worked so hard to achieve. This is one smart, hot, bingeable read that’s got Attn: Netflix stamped all over it.

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