Tag:

Suspense

Review

The Unwedding

by Brian Kenney

Things couldn’t get much worse for Ellery. She’s all alone at a super-expensive resort in Big Sur where she and her husband were meant to celebrate their twentieth anniversary, except his mid-life crisis blossomed into a full blown decision to divorce (new girlfriend and motorcycle), and, well, the reservations aren’t refundable. Then it turns out that most of the other guests are there to celebrate a wedding. How annoying is that? Ellery misses her kids terribly. And when she decides to take an evening dip in the infinity pool, she finds the groom beat her to it, except he’s floating face down, fully dressed, with a huge gash in the back of his head. Time to call the cops, but a huge storm has moved through, triggering a mudslide that completely isolates the hotel, cutting off cell service. Yup, we are in a closed-resort novel. But, fortunately for Ellery, she makes some friends, and together they set out to investigate what’s really going on in this Christie-like setting. This is Condie’s adult debut (she is author of the YA “Matched” series) and she does a magnificent job of balancing the search for a murderer with exploring Ellery’s rich internal life. A gift to readers who enjoy closed environments and unsettling outcomes.

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Review

The Puzzle Box

by Henrietta Thornton

This sequel to Trussoni’s 2023 The Puzzle Master (my favorite book of all time!) finds savant Mike Brink once more faced with a puzzle that others have found unsolvable. This time his help is requested by the Japanese imperial family, who dispatch another puzzle genius, Sakura Nakamoto, to whisk him from New York to Tokyo. Mike is well known for his work creating puzzles and taking part in competitions in which participants recite the string of numbers that form pi, his synesthesia allowing the numbers to appear “as a scale of color at the edge of his vision.” These are the upsides of the accident that left him an affable genius. But there are drawbacks. He’s so far been unable to form any romantic relationship and struggles to understand himself. So when Sakura tells him that the beautiful Dragon Puzzle Box, a puzzle that’s uber-famous in Mike’s world, is available for him to try, and that it will help him to understand his gift, he jumps at it. This is no ordinary box—others who have tried to open it have had fingers amputated or been poisoned by the puzzle’s booby traps. Work on it takes Mike on thrilling journeys not only to fascinating Japanese locales but further into the recesses of his mind than he thought possible. Engrossed readers will happily make the trips with him. While you’re waiting for this wonderful follow-up, get The Puzzle Master and read our interview with Trussoni when that book was published.

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Review

Things Don’t Break on Their Own

by Henrietta Thornton

If you like a jaw-dropping twist, this is the book for you, and I mean the reaction literally: at one point in this great domestic drama, one character whispers a closing remark to another that literally made my mouth hang open. And that wasn’t the last surprise. The drama concerns a missing child, Laika Martenwood, whose English family’s treatment by the media after she’s gone will remind readers of the real-life McCann family, dragged through the tabloids after their daughter was snatched. The Martenwoods are more dysfunctional than even the tabloids say, though. The father is one of the most loathsome characters to come along in a while; his wife is so psychologically abused that she can’t leave and can’t protect her children from him; and daughters Willa and Laika are relentlessly mocked and bullied by the horrible man. As the book opens, we find Willa as an adult, barely hanging onto the life she’s cobbled together while agonizing over whether her sister is still alive, where she could be, and what happened to her all those years ago. Moving back and forth in time, Collins puts the media and family ties under a magnifying glass, in the process reminding readers that just as things don’t break on their own, they don’t have to stay broken.

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Review

Like Mother, Like Daughter

by Jeff Ayers

Cleo, a student at NYU, has a tumultuous relationship with her mother, and that hatred gets tested in McCreight’s latest domestic thriller. Cleo’s mom, Kat, begs her to come for dinner, and Cleo reluctantly agrees. Arriving late, she finds food burning in the oven and on the stovetop and blood on a shoe, but no Kat. What happened to her mom? As she searches for answers from her father and friends, she quickly learns that everyone has secrets, and the mom she wanted to avoid was not the woman she thought. The story jumps between Cleo trying to find the truth and Kat, from two weeks before her disappearance, trying desperately to hide from her past and keep Cleo from discovering everything. Even the most jaded readers will not anticipate all the surprises here. McCreight, who knows how to keep the pages turning, has become one of the best in the psychological thriller genre. She has another bestseller on her hands.

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Review

Red River Road

by Brian Kenney

Do you love books that take you to new places, especially if it’s unlikely you will ever visit them in person? Me too. And Downes’s thriller does exactly that, bringing us to the dramatic coastal highways of Western Australia and setting us down among the “vanlifers,” who are exploring the coast while living out of their souped-up vehicles. But this isn’t a Fodor’s Travel Guide. We’re following Katy Sweeney, who’s hit the road in hopes of finding her sister, Phoebe, a sort of solo travel influencer, who disappeared a year ago. The case has grown cold and the cops have all but given up when Katy meets Beth, another young woman who has her own reasons for disappearing into the anonymous van world, a world often hostile to women. The two pair up—Beth is pretty destitute—and use Phoebe’s social-media posts to retrace her steps along the coast. Documenting a true road trip from hell, this fast-moving suspense novel eventually arrives at a resolution that is both terrifying and shocking, turning everything we have come to believe inside out and upside down.

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Review

The Out-of-Town Lawyer

by Henrietta Thornton

This legal thriller’s title is reminiscent of The Lincoln Lawyer, and Rotstein’s ace storytelling will also bring vintage Grisham to mind. The lead character, Elvis Henderson, even lives out of a vehicle—the camper van that he parks outside the run-down motel where his coworker, Margaret Booth, stays while they defend the case that has Alabama rapt. Destiny Grace Harper is accused of murdering her twin babies, but not by any action she took. She didn’t save them because her strict Christian church doesn’t believe in medical treatment. When her babies were discovered to have a lethal condition in utero, one that could be reversed with a simple surgery, Destiny Grace ran away rather than succumb to the court-ordered procedure. Now Elvis is up against pro-life locals, his client’s refusal to cooperate in her own defense, and a judge that’s just as stubborn. Both his wily arguments and the prosecutors vigorous rebuttals are spellbinding enough, but the story also digs into the rot that’s sometimes behind nice-family facades and small-town politeness. With James Patterson a former co-author of Rotstein’s (in The Family Lawyer), this has a ready-made audience, but newcomers to Rotstein will soon want more too.

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Review

A Calamity of Souls

by Jeff Ayers

In a small Virginia town in 1968, a Black man named Jerome works for an elderly white couple. On Friday, when he expects to get his weekly salary, he walks into their house and finds their dead bodies. The police arrive and accuse him of resisting arrest and beat him. In jail with a head wound and bruises, the innocent man has already been convicted. A white lawyer named Jack Lee takes the case and immediately finds himself in the crosshairs of hate. Working with a female Black lawyer from Chicago, Jack struggles for justice in a town and environment where the verdict is already a foregone conclusion, and there is no lifeline for him or the case. Baldacci is one of the great storytellers, and he channels John Grisham in this compelling and harsh story that explores racism, the criminal justice system, and family dynamics. Half legal thriller and half an examination of the South at one of its most tumultuous times, this will be yet another bestseller for Baldacci and a novel destined for book club discussions.

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Review

The Recruiter

by Jeff Ayers

Rick Carter, not his real name, walked away from his family ten years ago to keep them safe from the ramifications of his job. He is the best of the best when it comes to recruiting others to handle jobs notorious criminals want dealt with. Professional assassinations, smuggling, or dealing with trafficking issues while keeping those in the driver’s seat out of the spotlight? Call Rick. But even with his unscrupulous methods, Rick has a moral code. When he’s forced to find killers to eliminate a law-enforcement task force, he quickly learns that there is more at play than he realized, and now his family and entire criminal empire are about to end horribly. Podolski crafts a skillful and page-turning action thriller that does not let up for a second. Rick and his telling of the story make someone completely unlikeable into one whom the reader can root for to succeed. It’s hard to create empathetic characters when you build a world of criminals, but Podolski nails it. This looks like the start of a series, and the second one cannot come fast enough.

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Review

Return to Blood

by Willy Williams

Following his acclaimed debut, Better the Blood, Michael Bennett’s compelling sophomore outing in his crime series starring Māori detective Hana Westerman proves the New Zealand screenwriter and author is no one-hit wonder as a mystery writer. In the wake of the traumatic events recounted in the first book, Hana has resigned from the Auckland CIB (Criminal Investigation Branch) and returned to her hometown of Tātā Bay, where she helps her father, Eru, prepare local Māori teens to get their driver’s licenses. But the calm Hana is trying to rebuild is shattered when her 18-year-old daughter, Addison, discovers the skeleton of a young woman in the sand dunes. Investigators suspect the bones may be those of Kiri Thomas, a Māori teenager who disappeared four years earlier. Although Hana is no longer in the police force, she begins to probe the possibility that Kiri’s death may be connected to the 21-year-old unsolved murder of Paige Meadows, whose body was found in the same dunes. Likewise, Addison becomes obsessed with Kiri’s fate, threatening her friendship with her non-binary flatmate and musical partner, Plus 1. In a nod to Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, the storyline is interspersed with the dead Kiri’s haunting first-person narrative. Bennett, who is Māori, immerses readers deeper into Māori culture and traditions as he expands on Hana’s loving relationship with her father and tense interactions with her chilly second cousin, Eyes. An atmospheric thriller that will have readers booking flights to New Zealand. Bennett is adapting Better the Blood into a six-part TV series for Taika Waititi’s production company.

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Review

The Recruiter

by Jeff Ayers

Rick Carter, not his real name, walked away from his family ten years ago to keep them safe from the ramifications of his job. He is the best of the best when it comes to recruiting others to handle jobs notorious criminals want dealt with. Professional assassinations, smuggling, or dealing with trafficking issues while keeping those in the driver’s seat out of the spotlight? Call Rick. But even with his unscrupulous methods, Rick has a moral code. When he’s forced to find killers to eliminate a law-enforcement task force, he quickly learns that there is more at play than he realized, and now his family and entire criminal empire are about to end horribly. Podolski crafts a skillful and page-turning action thriller that does not let up for a second. Rick and his telling of the story make someone completely unlikeable into one whom the reader can root for to succeed. It’s hard to create empathetic characters when you build a world of criminals, but Podolski nails it. This looks like the start of a series, and the second one cannot come fast enough

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