Tag:

Psychological

Review

The Sunshine Man

by Brian Kenney

It’s a big day for both Bridget Keller and her old family friend Jimmy Maguire. Jimmy’s being released from notorious English prison Wandsworth, having served decades for the murder of his childhood friend Providence. And Bridget, Providence’s older sister, is on her way to the prison gate to meet Jimmy and kill him. But things aren’t quite right for the attack, so Bridget puts it off…and puts it off…while she tails Jimmy as he visits old haunts, planning to kill him at every stop. As we journey with the ill-fated pair, readers look back at Bridget and Jimmy’s childhoods. Both have been abandoned by their mothers, Bridget physically when her mother took off, Jimmy emotionally as he survives life with his alcoholic mother; “the mister,” an abusive man whom Jimmy just KNOWS isn’t his father; and his small-time-criminal brothers. Nobody expects good from a Maguire. But as readers come to know Jimmy from his friendships, efforts to escape a life of crime, and sometimes-sparkling inner thoughts, it becomes harder to view him as just a criminal. Solid twists add to the emotional uncertainty to create a thought-provoking look at intersecting tough lives and longings for love.

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Review

Dark Sisters

by Charlotte Del Vecchio

The small Southern town of Hawthorne Springs holds a dark and twisted history of witchcraft and sin, carried through generations of the women who live there. In this historical thriller, we meet three women whose fates, spanning hundreds of years, have been bound to the magic that flows from this town. Anne Bolton is a healer in 1750 fleeing with her daughter from persecution for witchcraft, placing her faith in a powerful natural entity and encouraging others to do the same. Mary Shepard is a housewife in 1953, entertaining a sapphic affair as an escape from her monotonous life in a restrictive community. Camilla Burson is the defiant daughter of a preacher in 2007, fighting against the community and the church to discover the truth behind the sinister and mysterious disease that plagues the women of Hawthorne Springs and how it connects to the Dark Sisters, a parable of two wayward women that may be all too real. Is there truly a source of magic in this town, or are the Dark Sisters simply a story preachers share to incite fear and keep women in their place? Visit three different time periods as DeMeester addresses generational trauma, cult-like religious practices, and the collective power of women who are willing to take down the patriarchy.

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Review

A Murder in Paris

by Henrietta Thornton

“There will be no more diaries to fill, now.” How lonely, an emotion that echoes through this book that is sure to be on end-of-year best lists. It opens in present-day London and then flits back and forth between 1945 and present-day Paris, with an opulent city of lights hotel, the Lutetia, as the main setting. The hotel is famous for a painting in the lobby that depicts a woman in rags in one of the rooms; she was one of the many Holocaust survivors housed briefly in the hotel after returning from the horrors of the camps. In the present day, the artist’s granddaughter, memory specialist Dr. Olivia Finn, must quickly head from London to Paris when the hotel calls to say that her grandmother is in the lobby, needing help that she insists only Olivia can provide. Olivia’s grandmother says that she killed a woman at the hotel during those terrible first post-war days; she has dementia, but could her confession be true? Memory and its porousness are central to the plot here. So is the turmoil and moral ambiguity of 1945 Paris: Resistance men who fraternized with Nazis are showered with honors but their women comrades branded “whores,’” while the police work to uncover collaborators attempting to pass as camp survivors. With twists to spare, a fast-moving plot, and piercing looks at what it was like to start over after the war, this is one to get on your TBR list.

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Review

The Burning Library

by Willy Williams

Yale University’s Beinecke Library possesses the 15th-century Voynich manuscript, a codex so mysterious and untranslatable that it would stump even The Da Vinci Code’s Robert Langdon. But Macmillan (The Manor House) daringly incorporates this unique book as a possible clue to an even more cryptic ancient text in a twisty feminist thriller that features deadly secret societies, a sleuthing scholar, a Scotland Yard detective, and an action-packed quest that begins in Scotland and ends in Italy. On a remote Scottish island, Eleanor Bruton, a member of the Order of St. Katherine, or the Kats, is studying an antique piece of embroidery for clues to a valuable title, The Book of Wonders, when she is brutally murdered. Her killers work for a rival women’s group, the Larks. While the Kats seek power over men through their traditional roles as wives and mothers, the equally ruthless Larks represent feminist modern women. Caught unwittingly between the two groups is Anya Brown, a brilliant, newly minted PhD., who has been hired by the elite Institute of Medieval Manuscripts in St. Andrews to study a private collection of rare materials. In London, DC Clio Spicer suspects that the “accidental” death of her mentor might be connected to Bruton’s killing. Despite the anticlimactic conclusion, Macmillan takes readers on an exciting adventure that will please Katherine Neville and Dan Brown fans.

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Review

The Intruder

by Henrietta Thornton

Casey just wanted a quiet life in the New Hampshire woods. That’s mostly what she’s got, despite the neighbor that seems a bit off and the icky landlord whose suggestive comments she could do without. When a massive storm bears down, her cabin’s failing roof is a worry but turns out to be the least of her problems. Then she sees someone outside. It’s a teenage girl who’s been hiding in the garden shed, and when Casey tries to help her, Casey soon becomes captive in her own home while the storm rages. The girl, who seems enraged at Casey for reasons that are a mystery to readers and the hapless captive alike, is ready to make this night a violent one. Alternating with that story is the tale of Ella, a girl who lives with her abusive, hoarder mother, and her desperation to escape that life and the bullying at school. McFadden brings her usual tight plotting and twists to this massively absorbing work of psychological terror, which will be a winner with her fans and all who enjoy a tense, character-driven read.

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Review

The Vanishing Place

by Henrietta Thornton

There’s no horror here but plenty of scares as nine-year-old Effie must parent her siblings in her family’s freezing shack in the western New Zealand bush. With the nearest town, Koraha, six hours walk through dense forest, Mum with a new baby and Dad mostly off hunting and fishing, it’s all Effie can do to keep the little ones fed and warm. The new baby, the fourth child and named four, heralds a much harder chapter for the family, one that ultimately sees Effie living as an adult in Scotland. She’s compelled to return to New Zealand when reports reach her that a little girl—unknown to Effie but looking exactly like her—has shown up in the town, injured and starving. Who she is and what happened in the past is a twist-filled saga that drops readers right into the dangerous landscapes that are both the New Zealand wilderness (“an unforgiving thing that would eat them up”) and the off-off grid family. One to remember, and a must for fans of Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible and Alisa Alering’s Smothermoss.

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Review

Empty Boxes

by Danise Hoover

The title is a hint to a major plot element in this somewhat tangled, dangerous, multi-crime story with an intrepid reporter at the center. Rita Locke, crime reporter for a major Pittsburgh paper, is awakened early on a Sunday, her day off, by one of her police sources alerting her to a grisly murder in a funeral home. It’s the last straw for her boyfriend, and as she leaves for the crime scene, he ends their relationship. The body was found by a local beautician, and she is mighty nervous when interviewed by Rita. There are dead witnesses, anonymous clues, stolen jewelry, fake medical practitioners, and medical schools, nearly deadly foreign travel, returning boyfriends, and of course, the empty coffins referred to in the title. Yes, the story is crowded, but it is refreshing to have a reporter at the head rather than a cop or a PI, and readers will not be able to put this down towards the end. Here’s hoping for more about Rita Locke.

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Review

She Didn’t See It Coming

by Jeff Ayers

Bryden seems to have the perfect family. She has a loving husband, Sam, and an adorable three-year-old daughter named Clara. One night when he’s working late, Sam gets a call from Clara’s daycare. Bryden has not picked up their daughter and is not answering her phone or responding to texts. Sam picks Clara up and arrives home to find Bryden’s cell phone and purse in the apartment and her car parked in the garage. Where did she go, and what happened to her? Detective Jayne Salter of the Albany Police Department gets the case. From the moment she starts investigating, she finds Bryden’s family, friends, and neighbors all seem to be hiding something. But does that make one of them guilty? Lapena keeps the suspense and mystery going to the final page. Readers, at one point, will think everyone is responsible for Bryden’s disappearance, but the truth is shocking and surprising. Jayne will uncover more murder and chaos than she’s bargaining for, and Lapena could have a series character on her hands with this charismatic detective.

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Review

It Should Have Been You

by Brian Kenney

Hang on to your hat! This latest from Andrea Mara is one twisty terror ride that will have readers glued to the page. The premise starts out simple enough. Susan O’Donnell, a high-school math teacher, is a new mother, her daughter Bella having been born four months ago. Safe to say Susan is exhausted, sleep deprived, and anxious. So when she reads a snide WhatsApp message from the local neighborhood queen, clearly directed at Susan, she sends it on to her two sisters with her own remarks: “omg she’s such a smug wagon. I’d love to send her the pics of her husband wrapped around the PR girl at the opening party for Bar Four…” Bitchy? Totally. Funny? Yes, indeed. Except that Susan makes a dreadful mistake: she sends her post to not just her sisters, but to the 300 residents of her housing estate. Time to grovel and beg for forgiveness. Except things don’t work out quite that way. Instead, this one incident sets in motion a series of lies, violence, and murder that no one can stop. A knock-out.

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Review

The Bachelorette Party

by Willy Williams

Agatha Christie’s 1939 And There Were None set the template for the island mystery with its protagonists trapped on a remote isle and stalked by an unknown killer. The arrival of cell phone technology has forced writers to up their thriller game. As with the guests in Sean Doolittle’s Device Free Weekend, the five girlfriends who arrive at Baltic Vinyasa on Isle Blind off the Swedish coast for a four-day yoga-themed bachelorette party must give up their cell phones and other digital devices to the proprietor, Irene. “I wish I wasn’t so addicted to my devices,” confesses Lena. Her sister Tessa, the bride-to-be’s best friend, has another, more secret, motive for joining the party. A true-crime podcaster whose latest episode crashed and burned in the wake of a scandal, she hopes to redeem her career by solving the mystery of the Nacka Four. A decade earlier, four young women, who had traveled to the archipelago for their annual reunion, disappeared, presumed by police to have drowned when their boat was found floating. Tessa suspects they may have been murdered on Isle Blind and is determined to find evidence. But from the moment she steps on the island, her sense of dread grows. While elements of this twisty mystery require a suspension of disbelief (the luxurious hotel is built on a rocky island too barren to support crops yet has plenty of water for hot showers), Sten (The Resting Place) excels at building the creepy horror and chilling tension. Readers who like their thrillers bloody and gory will enjoy this dark Nordic take.

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