Book Review (ARC): The Vanishing Season by Joanna Schaffhausen

This is an elegant and gruesome beginning to what looks to be a promising series by Joanna Schaffhausen. Although the plot itself isn’t the most surprising, the prose is lovely – there are enough singular touches, character developments and imaginative turns-of-phrase to hit my thriller sweet spot.

Ellery Hathaway is a great heroine. Scarred both physically and emotionally from being the last “victim” / survivor of a particularly brutal serial killer, Ellery has changed her name, joined a small police force, adopted an adorable dog and is fighting to not only move on from her past, but learn from it. Three people have disappeared in the town where Ellery lives – and they’ve all vanished in the first week of July, year after year. It’s too much of a coincidence for the young police officer, but neither her superior nor her colleagues believe there’s enough to raise an investigation, so Ellery goes looking for help elsewhere.

That help comes in the form of Reed Markham, the FBI agent who found Ellery in the killer’s blood-streaked closet all those years ago. Washed up and battle-scarred, Reed is wary of getting involved, but helpless to stay away. When he arrives, it becomes clear that the vanishing season is only just beginning…

As I said above, this is lovely, atmospheric, tense and kinda gross, which I appreciate. Endless ickiness is one thing, and gets exhausting, but when authors are just merrily going along and then hit you with the truth of the matter (ie: farm tools), it’s like a sledgehammer to the gut, and it’s hugely effective. Schaffhausen is excellent at these kinds of moments, and it provides a real darkness that underpins the story.

Even when you’re marveling at how damn cute Ellery’s dog is, you can just feel that rotten river, flowing beneath, sucking all the light in its path.

By the way, her dog lives.

As all good dogs should.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I appreciate it!

Book Review (ARC): Solving Cadence Moore by Gregory Sterner

Here’s the thing about Solving Cadence Moore – my belief is that people will either love it, or really hate it. I’m somewhere in the middle. While it wasn’t my favourite read this year, I think the author has talent and imagination, and I almost wish someone had cut this novel to pieces and told him to re-write it from the vast edits. Something tells me that Sterner has never heard Stephen King’s “kill your darlings” advice. The book is bloated in length, consistently repetitive, and with a huge amount of extraneous bracketed information that didn’t add anything to the tale.

Further, I don’t think the synopsis helps – it’s killer, and it’s very tough for the book to live up to its promise.

Sterner was clearly inspired by the true-crime story of Maura Murray, who disappeared over 15 years ago on a snowy road in New Hampshire, late at night, alone, with a broken-down car and booze in the backseat. Murray has never been found, and the theories are a tangled, wild mess. Did she run away to Canada? Did she have the colossal bad luck as to encounter a serial killer or rapist on that backwoods road? Was she fighting with her family? Did she die of exposure? Why did she lie to so many people before she vanished? And so on, and so on, for fifteen years. The wondering, the questions, the articles and books, and still at the centre, a person-shaped mark. A blot on the landscape. We still don’t know what happened to Maura, and that seems like an unlivable thing.

How could a person just disappear?

Charlie Marx asks that question on his podcast, over and over. Desperate to solve the mystery of Cadence Moore, a young lady who vanished years before, and emboldened by the recent interest in the case due to a blockbuster movie, Marx takes on the challenge to finally, 100%, tell the world what happened to her. On air.

If he’s successful: instant fame, fortune, notoriety. If he’s unsuccessful, it’s the end of the road. Notoriety of a different kind. And so Marx decides to do it. Try and solve Cadence. Much of the novel is written as if we’re listening to Marx on the radio. I’m not sure this lends itself well. There’s just so much vocalizing – so much information and chatter. When you spend your time reading text that mirrors how people actually talk, it’s amazing how much blather there is. It’s frankly exhausting, and I wished for an Editor as I’ve never wished for one before.

Still, the mystery of Cadence is intriguing. I wanted to know much more about her, though I think that’s the point. I also want to know so much about Maura Murray, because the very fact of her disappearance is what makes her fascinating. Because that person is not there to answer questions, the answers are tantalizingly out of reach. I think that’s what Sterner is getting at here – in some ways, we can only know Cadence through the recollections and memories of others. She will forever remain a question mark in the truest sense of the phrase – because she is no longer there to put a voice to her innermost thoughts, motivations or reasonings. Much as we cannot ask Maura why she was traveling with open alcohol and had lied about leaving school, we also cannot ask Cadence Moore about her dreams or aspirations or fears.

Those answers vanish along with the person, into the dark.

In the end, I think this book has a lot of promise, but as I said, a brutal edit would be needed before this lived up to its synopsis. This is Gregory Sterner’s debut novel, so I think there’s obviously so much room for him to grow as a writer – maybe he’ll come back to this someday and “kill his darlings”! Either way, I look forward to exploring his future work because I think the premise of this book is stellar, and the imaginative way its told bodes well for Sterner’s career.

Thank you to Kelsey from Book Publicity Services and to the author, for the complimentary copy of the book in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. I appreciate it!

Book Review (ARC): The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone by Felicity McLean

If there’s one thing this book is, it’s atmospheric. There’s a certain feeling – of menace, of creeping heat, of the stink of the river. An undercurrent that threatens to pull everyone down with it.

Shifting between the past and the present, the book examines both the events leading up to an event as shocking as three sisters vanishing into the night, and the reverberations afterward, when people wonder, should we have known? Should we have foreseen? And for Tikka Molloy, there’s an extra element of responsibility and guilt, of shame and of longing. Because she and her sister were close with the Van Apfel girls, and knew more than they told. But would it have made a difference?

That’s the question. Because the girls are gone, and will always be gone. There’s no question of knowing anything, of coming to any kind of resolution, because the light has been snuffed out, and there’s only darkness, the kind of darkness that rivals a starless night.

In the end, I loved a lot about The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone. It’s examinations of girlhood. Of scorching summers with the murder of crows above, circling, circling. The cruelty of religion. Of obsession, and of righteousness. Of how loaded growing up as a girl can be, even when you’re barely old enough to have your period – how you can be the touch-point around which men hover, grasping and hungry.

There was a certain discomfort in that too. Because there was a victimization of Cordie in particular that seemed to spread its tentacles throughout the book. A feeling of the male gaze in the writing of her, this impossible girl-child, sexualized before her time, spinning and dancing in the glare of the headlights.

It didn’t bother me that there isn’t any real resolution. Missing children are rarely found. McLean offers explanations in the way of imaginative speculations, but we as readers know about as much as the town that was left behind. The Van Apfel girls took their secrets with them down to the river when they stepped, unwavering, furious, driven, as girls can be, into their future – and they didn’t need us, they didn’t need anyone holding them down, not any more.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I appreciate it!

ARC Review: Their Little Secret by Mark Billingham (Tom Thorne Series)

Tom Thorne is a favourite of mine, and for good reason. He’s prickly, sardonic and frequently a tad rude, but he has a huge heart underneath it all and a keen sense of justice. Couple all of that with his love for Indian takeaways and you have a winner.

It’s hard to believe there have been sixteen books in this series, and it just keeps getting better and better. Mark Billingham has a real talent for writing twisty mysteries that nonetheless don’t all hinge on the final “shock” moment as so many do these days.

In Their Little Secret, Thorne is called to the scene of a suicide. A woman has jumped in front of a commuter train, and a homicide detective needs to sign to say there was nothing suspicious or untoward about the death. But something just seems off, and soon, Thorne is visiting the woman’s family and learning that she was recently swindled by a conman who made off with almost a hundred thousand pounds of her savings.

Angered but with his hands tied, Thorne hands it off to the Fraud department. All seems back to normal until a young man is found murdered on a beach – miles away – and the conman’s DNA is found beneath his fingernails…

Told from alternating perspectives, Their Little Secret lets us into the minds of not only Tom Thorne, but also Sarah, a deeply troubled young woman with a dark secret, and Conrad, the scam artist bilking women out of their savings, who becomes entangled with one person that he can’t quite control.

Put simply, I was riveted. This is one of Billingham’s best Thorne novels. The genius here is not being quite sure of anyone’s true motivations. The feeling of being on the edge of a avalanche that may tumble with the crack of a tree branch. Even the relationships between Thorne, Hendricks and Nicola Tanner seem balanced on the precipice, teetering on the brink of a fall. Their own kinship may be what ultimately destroys them.

That, they have in common with the killers. Their little secrets, threatening everything.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I appreciate it!

Book Review (ARC): How the Dead Speak by Val McDermid

The first books in this brilliant series were so very imaginative, gruesome and brutal that they are hard to live up to. Truly, Tony Hill and Carol Jordan were a force to be reckoned with – in all of their messy realities, from Carol’s growing alcoholism to Tony’s impotence. Their relationship has gone through every tragedy that you could dream up, and more besides. So the question is now: can these books survive Tony being in prison for murder, and Carol out of the police force?

In many ways, How the Dead Speak feels like an ending to Tony and Carol, and a beginning to a new series about DI Paula MacIntyre. I wouldn’t blame McDermid if so – it’s difficult to write a series of police procedurals about non police officers, and it’s also hard to see how Carol Jordan could ever come back from professional disgrace after the events of Insidious Intent.

I wasn’t shy about disliking the latter novel. I think How the Dead Speak is better, but it still has the slightly disjointed and rushed quality that marred Insidious Intent. There are so many different viewpoints and threads, and I expected them to come together in a flourish that would knock my socks off, and instead… well, they didn’t. The book seemed to peter out, without many answers, moments of excitement, or narrative cohesion. It felt like many different books and the thing it felt like the least was a thriller or mystery novel.

Tony Hill is in prison and struggling to find his place. Carol Jordan has been ousted from ReMIT and begins to work with her old nemesis Bronwen Scott, seeking justice for people accused or found guilty for crimes they didn’t commit. A new version of ReMIT has been put in place, with DCI Rutherford in charge and the old crew – Alvin, Karim, Paula and Stacey – joined by newbies Steve and Sophie. They’re investigating the discovery of thirty skeletons found on the grounds of a former convent and girls’ home.

From the beginning, we know who the murderer is, and really – he or she is second fiddle to the interpersonal dramas. In the beginning of the Hill/Jordan novels, the thrills were the point. The relationships fed off the cases and were informed by the killer’s motivations – the characters seemed immersed in their work and the darkness surrounding them. But in this book, the mystery (or lack thereof) is a distant thing – not impacting anyone or acting as a catalyst for change. Instead, McDermid concentrates on Tony’s fumblings in jail, trying to find professional purpose and avoid being beaten up. She spends time with Carol attempting to recover from her PTSD through therapy. And there’s A LOT of time on Tony and Carol missing each other, longing for each other (etc etc) in a rather tiresome way.

It’s my opinion that these books would be greatly improved if Tony and Carol would accept their close friendship for what it is, and avoid a disastrous romance. There’s simply no way in hell these two could ever make it work as partners. Further, there’s no spark between them. They have come through the fire and on the other side, they’ve been burned clean of that electricity and old passion. Instead, they’re like brother and sister – they love each other, but I don’t believe they are in love with each other.

I have no problem with reading about committed, happy (or unhappy) couples. But I don’t believe that Tony and Carol have any chemistry left, and I think the series would be rejuvenated if they accepted their friendship. Perhaps then, the spark would return? Maybe? Maybe not? Either way, I’d love to see a return to the thrills and depravity of the earlier series, and less of Tony doodling Carol’s name in the margins of his notebook.

If the series is going to transition to be about DI MacIntyre, sign me up. She’s a worthy successor to Carol and Tony, and she feels very much at the beginning of the kind of darkness that the earlier books explored so well. If it continues with Tony and Carol, I’ll still read of course – McDermid is too talented a writer for me to ever avoid her books – but I think a change of course with their relationship and their professional lives is needed for that sense of magic and possibility that I used to feel about the series.

Book Review (ARC): Missing Person by Sarah Lotz

By far my favourite book of Sarah Lotz’s is The White Road. Insanely atmospheric and creepy, it’s an examination of the thrill of discovery, the ghosts that walk beside us, and the quest for more – more thrills, more danger, more fame. When I read the blurb for Missing Person (which has changed significantly – obviously lots of edits were done, and the release date pushed back numerous times by my count), I expected to love it as much (if not more) than The White Road.

Not so, unfortunately. While this is a solid book, it didn’t feel particularly like a Sarah Lotz novel, nor did I quite get the point? By the end, nothing had happened. The stakes didn’t feel high. It wasn’t thrilling. It wasn’t scary. It’s a nice dive into the world of web sleuthing, with a diverse cast of characters, and even a peek into the mind of a killer, but again – I didn’t find it at all frightening.

It begins with a young Irishman named Shaun Ryan, discovering that his uncle – believed long dead – actually left Ireland for New York City decades before. Stuck in a small village with a dead-end job and a family he dislikes, Shaun is intrigued by the idea that his uncle could still be alive. Utilizing the Internet, he posts Teddy’s photo on forums, seeking answers as to his whereabouts. A group of web sleuths recognize the photo – they believe it resembles a composite done for the victim of a brutal murder – a victim known as “the boy in the dress”.

What follows is a lot of back-and-forth, interspersed with web chats, WhatsApp messages, forum postings, and very little action. Shaun and the web sleuths from “Missing Linc” attempt to piece together Teddy’s last movements, and track down vanished evidence from the botched police investigation. The drama between the “sleuths” isn’t particularly compelling, but I did find them to be a likable bunch, all with their own reasons for caring so much about the boy in the dress.

Generally, the novel is well-written and I really did like the subject matter. But I should have felt that the stakes were high, and that the tension was going to be raised to a fever pitch. I should have felt terrified for the sleuths with a killer in their midst. I should have been shocked and laid bare by the ending. Instead, I had to wonder what it was all for?

Again, Sarah Lotz has terrified me in the past. There are passages in The White Road that had me putting down my Kindle, too anxious to continue. It isn’t that Missing Person is a bad book. It’s that it’s marketed as a thriller, and it’s not even remotely in that category.

For the record, my favourite character was Daphne the dog.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I appreciate it!

Book Review (ARC): The Night Before by Wendy Walker

First of all, what a gorgeous cover.

Second of all, I really did love Wendy Walker’s first thriller, All is Not Forgotten. Although I found the narrator repulsive, the premise of the book was so compelling and original.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t a huge fan of The Night Before. To be fair, I read it while doped up on Nyquil, so I’m not sure if that affected my reading comprehension, but I found it to be a fairly shallow thriller, albeit with a crackerjack surprise at the end.

The novel centers around two sisters, Laura Lochner (the night before) and Rosie Ferro (the morning after). A bit of a twisted and aimless soul, Laura is back living with her sister’s family after a disastrous end to a relationship leaves her reeling. Although Laura wants nothing more than to find love, the past looms ever present in her blood-stained rear-view mirror, and informs every decision she makes, from omitting her infamous last name on her dating profile, to seeing a psychologist to try and work out her own fears.

Still hellbent on finding her happily-ever-after, Laura heads out on a blind date, and doesn’t come home. In the morning after, Rosie frantically searches for her, aided by her husband Joe, and their childhood best friend, Gabe. In tracing Laura’s footsteps, they find her abandoned car, and the tension ratchets up a notch. But who is Rosie actually worried about?

Laura?

Or the man she was meeting?

Told from different narratives and different timelines, the novel gives us snippets of Laura’s date (which is tedious and for the life of me, why did she stay on it?), Rosie’s search, and interspersed, Laura’s sessions with a psychologist who seeks the truth of why his patient feels so unlovable and broken.

Though the denouement surprised me (I had zero idea who the actual villain was, and it was a shocker), I didn’t find there was enough pull in the actual narrative to keep me invested. Laura’s voice was scattered and unappealing – with a ton of repetition and confusing back-flows into the past. While Laura was at least complex, I found Rosie was a cardboard cutout – absolutely no character development at all – she existed solely to find her sister and/or worry about her.

While The Night Before wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, I won’t deny that it was entertaining and twisty, with enough “wtf” moments to keep it from sliding off the cliff. I think it was balancing on the edge of being truly good, and with some careful editing (Rosie’s flatness, Laura’s inner monologue, and the endless meandering date), it could have been a complicated and dark mountain of a novel.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I appreciate it!

Book Review (ARC): Lock Every Door by Riley Sager

No visitors. No nights spent away from the apartment. No disturbing the other residents, all of whom are rich or famous or both. These are the only rules for Jules Larsen’s new job as an apartment sitter at the Bartholomew, one of Manhattan’s most high-profile and mysterious buildings.

Sounds simple, right? What could possibly go wrong?

Thankfully, quite a bit. This is a compulsively readable novel from Riley Sager, a favourite of mine since his debut, Final Girls, which was such a fresh take on the typical ‘slasher’ that I almost cheered when I read it. When authors can take a trope and make it feel as if you’re discovering it for the first time – that, my dear friends, is talent.

Although I always hesitate to pronounce any book the author’s “best yet”, well… I might make an exception? Because Lock Every Door was just so deliciously addictive.

As you can see from the blurb above, our heroine Jules Larsen has taken a new job as an “apartment sitter” in the Bartholomew, a fancy-schmancy building in one of Manhattan’s most coveted neighborhoods. Adding to the building’s appeal is is that it was the setting for one of Jules favourite childhood books, Heart of a Dreamer, a book she shared with her sister before she disappeared eight years before.

As you can imagine, Jules is pretty excited to be standing in the pages of a book she loves so much – and feel some connection to her beloved sister, so she takes the job without much introspection – even agreeing to the arcane rules – such as “no visitors” and “no talking to the other residents”.

Jules becomes close with another apartment-sitter, Ingrid. Ingrid isn’t quite so warm and fuzzy about the Bartholomew, and spills her worries about the building’s dark past, and what might be going on in the present. When Ingrid vanishes in the night, leaving only an echo of a scream, Jules feels compelled to find her, and sets out to do her own research into the Bartholomew, its residents, and what secrets the walls might be hiding.

At its heart, this is a story about relationships – between sisters, between friends, strangers, lovers, killers and victims, to buildings and to fantasies, between our bodies and our hearts. The connections between those things, between us and our past, between privilege and poverty – it’s all so tenuous but can feel so bloodied.

This is a wild ride, and you should let Sager take you on it. He knows exactly what he’s doing. I had absolutely no idea what the denouement would bring, and was that ever a treat.

One of the best thrillers of the year, no doubt. Enjoy.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I appreciate it!

Book Review: The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths

I have one thing to say.

HERBERT!

Okay, I have more to say. This book is delightful. It’s everything I didn’t know I needed or wanted in a mystery novel, complete with biting wit, atmospheric tension, a crackerjack sense-of-place, three extremely unreliable and captivating narrators, and one of the most adorable dogs to ever exist on paper – Herbert, he of the woolly white fur and love of crisps.

Clare Cassidy – who I would argue is the main character of this piece – is an English teacher at Halgarth High in Sussex, which she believed would be a quiet place to recover from her divorce and continue raising her teenage daughter Georgia. Even more appropriately, Halgarth High was once the home of Clare’s favourite Gothic writer, R.M. Holland, and holds its own mysteries (and ghosts) within its hallowed halls.

Fiction bleeds into reality when Clare’s good friend, and fellow teacher, Ella Ephwick is found murdered in her home, and it seems as though Holland’s morbid tale, The Stranger, is coming to startling life. When a police detective named Harbinder Kaur is put on the case, Clare turns to her diary to sort out her muddled fears, and finds something new within the pages – a message. Hallo Clare, you don’t know me.

The novel switches between Clare, Harbinder and Clare’s daughter Georgia. Each woman has her own secrets, and all are equally worthy of spending time with. I’m not usually a fan of authors flipping back and forth between narrators, because I often find I’ve fallen in love with one person’s voice and then they’re gone, or worse yet, the voices don’t sound at all dissimilar, and I can’t remember who is supposed to be speaking. Thank goodness Griffiths doesn’t have that problem. Clare, Harbinder and Georgia are distinct, clearly delineated characters, and all offer their own foibles and strengths, their own hopes and selfish desires.

Although I could have gladly spent days (months!) with these women (in the unlikely event that Elly Griffiths is reading this – please make it a series, I’m begging you from my soul), I was also desperate to know the answer to the central question: who is the killer re-creating Holland’s stories of horror?

I didn’t guess for one moment who it was (if you read my reviews, you’ll know I normally do – even once from the synopsis) – and the ending was pitch-perfect and electrifying – from the shock of the killer’s true identity, to finally getting to read R.M Holland’s short story, The Stranger, in full.

The star of the story though – is Herbert. Herbert, Clare’s dog, who she loves with a fierce simplicity that I recognized immediately. My dog is my familiar, my companion, “my soul in animal form”. This quote – I love him so much that sometimes, when I look at him, I’m quite surprised to find he’s covered in hair. It made me laugh, it made my eyes sting with tears. Yes, this is how it is, loving these helpless, funny, greedy, loyal and endlessly affectionate beings – who ask for almost nothing, but take your entire heart.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I appreciate it!

Book Review (ARC): Layover by David Bell

I am honestly shocked that this was described as a high concept thrillerin the blurb. It’s not even close to high concept. It’s not even thrilling, for that matter.

Perhaps I’m smoking something different than the rest, but I found this book to be amateurish and annoying.

The hero – for one – is a complete dumb bunny. He has absolutely no drive or ambition, just takes handouts from his father and whines about having to work in commercial real estate development (he’s so deep – he needs a job with meaning). At a time when most people his age are struggling to find work, the guy is rolling in cash and living in the beautiful city of Chicago, with a perfectly nice girlfriend and a supportive Dad. I mean, c’mon guy, you’re SET FOR LIFE. I understand wanting to find some sort of value in what you do, but perhaps count your blessings and look for that value outside of work? Volunteer? Read a book? Learn to bake? Take a fucking walk? Anything.

So he’s on one of his boring work trips, forced to fly across country to make yet another million, when he meets a “mysterious” woman named Morgan in an airport bar. I put mysterious in quotation marks because she’s wearing sunglasses indoors, so this dumb shit thinks that means she’s an International spy or something. They have multiple drinks (it’s like 9am at this point) and they get into some faux-deep philosophy about their lives and choices. Morgan has absolutely nothing of interest to say, but she’s thin and pretty and seems frightened, which produces a boner in him that just won’t quit. Seriously, the thing is made of titanium. Because when she tells him she never wants to see him again and gets on a plane, what does he do?

HE FOLLOWS HER.

When she tells him she never wants to see him again, AGAIN, what does he do?

HE CONTINUES TO FOLLOW HER.

When she leaves him high and dry in a hotel room, what does he do?

I’ll give you a guess but do you even need one?

All this is wrapped around a “mystery” that is so exhaustively boring it defies description. Clearly Ms. Indoor Sunglasses is on the run from something, but it never materializes into anything shocking or creepy. There’s also a female cop, who provides a modicum of relief from Joshua’s reeking sense of male entitlement but she’s also one-note and concerned either with her upcoming promotion or the lack of time she spends with her teenage daughter. Nice!

I don’t even remember the ending and I read it like 2 days ago. So. That’s about it?

Oh wait, one last note to Joshua. When a woman tells you “no”, believe her. Do not follow her onto a plane and then act put-out when she’s not thrilled to see your unwelcome ass. You’re not a nice guy, you’re gross, and it’s time you knew it. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. As you can tell, I took that literally and will continue to do so! It’s always nice to have the the chance to read books, even if they don’t turn out to be ones I enjoy. Long live authors!