Out in August of this year, Getaway by Zoje Stage has been described as “cinematic”, “terrifying” and a “thrill-ride”. And guess what? They’re not wrong! Every superlative used to talk about this book is ON POINT. As someone who loves thrillers, reading this book was wonderful. I felt like my heart was in my throat. My body was twitchy and uncomfortable, as if it was me in the Grand Canyon, being stalked like a deer in the woods. That kind of visceral experience is rare, and a testament to how good Stage is at character development, interior voices, landscape, atmosphere and pacing.

In other words, a total master class.

In Getaway, two sisters, Imogen and Beck, and their old friend Tilda, are setting out for a hiking trip of the Grand Canyon. After repeated traumas, Imogen has retreated inside of herself and rarely leaves her apartment. Seeking to help her sister, Beck organizes the trip, which is reminiscent of backpacking excursions they’d go on as children with their parents. Tilda, an American Idol alum and Instagram star, is not Imogen’s favourite person – they grew apart after an incident in University – but she’s determined to make a fresh start.

As the women make their way out into the arid wilds, old tensions threaten to disrupt the fragile peace they’ve made. Imogen notices that their things begin to disappear and that odd items dot the red earth. She can feel that they are being watched. But by who? And what do they want?

When the answers to those questions become clear, the women descend into horror. A cat and mouse game of survival, that will seemingly only end in blood.

Stage surprised me with the ending. Truly feminist and brilliant, it filled my cup in every possible way. 5 enthusiastic stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Mulholland Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I’m surprised by the overwhelmingly positive reviews for The House Swap. While I loved the premise of this book, it wasn’t my favourite – disappointing, because it just sounds so darling and fun.

First things first, assuming you’ve read the blurb and are just hear for the dirt, I’m going to dive right in. The “hero” is a douche. A few chapters go by and we find out his entire job is buying distressed companies and making hoards of people redundant. A man comes to his flat and begs him to reconsider, since he’s worked for this company for twenty-eight years and in three months, he’ll have access to the pension he’s been paying into for all that time. If he’s made redundant now, he can’t ever access that money. Our hero James – the guy we’re supposed to root for – pauses in the foyer of his multi-million-dollar apartment and basically says “that’s too bad but that’s also life! I have to go! Please never bother me again with the fact that I just torpedoed your entire retirement!”

It’s awful. This is mentioned once and basically never again. James is also callous about pretty much everything. When he swaps homes with Cassie because of his psychotic ex-girlfriend (and REALLY he NEVER caught a glimpse of her behaviour before? This was hugely far-fetched), she leaves him lots of helpful notes, puts new sheets on the bed and food in the freezer and even waits around so she can give him a tour. He’s enormously rude to her, shocked that she would go to so much trouble (he stripped his own flat down to the basics and leaves her to buy everything she needs) and by and large, he’s irritated by everyone he meets. How does this dude have friends?

Again, a douche.

Throughout the story, the plot is revealed solely through dialogue, which left me unmoored at times. Cassie is supposed to be an author of a successful book series, but she never writes, researches or spends any time on WHAT BROUGHT HER TO LONDON IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE. James doesn’t seem to do much of anything besides complain about his surroundings. He plays around with the idea of destroying a wildlife habitat in order to put up a hotel for millenials who hate nature, but his dreams of ruining the landscape that Cassie loves are quashed.

There’s also a large plot around Cassie’s supposed infertility and her quest to undergo IVF. I admit her longing for a baby was alien to me (she never seemed to want an actual child, if that makes sense, just a squishy baby to cuddle – which, I get it, but that kid is going to grow up my dear) and I didn’t find that it entirely fit with the plot, even though I can see how the author thought it would, since James is determined to be child-free.

Onto the “love story”. Cassie and James apparently fall in love, though they sure didn’t in my copy of the book. This is largely due to the time jumps. All of a sudden, a month has passed and Cassie and James have apparently been “talking every day”!! Well that’s lovely! Would have been nice, as a reader, to be privy to that! It just felt lazy to me. We need to be shown the love, not just told about it. Not to mention, the dialogue between them doesn’t sound like the way human beings talk. It’s as if they’re aliens trying out English for the first time.

The drama between them seems manufactured at best. I won’t say any more, as to avoid spoilers.

I wanted to like this very much, because the premise seemed so escapist and lovely, but the abundance of dialogue, time jumps, asshole hero who makes people redundant for a living and everything happening behind the scenes (please show me the characters falling in love!!!) make this a two-star read for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

It’s November 1991. George H. W. Bush is in the White House, Nirvana’s in the tape deck, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer.

Now that’s a lede.

I gave Survive the Night 4 stars purely for the mindfuck twists. It’s a ride, to be sure, but it’s not quite the electrifying novel it could have, and should have been.

Sager is a must-read author for me – anything he puts out, I’ll snap up (or nab on NetGalley before my finger even knows I’m smashing the Request button) – I loved Final Girls and Lock Every Door so very much. The way that Sager turns tropes on their head is like a drug to a thriller addict like me – his writing is fresh and surprising, often funny and smart. There is a lot to like about Survive the Night, but there are a few key things that I think would have made this even better.

Like the blurb says, our heroine Charlie is a young woman living in the 1990s, taking a road trip with a man she suspects might be the serial killer who murdered her best friend. Unable to cope with the death of Maddy, Charlie is heading home, leaving her boyfriend behind on campus and hoping that she’ll heal with the help of her grandmother and their beloved movies. Charlie is a film buff and uses their familiarity to escape from the tragedies that have befallen her at such a young age.

Her ride, Josh, seems great at first. Handsome and self assured, he’s an easy conversationalist and good company on the emptiness of the midnight roads. But soon, Charlie starts to wonder – why is his story changing so often? Why won’t he let her see what’s in the trunk of his car? Why is he sticking so close, seemingly unwilling to let her leave his side?

Is he the Campus Killer?

And if so, can she kill him before he kills her?

What follows is pretty juicy, up till the end, when everything falls apart a bit. There are some excellent twists throughout this page turner – some I saw coming and others I very much didn’t.

The issue isn’t with the plot so much – it’s with the atmosphere. I wanted so much more of the 90s setting and vibes. The 1990s is the decade in which I became a teenager, and I remember it fondly. The mall, the lack of cellphones, not even a whisper of an Apple Watch or iPad, the clothes and trends, the celebrities (Leo DiCaprio heeeeey), movies, music… it’s such a rich decade because it really was the cusp of a new age in the way human beings interact. There was no social media or even messenger / DM – people had to use pay phones when they were out and at night, you talked endlessly on the phone to your friends until your parents shouted at you to stop taking up the line.

I felt that Sager could have utilized this more – although there are plenty of Nirvana mentions and pay phones abound, it just didn’t feel like the 90s as much, I’m not sure why.

There’s also a gimmick used throughout the novel that weakened it, in my humble opinion. Especially in the epilogue, when the gimmick reveals itself in an extremely meta way that affected how I looked at the novel in its entirety.

However, these really are small quibbles. Survive the Night is a banger of a thriller. It’s a testament to Sager’s talent that I expect so much from his books and that there were tons of twists I never in a million years saw coming. Like a 90s trend, Sager’s writing is just that irresistible.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Psychological thrillers are a dime a dozen these days, and the author needs to have a very distinctive voice in order to stand out from the crowd and make a mark on the genre. This book – for me – failed to do that in every way that matters.

The Serial Killer’s Wife is about an upstanding family living in a small village outside of London. Tom, Beth and their daughter Poppy seem very happy. Tom has a good job and Beth runs one of those cafes where you paint vases and drink coffee. When the police knock on the door one evening, Beth is at first worried – has something happened to Tom? But no, it’s the opposite.

Tom may have happened to someone else. His ex-girlfriend, who is missing and presumed dead.

From there, the story spools into rather endless chapters of meandering – from Beth’s every thought, to Tom’s past, to the village gossip and Beth’s burgeoning friendship with a local widower, whose wife died the year before from anaphylactic shock. It’s all just sort of… there. Nothing really happens until the last few chapters, when the big “twist” is revealed – and yes, it’s a big one and it’s satisfyingly evil, but at the same time, I felt no glory in that discovery because I hadn’t enjoyed the journey.

One of the main problems for me was the flat dialogue (NO ONE talks the way these characters do) and the unwillingness to really let Tom’s inner monologue reveal what a horrific person he truly is. There’s a sense of fakeness, of blandness and of holding back. Part of me thinks that’s because the author didn’t want to chance that she’d inadvertently reveal the twist. And that’s a problem – as I’ve ranted before, the notion that all books must have these enormous, Gone-Girl twists, is maddening.

Books can absolutely be thrilling and special without flipping the narrative on its head in the final pages. I promise.

Thank you to NetGalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

The heroine of The Family Plot is called Dahlia, after The Black Dahlia. Her brother, Charlie, is the namesake of Charles Lindbergh, who was kidnapped and murdered as a baby. Older sister Tate is named after Sharon Tate, famous victim of Charles Manson. And her twin Andy, from the father of killer Lizzie Borden.

You might be wondering what kind of psychopath would choose names for their darling babies amidst such horror and cruelty. Dahlia’s mother is a “special” soul – obsessed with the murder of her parents, she raised her children on a steady diet of victimology, true crime stories, dead body reenactments and charming details like someone being shot in the head and their brain looking like a “roast chicken” on the floor. Settled on an island that is also home to a famous serial offender, The Blackburn Killer, who dumps women onto beaches wearing ice-blue dresses and with branded ankles – the kids grow up mired in the muck of crime scenes, with more knowledge of victims’ names and birth dates than they do of the periodic table or Shakespeare.

Suffice to say, this isn’t the Brady Bunch, and all the children flew the coop as soon as was humanly possible – with Andy being the most mysterious.

Dahlia’s been searching for her beloved twin since he left in the dead of night, over a decade earlier. But when she returns to the family home for her father’s funeral, a grisly discovery is made – Andy’s skeleton, the fractured skull split apart by an ax. Andy is suddenly not just a ghost on a Sri Lankan beach or a face in the crowd in Paris – he’s truly gone, not to be found on social media or a message board or by combing the streets of nearby cities. Dahlia is set adrift by the news, and deep in mourning, she begins to try to piece together what exactly happened to her brother. In doing so, she stumbles upon evidence that The Blackburn Killer might be closer than anyone ever dreamed…

The Family Plot was the first novel I read by Megan Collins. The premise is wonderful. I love listening to true crime podcasts (“The Murder Squad” is my favourite) and armchair detectives are actually out there solving cases these days – combing through evidence with the kind of meticulousness that most exhausted, overworked detectives just don’t have the time or manpower for these days.

My main sticking point here is that the characters are utterly irredeemable. There wasn’t one person I was rooting for in the entire sorry bunch. Dahlia is a wet rag. Charlie is an obnoxious drunk. Tate is infuriating and more concerned with her Instagram art than her sister’s obvious grief. Their mother – I mean, where do I begin here? She needs serious, serious help. I also – with the exception of Tate – didn’t find any of them believable as actual human beings.

Toward the end, the revelations come in thick and fast, and I felt the main, overarching theme was lost – the victims. The women who were murdered for someone else’s sadistic pleasure. They are just blobs in an image or stick figures in one of Tate’s dioramas. None of the characters seemed to feel genuine grief over what had happened to them, and genuine horror at who had contributed to their suffering and the abrupt cleaving of their lives.

So while The Family Plot was entertaining at times, I couldn’t feel any of the gravitas I had hoped for. There was a real chance for the author to “honour” the victims the way that the family purported to do all of their lives, but as it turns out, their prayers were just soap bubbles, amounting to nothing more than empty words, floating away into the sea and sky.

Thank you to NetGalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review. Appreciate it!

This was delightful in a lot of ways that mattered, though it didn’t quite “get there” in others.

Let me explain.

The premise is wonderful. Uptight, prickly (practically virginal) Clara moves across the country because she has a crush on a childhood friend. He promptly up sticks and leaves her with a guy who is sub-letting his apartment. Josh, the sub-letter, is a porn star. Not only is he a porn star, but he’s gorgeous, believes that the woman should always come first, and is generally a lovely guy.

I mean. So good, right?

Clara and Josh set some House Rules, but as they grow closer as friends and eventually, business partners, the sexual tension is stifling, and Josh even starts to wonder – could this be the real thing?

The problem isn’t immediately quantifiable.

Shenanigans should ensue! For the first little bit, things are great. There’s sexual tension, some banter, a good amount of sarcasm and wit. But when Clara and Josh end up joining forces on a business venture, things went off the rails a bit for me. There’s no… pining. I wanted there to be lots and lots of pining – I mean, they LIVE together, so it’s prime time for some angst.

Regardless, the book is very entertaining and readable. I would recommend to anyone who enjoys a frothy romance with the friends-to-lovers theme.

“She’s never liked us much, not since she complained that there were no boys on the island, and Reese gave her the blankest look I’ve ever seen and said, “Plenty of girls, though.”

Girls are at the centre of this riveting and gruesome novel from Rory Power – girls in all of their mysteriousness and beauty, in their messy beginnings and messy middles. It’s no surprise why Wilder Girls is getting all the buzz – not only is the cover absolutely spectacular (I mean honestly, it sells itself), but the premise is beyond intriguing.

The island takes everything…

Told from the perspective of two “heroines”, Hetty & Byatt, and also featuring their best friend Reese, Wilder Girls is the story of Raxter School for Girls, set on a remote island off Maine, ensconced in wilderness, cut off from the rest of the world and shrouded in an unknown plague known only as “the Tox”.

It’s not clear what the Tox is, exactly, except that it causes horrific bodily injuries to its sufferers. There’s a fair amount of grisly body horror here, and it’s very well done – Power doesn’t mince words, and I found myself wincing, able to feel the agony and indignities of these girls. But there’s also a certain freedom that comes from their imprisonment – the girls cannot go anywhere beyond the walls of their school (the animals in the forest are infected too), and so, they have formed a series of small communities and societies within. Normal rules break down and their desires, needs, changing minds & bodies, become heightened by the confinement. But also set free, because what could be the consequences of a kiss between girls, when outside the fences, Death walks between the trees?

The only people who are allowed to leave Raxter are the “supply team”, who meet the Navy members that come over regularly to drop off food, water and medicine. When one of the assigned girls leaves the rota, Hetty is selected to fill her place, and the story truly kicks off.

A lot of Wilder Girls is brilliant. The sense of coming of age in chaos, it reminds me sharply of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When high school truly is hell. Raxter is brimming with changing bodies and burgeoning hearts. The Tox is as inexplicable as female desire and puberty.

Where the story fails a bit however, is in the strangely melodramatic romance between Hetty and Reese. I was expecting more from two people who had already been through so much. It was extremely “insta love” and “insta breakup” that it almost felt like Power wasn’t comfortable exploring it in more detail. There’s an unneeded heterosexual romance as well (miss me with that in this kind of book). Further, the denouement was so sudden that I can’t help but feel there *must* be a sequel. If there isn’t, what the actual…?

Wilder Girls doesn’t quite live up to its terrifyingly beautiful cover, but it comes close. If there’s a sequel, I’ll be reading it.

A smart and robust thriller from Saul Black, Anything For You is the third novel in his Valerie Hart series. My favourite of these – by far – is his debut, The Killing Lessons, which was creepy, atmospheric and crazy good at building tension.

In Anything For You, Valerie is investigating what, at first glance, is your standard issue home invasion. High flying attorney Adam Grant is found – stabbed and bludgeoned in his bed. On the floor next to him is his wife, Rachel, clinging to life after a stab wound to the chest. Fingerprints found all over the scene belong to convicted felon, Dwight Jenner, who’s disappeared in the bloody aftermath.

Through her search for Jenner, Valerie turns up photos and sightings of his mysterious girlfriend, blonde and beautiful Sophia, a known prostitute and seeming accessory to murder. Black flips back and forth between Sophia and Valerie’s perspectives, giving us glimpses of both women – on dark but opposite paths.

Though I appreciate Black’s gritty and sensual writing, I think there is a certain element to his portrayal of Valerie that just doesn’t ring true. Constantly thinking about and fantasizing about sex, one step away from flinging herself on most men she meets – Valerie reads to me, as a male fantasy of what men hope women are truly like. Her thoughts are stereo-typically masculine, and she’s also annoyingly aware of her own beauty, and seems to measure other women against it. Ick.

That aside, Black’s portrayal of Valerie’s alcohol consumption – and the refreshing change to see an author building a portrait of someone who chooses moderation rather than abstinence – is very well done. Valerie is always hovering on the avalanche of bad decisions, just a whisper away from plunging her life into chaos. While I think her character could use a female editor, I still enjoy reading about her.

The book is an electrifying race to find out whodunit, and there is a wham-bam shocker that hit me like a punch. Wow. Saul Black is an extremely talented author, and I look forward to more of Valerie Hart – or perhaps a male detective? I’d love to see Black conquer his own gender in that way – just my opinion, but I think his writing style would produce a fantastic male lead.

“He’d always harbored a fear that she still lay there. Her dark bones in wait. To rise. To get them.”

Reading Loreth Anne White is a sensory experience. You can feel the biting wind in your hair, whispering in your ear like a lover might. The snow crunches and powders beneath your feet. Frost alights on your fingertips, and the sky is vast overhead, raining stars over the horizon. It’s as if you are there, walking side-by-side with the characters, hearing a bird shriek in the wilderness, seeing headlights flash in the dark. It’s my favourite thing about her writing – that acute sense of place, and it never wavers.

The Dark Bones is a sequel to A Dark Lure, and I was excited to see White returning to this world. Although I didn’t remember everything about Olivia, Cole, Tori and Ace, I remembered enough to want to check in – see how they were doing, and get reacquainted with their town and the folk who live there. Although they’re kept on the periphery, I sense another novel in those characters – Olivia and Cole’s romance especially seemed to have stuttered to a halt – so I’m anxious to see if White returns.

The novel switches between the past and the present, circling around Rebecca North, once an insecure, shy teenager, and now a police officer based in British Columbia, who returns to her hometown after her father commits suicide. His cabin is also razed to the ground in an “accidental” fire, and knowing that her Dad was working on a cold case when he died, Rebecca is suspicious of the blaze. She begins to investigate both her father’s death, and the cold case he was fixated on – that of the disappearances of local teenagers Whitney and Trevor, who vanished twenty years back. Her machinations bring her into close quarters with Olivia (whose daughter Tori is suspected to have been near the cabin when it burned), and Rebecca’s ex-boyfriend, Ash Haugen, whose land borders Broken Bar Ranch, and who cheated on her with Whitney the summer they turned seventeen.

It’s all quite a quagmire. In the beginning, I struggled to relate to the characters. Ash was a closed book, and I grew quickly exhausted with the idea of Rebecca being hung up on a guy she went to high school with. Slowly though, White hooked me in, as she has a tendency to do, and the tension ratcheted up to a fever pitch. I appreciate that as a novelist, she’s not afraid to go to dark places, and truly, the reality of what happened to Ash, to Whitney, to Trevor and more… it’s disturbing, and raw, and bloody.

As the book drew to a close, it became clear why Rebecca was so frustrating in the beginning – because she’d sublimated so many memories of her past in order to move on, and coming back was like a regression of sorts. The landscape of her childhood was a hell of forgotten feelings, and rivered with the ghost of her father, whom she’d been too late to help.

Ash too, was unable – or unwilling – to work through what had happened to him, and so, they were both stumbling, like newborn deer, into the dark.

To pre-order your copy of The Dark Bones, click here <—-

I received this book as an ARC from NetGalley and Montlake Romance, in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to both!

A note to all lovely readers that if you click the Amazon link above and purchase, I will receive a small fee for referring. Thank you for supporting this blog and in turn, supporting authors!

Thank you to NetGalley and Montlake Romance for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I appreciate it, as always!

I fell in love with Loreth Anne White’s writing when I read A Dark Lure. It was so unbelievably atmospheric and sensual and raw and terrifying. I read it – captivated – wishing only for more.

In the Barren Ground is a bit of a departure, in that it’s mostly mystery and there is barely any romance or sex. It’s as if White is pulling an Iris Johansen, and pulling out of writing romance altogether, to which I say – please don’t. I know that romance gets a bit of a bad rap, but the genre has a TON of loyal and devoted fans. And Loreth, you write fantastic romance. For real. A Dark Lure was very, very powerful and part of that was because of the build up of the romantic relationship between the two leads.

With that said, In the Barren Ground was very, very good. It has all of the taut suspense I’ve come to expect from White, as well as the compelling mystery that I couldn’t untwist for the life of me until the last second. Even then, there were still elements that left me breathless – it was definitely a page-turner.

There are some aspects of the novel that made me cringe. For one thing, the heroine has a hang up about sex, and seems to think she’d be a slutty slut for going to bed with the hero. Far be it for me to object to a woman feeling badly about herself for a natural human need, but come on now. It’s 2016. Can we move on?

Secondly, the hero is a bit problematic. Not saying he’s not appealing in a certain sense, but I didn’t buy his journey so much. I wanted to, no doubt. But his transition from scoundrel to good guy didn’t have a ring of Han Solo about it. It felt like White was directing the action, rather than the characters. Which brings me back to the lack of sex and romance. This novel would have benefited hugely from both.

But back to the good stuff. White’s sense of place is ridiculously good. One of my pet peeves is not feeling I *know* where the characters are. You’ll never have that issue in White’s novels. I was there with Tana and Crash, in the snow, in the neverending cold, in with the howling wind and the barren grounds. There was something almost gothic about the atmosphere – intentionally so – and it was beautiful and breathtaking.

All in all, this was an unputdownable read. My quibbles about romance / sex are personal preferences that of course not everyone will share I just hope that in future, White can marry the two again with her mystery, because THAT is a gorgeous thing to behold.