Tag: suspense

Day 819: The Winter People

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Cover for The Winter PeopleReading two books by Jennifer McMahon doesn’t make me an expert on her, but they do have something in common. They both show a fascination with the supernatural and the grotesque.

Like her more recent book The Night Sister, The Winter People is set in Vermont. It takes place in two time periods, the present and 1908.

In 1908, Sara Harrison Shea lives with her husband and daughter on a barren farm near a landmark called the Devil’s Hand. Sara was raised by a Native American woman she calls “Auntie,” whom the nearby villagers visit for potions and spells. We know from the beginning of the novel that she died a terrible death and that parts of her story are recorded in her diary, which has pages missing. In the village of West Hall there have long been legends of “Sleepers,” people who are brought back from the dead.

In the present time, teen Ruthie returns late from a date to find her mother, Alice, gone. When Alice hasn’t returned by the next day, Ruthie and her little sister Fawn begin looking through the house for clues to where she has gone. In a series of hidey holes, they find some strange things, a gun and the wallets of two people from Connecticut. Since the countryside around West Hall is known for people’s disappearances and the Devil’s Hand at the edge of the farm is supposedly haunted, Ruthie begins wondering what her mother could be involved in and doesn’t call the police.

Katherine is grieving the death of her husband, Gary. He had been distraught since the death of their son, but recently things seemed to be better. Then he told her he was going to Cambridge to photograph a wedding but died in a car accident in Vermont. What was he doing there? When Katherine gets back his charge receipts, she finds he ate lunch in West Hall, so she decides to move there to try to find out what Gary was up to.

McMahon builds up quite a bit of suspense in this novel, often from small things like the tapping on a closet door. The novel centers around a series of grief-stricken people and the belief that people can come back from the dead. Can they? And if so, in what form?

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Day 800: The Day She Died

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Cover for The Day She DiedI recently discovered that Catriona McPherson, the author of the Dandy Gilver historical mysteries, also writes much darker contemporary thrillers. A while back I reviewed The Child Garden, which came out in September. The Day She Died was published last year.

The reason I mention The Child Garden is that when I began reading The Day She Died, some of its elements seemed familiar—a lonely cottage in Scotland, a distraught man, a damaged heroine. But this novel is a different story altogether.

Jessie Constable has spotted Gus King several times in town and even met him once, an encounter that thoroughly embarrassed her, but he doesn’t seem to recognize her when she finds him distraught in the grocery store with his young daughter. He has been talking loudly on the phone, and he explains to her that his wife Becky has just informed him she is leaving him and the children.

Jessie decides he shouldn’t be driving, so she offers to drive him home, even though she will have to take a cab back. Once she arrives at his remote cottage on the seaside, though, she finds herself drawn further into his problems. Almost immediately after they get to the cottage, the police arrive to inform Gus that his wife has been found dead in a car accident, an apparent suicide.

Gus begs her to stay, and soon she finds herself living with him and his two small children. Their relationship quickly turns physical. Still, Jessie keeps wondering about little things that don’t make sense. Where is Ros, Becky’s best friend, who looks so much like her? Who is the man who keeps trying to get her attention but can barely speak English?

Chillingly, the book begins with a woman imprisoned in a small space. We don’t know who she is or what the time frame is, but we know that at some point Jessie’s romantic adventure will turn dark.

I figured out some of the mysteries of this novel well in advance but not all of them. Jessie’s story is gripping and the situation much more complex than it seems. This book is a great psychological thriller.

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Day 775: Mind of Winter

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Cover for Mind of WinterSeveral times I thought I knew what was going on in Mind of Winter, but I have to give the novel credit for having completely fooled me. This chiller is set on Christmas Day during a blizzard.

Holly awakens late on Christmas morning. She vaguely remembers having awakened earlier and looked in on her daughter Tatiana, but then she fell back asleep and the family overslept. Her husband Eric rushes off to pick up his parents at the airport. Holly gets up to begin Christmas dinner for a full house, and then it begins to snow.

But Holly has awakened with a thought—something followed them home from Russia. Russia was where she and Eric adopted Tatiana (called Tatty) 13 years earlier as a baby. Throughout the day, Holly is obsessed with memories of the adoption and of incidents with her daughter as her interactions with Tatty become more bizarre.

The two of them are left alone because Eric’s parents have to be driven to the hospital and friends and family decide to stay home because of the blizzard. Oddly, some of them omit calling Holly to tell her these things directly, so she spends quite a bit of time unnecessarily preparing the dinner and has to call Eric to find out what is going on. But the oddest behavior is going on inside the house. As Holly obsesses about everything Tatty does, Tatty alternates between loving girl and rebellious teenager. This doesn’t sound that odd, but you have to read the novel to understand.

This tale is a carefully constructed psychological drama. The book blurb focuses on Tatty’s behavior, but it is really Holly’s that seems inexplicable at times. At first, she seems to be the most over-protective mother ever. Then, something else seems to be going on. The novel builds quite a bit of suspense as you try to figure out why these characters are behaving so oddly, and I didn’t see the ending coming at all.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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Day 768: The Asylum

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Cover for The AsylumJohan Theorin takes a step away from the island of Öland, the setting of his previous novels, to present this even darker thriller. Its main character is Jan Hauger, a young man whose version of events isn’t always to be trusted.

Jan is  a child care worker who takes a job at a preschool attached to a mental asylum. The preschool is for the children of the inmates, to allow the children to see their parents regularly. Although Jon cares about the welfare of the children, it is clear early on that he has other reasons for being there.

One thing we soon find out about Jan is that as a young man he kept a little boy captive for several hours. We don’t learn why for some time.

Jan has an interest in getting into the asylum, for he believes a woman he once knew as a girl is inside. He has been captivated by thoughts of her for years. Soon, he finds there are ways into the asylum from the preschool.

The asylum has some famous inmates, the most renowned of whom is the serial killer Ivan Rössell. When Jan accepts an unauthorized but seemingly harmless task of secretly delivering mail into the asylum so that the guards can distribute it to the inmates, he finds that Rössell gets the bulk of this mail. But Jan also sees a way to get a message to his friend.

As Jan’s story emerges in three different time streams, we begin to feel his judgment may be impaired. There is something dangerous going on that he is unaware of. As usual, Theorin’s book is atmospheric and compelling.

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Day 754: The Night Sister

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Cover for The Night SisterI have never read anything by Jennifer McMahon before, so I have no way of knowing whether The Night Sister is characteristic of her or not. Certainly I was captured by this creepy and original tale.

The novel is set in three different time periods and features two related sets of characters, but it begins chillingly in the present when Amy takes a shotgun up the stairs of her house in Vermont. Jason, her friend from childhood who just talked to her a week before, is shocked to be called as a policeman to her house, only to find Amy and her family dead. Only her 10-year-old daughter Lou is outside on the roof.

In California, Piper receives a call from her sister Margot. She is shocked to learn that her ex-best friend Amy and her family are dead. Even more shocking is that it appears Amy killed her family and shot herself. Piper leaves immediately for Vermont, but she is preoccupied with memories of the summer she and Amy were 11, the last summer they were friends.

Occasionally, the novel returns to the 1950’s and the story of sisters Rose and Sylvia. Sylvia is the beautiful, favored child, and Rose feels she is treated unfairly. She believes something is wrong with Sylvia and starts wondering about her grandmother’s stories about monsters. She catches Sylvia sneaking out at night to go to the tower near the family motel.

link to NetgalleyBack in the present, Piper rifles her memory about the discoveries the girls made when they were 11. By then, Amy’s mother Rose is seldom around, rumored to be in a mental hospital. Sylvia disappeared years ago, presumed to have left for Hollywood and never heard from again.

This novel is not only truly suspenseful, but it is hard to predict. Several times I was convinced I knew what was going on, but I never did. It’s a truly gothic thriller.

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Day 744: The Child Garden

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Cover for The Child GardenI have long been a fan of Catriona McPherson’s light-hearted historical mysteries featuring Dandy Gilver, but I wasn’t aware that she had written some darker contemporary mysteries. For me, dark is always good.

At 40, Gloria is in a somewhat dowdy middle age, her life completely taken up by work and care for her severely handicapped son Nicky. Nicky will die soon, she knows, and her greatest fear is that her friend old Miss Drumm will die before he does, so that Gloria will lose her home in Miss Drumm’s cottage and have to move Nicky to care in a less expensive facility.

Gloria is driving home one stormy night from visiting Miss Drumm and Nicky in the care home when another car almost runs into her on the deserted roads near her remote cottage. She has just arrived home when the driver comes to the door and she finds he is an old friend from primary school, Stieg Tarrant.

Stieg  has a favor to ask. He says he has been stalked by a woman from his school days, April Cowan. Long ago, when he and April were in the school named Eden nearby in what is now the care facility, a boy died on an overnight camping trip on school grounds. Hinting that she knows something about the death, April has demanded Stieg meet her in a small building on the grounds, and Stieg wants Gloria to go with him. When they arrive there in the pouring rain, they find April’s dead body. Their first instinct is to tell the police, but Gloria panics, worried that a body in the grounds would result in the care facility being closed, just as Eden closed after Moped Best fell off the bridge years ago.

They go back to Gloria’s cottage, where Stieg admits that he had already found the body before he fetched Gloria. After some discussion of the circumstances of April’s death, Gloria thinks April for some reason tried to frame Stieg for her own suicide, so she has Stieg stay at her cottage while she goes back to the body. The body is gone.

When Gloria tracks down April’s address and goes to her house, she finds the police already there. Soon, it becomes clear that someone is trying to frame Stieg for April’s murder. Gloria can’t help but think there must be some connection to Moped’s death. Sure enough, when she begins trying to track down the other 11 people who were children on the camp-out, most of them have died.

link to NetgalleySet in the atmospheric countryside of Scotland, this novel is a real page-turner. As Gloria and Stieg investigate, the secrets start to come out, and Gloria even finds herself discovering the truth about her own marriage and ex-husband, who also attended the camp-out. I see there are some more McPherson books I haven’t read yet, and I’ll be looking for them.

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Day 717: Wildfire at Midnight

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Cover for Wildfire at MidnightGianetta Drury is more sophisticated than the usual Mary Stewart heroine. She is a model and the ex-wife of a writer. It is 1953 and London is filling up for Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation when Gianetta’s boss suggests she take a holiday and get some rest. At the suggestion of her parents, she travels to a hotel on the Isle of Skye. (It is because of this book that I formed a life-long desire to see the Isle of Skye, as yet unmet.)

Gianetta has only been at the hotel a few hours when she makes two horrifying discoveries. One is that her ex-husband Nicholas is staying at the hotel. The other is that a local girl was recently murdered on one of the mountains, her body found across a bonfire like a sacrifice. She is said to have been meeting a man from the hotel.

All of the men currently staying at the hotel were there at the time of the murder except for movie star Marcia Maling’s chauffeur. Mr. and Mrs. Hartley Corrigan are vacationing with Alastair Braine, an old friend of Gianetta’s, here for the fishing. Colonel Cowdray-Simpson, also a fisherman, would seem to be too old to be a suspect. The famous mountaineer Rodney Beagle is there, climbing during the day and listening nightly to the radio broadcasts about Edmund Hillary’s expedition on Everest. And there is also a bouncy travel writer named Hubert Hay, who is researching his next book, Sauntering Through Skye. The handsome Roderick Grant is also a climber, and he quickly shows a liking for Gianetta. And then there’s Nicholas. Unfortunately, none of the men have an alibi for the murder.

Very soon two other visitors to the hotel have vanished, two women who went climbing on Garsven, the same mountain where the girl was found. They were seen from afar climbing with a third person, yet everyone else has returned to the hotel. To her horror, Gianetta is also aware of some information that seems to implicate Nicholas. She begins struggling with understanding where her loyalties lie.

Wildfire at Midnight is atmospheric and suspenseful. Stewart was a wonderful writer, known for her evocative descriptions of exotic locales and for her engaging characters. I come back to her books for light reading again and again.

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Day 714: Rubbernecker

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Cover for RubberneckerBelinda Bauer has stepped away from the locale of her first three thrillers, set in Shipcott on the atmospheric moors of Exmoor. Rubbernecker is a departure both in locality and tone, set in Cardiff and showing a bit of humor now and then.

Patrick is a young man with Aspergers. He is not as functional as he probably could be, especially with his people skills, having apparently received no help for his condition from anyone, including his apathetic and alcoholic mother. Patrick has been obsessed since he was a small boy by the death of his father, the patient and caring parent. He doesn’t really understand what killed his father, and above all he wants to understand things. So, he is enrolled in anatomy classes at Cardiff University.

Another character we follow at the beginning of the novel is Sam, a coma patient. Sam has begun to emerge from his coma but can’t speak. However, he first awakens just in time to see a man dressed like a doctor murder the man next to him. As Sam frantically tries to communicate, he begins to fear for his own life.

At first, we don’t know how these stories connect or even their relative time frames. We wonder if we should see anything sinister in Patrick’s obsessions.

link to NetgalleyThe novel provides us a few glimpses of humor as Patrick tries to navigate the world of roommates and anatomy class teams and his peers try to understand him. The novel is well-written and involving, but I think I prefer the black aura overhanging Bauer’s earlier efforts. There is plenty of action going on in Rubbernecker, but it is lacking the atmosphere and absolute terror of the previous novels.

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Day 674: In a Lonely Place

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Cover for In a Lonely PlaceWhat makes this post-World War II noir crime novel stand out is that it was written by a woman and the crime is solved by two sharp women. Although there are plenty of women mystery writers, it is less common to find women writing noir mysteries at that time. Reminiscent of The Killer Inside Me, In a Lonely Place tells the story of a serial killer of women from the point of view of the killer.

Dix Steele is an ex-pilot being supported by his uncle in Los Angeles while he pretends to write a novel. He is living in a posh apartment of an old Princeton friend, wearing his clothes and driving his car and telling everyone his friend is in Rio. About once a month he picks up a girl at a bus stop or some other lonely place and strangles her.

Dix decides to get in touch with an old friend from the military, Brub Nicholai, but is taken aback to find Brub is now a police detective. Brub has also married, and his wife Sylvia doesn’t like Dix.

Dix meets an attractive redhead, Laurel Gray, who lives in the apartment complex and is divorcing her wealthy husband. Soon they begin a torrid romance.

This novel was convincing in its depiction of a serial killer. Although we see things from Dix’s point of view, we are not drawn into his dilemmas as we are, say, for The Talented Mr. Ripley. We want him to be caught and worry about Laurel or about the next time he is going to find the need to kill.

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Day 665: The Sleep Room

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The Sleep Room In this atmospheric novel set in the 50’s, Dr. James Richardson is a young psychiatrist when he accepts what appears to be an exciting opportunity to work with the world-famous Dr. Hugh Maitland. Maitland has just opened a clinic in rural Suffolk where he will be employing some experimental therapies and hires Richardson as a doctor for the facility. Richards is surprised to find he’ll be the only doctor on staff with just weekend relief.

When Richardson begins work at the clinic, he is surprised that Maitland will not let him examine the patient records. One of Maitland’s beliefs is that mental problems are chemical and need chemical solutions, not psychotherapy. In the Sleep Room,  one of his experimental therapies is keeping six women asleep for months.

Although Richardson has some twinges of doubt about Maitland’s ideas, he defers to him as the expert. Soon he has other things to think about. He becomes very busy with his work and is also romantically involved with a nurse, Jane Taylor.

Small odd things happen beginning almost with his arrival, though. He thinks someone is behind him when no one is. He hears sounds when no one else is in the room. Things disappear and reappear in places where they shouldn’t be. Richardson begins thinking that the stately home housing the clinic has a poltergeist.

The Sleep Room is a difficult book to review because it slowly builds up quite a bit of suspense, but then I found the explanation for the events absurd. Yet, there is a reason for that and I can’t really get into it without giving away too much. Let’s just say that after an apparent climax there is a long, boring explanation followed by a short, apparently aimless follow-up, and then everything gets turned upside down.

One problem is that the final twist isn’t signaled well enough by the rest of the novel and actually doesn’t make sense in terms of the total of the novel’s narrative style. I can think of another book that employed a very similar trick but much more successfully. So, although I was captured by this book, I find that it ultimately doesn’t work.

Finally, the novel is only adequately written and poorly edited. In particular, I noticed loads of unnecessary passive voice and several instances of confused homophones: “knave” instead of “nave” and “taught” instead of “taut,” for example. These problems were with the published book. I was not reading an advance reading copy.

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