Tag: thriller

Review 2316: Undone

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Will Trent has taken his partner Faith Mitchell to the hospital because she passed out. While he is waiting, an ambulance brings in a woman who has been hit by a car. She is naked and has obviously been kept captive somewhere and been tortured. Even more horribly, her eleventh rib has been removed.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has to be invited into a case, but Will drives to the crime scene, which is only being investigated near the road. The police try to send him away, but he enters the nearby woods to try to find where the woman was escaping from. He finds a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of plywood. Inside the man-made cave, he finds indications that two women were there. Eventually, he finds a second woman hanging upside down from a tree, dead. This woman has been blinded.

Back at the hospital, the doctor, Sara Linton (who apparently is the heroine of a different series by Slaughter), tells Faith she is diabetic. This condition is complicated because Faith is also pregnant.

For his part, Will has married his lover Angie, but she took off almost immediately afterwards. To his dismay, Will finds Sara, a widow, attractive.

As Will and Faith try to identify the victims, with the local police withholding evidence, another woman disappears. Because she physically resembles both victims, Will and Faith think she might be another victim of the same person.

This is another fast moving and interesting entrant to this series about a dyslexic detective and his partner.

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Review 2187: Dead Woman Walking

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I enjoyed Sharon Bolton’s thriller The Craftsman, but I have to say that I had lots more problems with Dead Woman Walking.

Jessica and her sister Isabel are on a hot-air balloon excursion in Northumberland National Park with 10 other passengers when they pass low over a farm and see a man beating a girl over the head with a rock. The man has a rifle, and once he notices them, he starts firing at them. They get away, but then they find that the pilot’s head has been shot off. In trying to flee and land the balloon, they make several mistakes and end up crashing.

The man has followed them through the forest on an ATV, so by the time the police get there, all the passengers that can be found are dead, apparently from the crash. Jessica, however, is missing. The police can’t figure out why she seems to be fleeing rather than trying to contact them, especially as it turns out she is also a police officer.

The plot switches between the investigation by Detective Alex Maldanado, the past history of Jessica and Isabel, and the hunt for Jessica by the murderer. It is written, especially at first, in short chapters and paragraphs which I think are supposed to heighten the urgency but instead irritate. I didn’t really buy that a man firing a rifle from the ground could shoot off the pilot’s head, but even if he could, I found that detail unnecessarily gruesome. There is enough to indicate he’s a ruthless killer.

None of the characters are well defined, even Jessica and Isabel. There are family secrets confusing the issue, and Jessica’s investigation to find out about. And speaking of which, the odds of the balloon going over this particular farm seem very low, even given my knowledge having read the book.

Finally, Bolton has a big reveal at the end, only I guessed it about halfway through the book.

Although Bolton starts with an interesting idea, it’s not a very thrilling book. In fact, it dragged for me in several places.

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Review 2136: The Secret Guests

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A while back, I tried reading a mystery by Benjamin Black, a pen name for the writer John Banville. It made me interested enough to try another book by him.

During the Blitz, the British government decides to send the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, away for safe-keeping. Ireland is selected, presumably because it is neutral. Garda Detective Strafford, who is assigned to security, thinks the choice of Ireland is crazy, because there are still many people in the newly independent Ireland who hate the British, but the British involved don’t seem to know that. Celia Nashe, the MI5 agent assigned, just wants to break through the old boys club and get a decent mission.

So, Celia and the princesses are sent, otherwise unaccompanied, to join the household of the Duke of Edenmore with only Strafford for company, surrounded by a hidden detachment of incompetent Irish army men. Clonmillis Hall proves to be a castle—ramshackle, comfortless, cold, and poorly run.

No, this isn’t Cold Comfort Farm but a pretty good thriller, as the local IRA agent finds out who the girls are and notifies his contacts in Belfast. But first we see the discomfort of Nashe and Strafford, the homesickness and boredom of the girls.

Nothing much about this semi-literary thriller is predictable. The girls are lightly characterized—Elizabeth as reserved and priggish, Margaret as sly and mischievous, but still with sympathy. Although the novel changes point of view, it sticks mostly with Strafford. An interesting, engrossing read.

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Review 2108: The Paris Apartment

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Jess needs to leave London quickly, so she calls her brother Ben in Paris and announces she is coming for a visit. He tells her it’s not a good time but ends up giving her instructions to his apartment.

All doesn’t go well for her travel plans, and she ends up arriving late. However, she can’t get Ben to buzz her in or raise him on her phone. She ends up following someone in and picking the lock to his apartment.

When Ben doesn’t appear the next morning, Jess begins asking about him. The neighbors, though, are hostile and unhelpful. The building itself is old and unusual, surrounding a courtyard with each apartment occupying a single floor. It seems much more expensive than Ben, a journalist, can afford. Moreover, in the apartment Jess has found a spot smelling strongly of bleach and a cat with blood on its fur.

I think I’ve read enough Lucy Foley. Her plots are puzzling enough, but her style gets old. All the books I’ve read by her are narrated the same way—in short chapters moving back and forth in time and changing narrators. Her style seemed unusual at first but it doesn’t change from book to book.

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Review 1743: The Family Upstairs

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Here’s another book that qualifies for RIP XVI!

Libby Jones knows that she is adopted and that on her 25th birthday she’ll receive some sort of inheritance. However, she is floored to find she has inherited a house in Chelsea that is worth millions.

The house has a dark history, though. Twenty-four years ago, Libby was found in a cradle in the house with four dead people, an apparent cult suicide. Her teenage brother and sister were missing.

Alternating with Libby’s discoveries is the narrative of Henry Lamb, her brother, who was 10 years old when first Justin and Birdie and more fatefully, David Thomsen and his family moved into the Lambs’ house. Slowly, David begins bringing Henry’s infatuated mother and weak father under his thumb.

We also hear from Lucy, another former inhabitant of the house, who is barely surviving, homeless on Italian streets with her two children and her dog. She needs to get to England and to do so, must beg for help from her abusive ex-husband.

This novel feels like it is building to a suspenseful ending, but its ending is surprising and ambiguous. I wouldn’t exactly class it as a thriller, but it is dark and interesting.

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Review 1570: The Body Lies

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Here’s another book for RIPXV!

The Body Lies opens with the body of a woman lying in the cold. We don’t have any context for this scene for some time during the novel.

The unnamed narrator is pregnant when she is attacked by a complete stranger in the street. Three years later, when she is ready to return to work after a break for child care, she is still afraid, so she looks for a job outside the city. On the basis of her published novel, she is offered a job at a university in the north. Her husband Mark says he can’t leave his job immediately, so he comes to visit as often as he can.

The narrator’s inexperience results in her getting more and more work piled on her by her department head. But more worrisome is the contentious tone between some of the members of her MA creative writing class. In particular, Nicholas Palmer, who seems talented, takes an aggressive attitude toward Steven Haygarth, who opens his crime novel with a nude girl’s dead body.

The narrator finds herself unwittingly getting involved with Nicholas in a way she doesn’t want to be. Nicholas says he’s trying an experiment with fiction never tried before. She has no idea how it will affect her.

At first, I was a little impatient with the student compositions, especially Nicholas’s, even though I knew they would be important to the plot. However, this novel slowly becomes very suspenseful. I have liked all of Jo Baker’s books, and they’ve all been different from each other.

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Review 1400: The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

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Here’s another review for Readers Imbibing Peril!

* * *

Like many others, I devoured Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy. I didn’t seriously consider reading David Lagercrantz’s continuation to the series until I picked up this novel on impulse. I have skipped one book in the series, but this one didn’t seem difficult to understand even though I hadn’t read the last.

Lisbeth Salander is in prison on charges related to events in the last book. There she has observed an inmate, Faria Kazia, subjected to routine abuse by another inmate, Benito, a gang member, with no intervention by authorities. In fact, although Warden Olsen came in with good intentions, he’s been held in check by Benito’s threats against his daughter.

Faria is in prison for shoving her brother out the window. She has said nothing in her defense, but Lisbeth is inclined to believe the death is related to an honor killing.

Lisbeth is also engaged in research into her own past. She asks the journalist Mikael Blomkvist and her elderly guardian Holger Palmgren to find some information for her. Soon, Palmgren is found dead under suspicious circumstances.

I know that Stieg Larsson wrote outlines of several more Salander novels before his death. What I don’t know is whether Lagercrantz is working from Larsson’s outlines or not. Lagercrantz is no Stieg Larsson, however. I don’t think Larsson was a great writer—he was too inclined to go into extensive detail on political issues—but he was a master of the gripping tale. The bones of one of his complex stories is here, but Lagercrantz fails to construct the fully realized world of Larsson’s novels. Further, he writes choppy subject/verb/object sentences that don’t flow well, and he gives away most of his plot points fairly early on.

So, no more Lisbeth Salander for me, which is a shame.

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Day 1235: In a Dark, Dark Wood

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Cover for In a Dark, Dark WoodNora is surprised to be invited to Clare’s bachelorette party (I prefer the Brit term “hen party”). Clare used to be Nora’s best friend, but Nora cut herself off from her old life 10 years ago. She is hesitant to go but agrees to accompany a mutual friend from school, Nina.

All the women meet in a modern house made of glass, which in the wintry landscape seems forbidding. To Nora’s shock, she finds out that Clare is marrying James, the man whose breakup with Nora was traumatic enough to make her change her life.

The weekend is uncomfortable and awkward, led by Flo, who is plainly neurotic and forces all of them into silly games in an attempt to give Clare “the best hen party ever.” But someone might be on the property with them, and it is clear from the beginning of the book that events are converging toward crime.

This novel did lead me along to want to read it, but its secrets were not hard for me to predict. If a predictable book can be suspenseful as well, this is it. I knew well before the crime who the criminal would turn out to be. So, just sort of average marks for this one.

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Day 1194: House. Tree. Person.

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Cover for House. Tree. PersonI scented gaslighting very early on in Catriona McPherson’s newest cozy creepster, House. Tree. Person. That did not spoil my enjoyment.

Ali McGovern has a trauma in her past and hints of a nervous breakdown. Her family is in a precarious financial position, too, because her husband, Marco, used her successful salon to prop up his failing restaurant. So, they lost both. When Marco falsifies her credentials to get her a job at Howell Hall, a mental hospital, she goes along with it, thinking she won’t get the job. But she does.

She comes home after her first day at work to a different problem. Her fifteen-year-old son, Angelo, is implicated somehow in the discovery of a body on the grounds of an old abbey across the street from the McGovern’s flat. The police think he knows something about it. Marco seems to know what is going on, but neither Marco nor Angelo will tell her.

At work she meets a cheerful and supportive staff, but her boss, Dr. Ferris, finds fault with her slightest action. In a catatonic patient, Sylvia, Ali thinks she sees signs of consciousness. She also believes that something is going on with Julie, a teenage patient who claims she’s being held there against her will.

Catriona McPherson has become one of my favorite writers for suspenseful and spooky but light reading. Her characters are engaging, and she creates a strong sense of place in small-town Scotland. House. Tree. Person. is another page-turner from her.

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Day 1193: Pompeii

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Cover for PompeiiI was just as short way into Pompeii when I realized I had read it before, probably when it first came out. Leave it to Robert Harris to make a page turner out of a story that everyone knows the end to.

The novel begins a mere two days before the horrendous eruption of Vesuvius. Marcus Attilius Primus is the newly arrived aquarius for the area—the engineer who is responsible for maintaining and operating the aqueduct that provides water to the towns along the bay. His predecessor mysteriously disappeared two weeks before. Soon after the beginning of the novel, Attilius discovers that the aqueduct has stopped running. He mounts an expedition to Vesuvius to try to find the break.

On the course of his urgent journey to repair the aqueduct, Attilius runs afoul of Numerius Popidus Ampliatus, a powerful citizen of Pompeii. He is also attracted to the man’s daughter, Corelia. When in his work on the aqueduct, Attilius figures out what is happening on the mountain, he has to avoid assassins sent by Ampliatus as he endeavors to rescue Corelia.

The novel also follows Pliny, who as admiral takes the fleet across the bay in an attempt to make observations and rescue people.

Harris has done his homework, and his descriptions of the eruption are terrifying. He must have had the time frame right, but my only quibble is that Attilius has to cover so much ground before he gets to Corelia, I can hardly imagine she would still be alive when he got there. This is another well written, suspenseful novel by Harris.

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