Tag: thrillers

Review 2522: Broken

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A women is walking around a lake on a freezing day. Suddenly, she is knocked down, her head forced into the mud.

Officer Lena Adams is investigating a report of a suicide at the lake. The police have found a pair of shoes on the shore and a note that says, “I want it over.” Eventually, they pull up the body of a woman who has been weighed down with cement bricks and chains.

Her ID says she is Allison Spooner, a student at the nearby campus. The death is possibly a suicide, but she was stabbed in the back of the neck, which would almost be impossible to do to yourself.

With an officer dispatched to the girl’s home, Lena and her boss, Frank Wallace, go there to continue the investigation. Lena can tell that Frank has been drinking, and when the police find a young man in the garage listed as Allison’s address, the situation is bungled, resulting in the stabbing of Brad, a young officer, and injuries to both Lena and Frank.

Dr. Sara Linton now enters the story. She has returned home for Thanksgiving for the first time since her husband Jeffrey’s death. She blames Lena, who was Jeffrey’s partner, for the death. The first evening, Frank calls to ask her to come to the jail because Tommy Braham has been arrested for murder and he is hysterical. Sara vaguely remembers Tommy as a cheerful boy of limited intelligence, but this is oddly the second call she has received about Tommy. When she gets to the jail, she finds Tommy is dead, having cut his wrists using a pen refill cartridge.

Will Trent has had his holiday leave canceled so that he can investigate the custody death. He finds a sullen crew of small-town police who are not at all cooperative. Lena has wanted to admit to the mistakes she made at both the arrest and custody sites, but she has been threatened by Frank to follow the story he’s made up.

Very quickly Will finds problems with the small-town team’s theory of the crime. They think Tommy killed Allison in her garage apartment and took her to the lake, but Will quickly finds the crime scene at the lake and also discovers that Tommy was in his own home when they arrested him.

I can see where the relationship is going between Will and Sara, and I’m not that happy about it. Sara was apparently a major figure in a previous series by Slaughter, and Slaughter has brought her into this series. Perhaps it’s because I like Angie, Will’s long-time love, from the TV series. I don’t see her as the negative figure Slaughter seems to be making her. Same with Lena, since I don’t know what she did in the previous series.

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Review 2460: Deep Beneath Us

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As a teenager, Tabitha had a mental breakdown and had to be hospitalized. Now her husband has left her for another woman. He has divulged her history of mental illness to her employer, who fired her for not divulging it when she was hired. This loss has resulted in the loss of her home and as a result, the custody of her son. She has returned to her family home on a remote moor because she has nowhere else to go, and at the beginning of the novel, she has decided to recede into madness. She feels a rumble and thinks she imagined it, but it is someone trying to blow up the dam.

Gordo hears the explosion and goes to the police to report it. That’s why the police are nearby when Tabitha realizes she can’t get her cousin Davey to answer his door. They find Davey inside, an apparent suicide, having taken the insulin left over after his mother’s death. At the cottage, Tabitha meets Davey’s friends Gordo and Barrett, with whom he regularly collected trash on the beach.

Tabitha, Gordo, and Barrett can’t make sense of Davey’s death nor of the police assumption that Davey tried to blow up the reservoir dam. Even though Tabitha finds a note, Davey doesn’t seem to be the type of person to commit suicide. Later, Tabitha is astonished to learn she has inherited Davey’s cottage—and delighted because it means she can offer her son a home, which he immediately agrees to accept. Then she and her new friends are astonished again to find that Davey has been hoarding all the junk the three men have picked up off the moor for the last 15 years.

Barrett is delighted to find his ex-wife wants to leave his two daughters with him, and with Tabitha’s son, the teenagers insist that Davey was murdered. As the adults and teens look into it, they end up digging into the tangled past of Tabitha’s family—the distant mother, the two brothers who were estranged for years and then apparently committed suicide on the same day (or did they?), the two cousins who eloped, one of them Davey’s brother, the other Tabitha’s sister, Tabitha’s near death as part of her father’s suicide—and why Tabitha remembers almost nothing.

This novel isn’t as much of a thriller as an extremely atmospheric and tangled mystery as Tabitha and her friends try to sort out the truth of her family’s past. Although the sequence of events around Davey’s death ended up seeming unlikely to me, my doubts didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the novel.

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Review 2442: Killing Me Softly

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Although I have lost track of it, I followed Nicci French’s series featuring psychoanalyst Frieda Klein for some time. So, when I was looking through my To Read list for books published in the missing years for my A Century of Books project, I picked out Killing Me Softly, which is a stand-alone.

Alice Loudon is bored with her job, but she is happily involved in a relationship when she locks eyes with a startlingly attractive man while crossing the street. When she comes out of her workplace later, he is waiting for her, and they begin a torrid affair. His name is Adam Tallis, and he is a well-known mountaineer. He is intent and possessive, but it’s as if Alice is possessed by him. At one point, she tries to break it off, but she ends up instead breaking up with her boyfriend.

Sex is an important part of their life, and Alice finds herself agreeing to practices that are farther and farther from the norm. She drops most of her friends and can’t concentrate at work. In addition, she and Adam are receiving threatening messages.

Alice finds that Adam is the hero of an incident he has refused to talk about, in which several people died on a mountaineering trip when a storm came up. But there’s a lot Adam won’t talk about, and Alice begins to believe that he has secrets.

Nicci French is a master at building suspense, and this novel is no exception. Although Alice is not an entirely likable character—she pulls several deceptions over people to get at the truth—we can’t help but be on her side.

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Review 2437: The Guest Room

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Tess’s grief over her sister Rosie’s murder four months ago is taking obsessive forms. First, she wanders all over London late at night hoping someone will try to attack her, as Rosie was found beaten to death on Hampstead Heath. She has moved into Rosie’s flat and is harassing Rosie’s ex-boyfriend. In addition, she constantly calls the police detective on the case offering obscure clues.

Unable to face Rosie’s bedroom, Tess offers it as a B&B, letting it out short-term to help make the mortgage. She has also taken a job at the Barbican, where Rosie used to work.

Tess leases the bedroom for a longer term than usual to a potter named Arran. As she does with all her tenants, when they are away, she looks through their stuff. In Arran’s things, she finds a diary about his infatuation with a woman. At times, it sounds like he is stalking her.

Tess doesn’t know it, but someone is stalking her. Is it her annoying downstairs neighbor, Luke? Her geeky across-street neighbor, Elliott? Or someone else?

This novel moved along pretty well and kept me interested, but Tess isn’t exactly a likable heroine. I was less bothered by that than my feeling that it was fairly easy to guess who Arran is writing about and although I wasn’t absolutely sure, the possibility of one character being the murderer occurred to me, and I was right.

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Review 2250: The Wheel Spins

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The Wheel Spins is the novel upon which the many versions of the movie The Lady Vanishes are based. Although I am familiar with the story in all its incarnations, I still found the book exciting.

Iris Carr is on holiday with a group of her friends in a Balkan country, possibly Romania. Rich and spoiled, the friends have been cheerfully disrupting their small hotel, leading the other English guests to dislike them. The last day, she finds she is tired of them herself, so she decides to stay a day longer than the others. When she does leave, she has a touch of sunstroke and has to be helped. The train is crowded, so the porter crams her into a compartment for six as the seventh person.

In the compartment are a commanding woman in black who turns out to be a baroness, a family of three, a cold blonde lady, and a nondescript middle-aged woman in tweeds. Iris isn’t feeling well because of her sunstroke, but the nondescript woman turns out to be English, Miss Froy, and takes her to the dining car for lunch. There she prattles about returning to England to her elderly parents and dog, her job as governess for the baroness, and her next job for the baron’s political opponent.

Back in the train compartment, Iris falls asleep. When she wakes up, Miss Froy is gone. When she doesn’t appear, Iris searches the train for her, but she doesn’t seem to be on it. In growing alarm, she finds her compartment companions denying that Miss Froy ever was there. On her way to the dining room, Miss Froy met some of the English people from the hotel, but when Iris speaks to them, some have not seen her and others lie for their own reasons. So, even though a young man named Hare and the professor with him try to help her, Hare believes she has hallucinated because of her sun stroke, and the professor thinks she is hysterical.

As the train nears Trieste, Iris begins to fear Miss Froy is in danger, but what can she do about it? This all makes an thrilling novel.

Missing from the movie adaptations are passages that visit Miss Froy’s elderly parents and dog as they await her coming. In a way, they are unnecessary, but they make the ending much more touching, especially the dog.

I received this novel from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2209: We Shall Be Monsters

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If you are interested in reading this book, you will understand it much better—and there is a warning to that effect in the book—if you read the two books that came before it.

At the end of Blood Floe, retired Constable David Maratse’s friend and lover, Sergeant Petra Jensen, was kidnapped. Now the body of a teenager is found naked, his back embedded with fishing hooks with colored threads attached. Not far away, next to an ice-fishing hole, are Petra’s clothes and a suicide note.

Maratse knows that the use of her Greenlandic name in the signature is a message to him that she did not commit suicide. He arranges a funeral for her so that the authorities won’t realize that he plans to go off on his own to find her—and that’s what he does.

While Maratse is following leads and other police investigate the boy’s murder, there are glimpses of what is happening to Petra. Tensions rise when her captor tells her she will soon be set free, as the readers know that for him setting free means killing.

I was drawn to this series because of its glimpses into life in Greenland, but except for Maratse dressing in white and taking a sled dog team, there wasn’t anything particular to Greenland in this one. It’s a fairly standard thriller.

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Review 2178: Triptych

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I have to admit, I looked for this first Will Trent novel after getting hooked on the TV series. Just a little warning: if you have already watched the series, the TV folks have made one major change from the book that may surprise you.

In Atlanta, young teenage girls have been found after being raped, beaten, and having their tongues either partially or completely bitten off. Detective Michael Ormewood is called out to a similar case, only this time the woman is dead, and she’s not a teenage girl but a middle-aged prostitute.

The next day, Ormewood meets Will Trent, a Special Agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He will be working the case with Ormewood. Will is unusual because he is dyslexic, although he tries to keep this problem a secret.

In the meantime, John Shelley has been recently released from prison, where he served 25 years for a similar crime, committed when he was 16. John has always maintained his innocence, right up to his last parole hearing when he wanted to get out before his mother died of cancer. John has been out for only a short time when he learns that someone has stolen his identity, but curiously, used it to apply for credit cards and buy things while keeping a good credit score.

Angie Polaski, a detective on the vice squad, has gotten peripherally involved in the investigation. She has ties to both Ormewood and Trent that she’s keeping secret.

This is a well-written, fast-paced novel that is part mystery, part thriller. It has interesting characters, and I enjoyed it very much.

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Review 2123: The Murder Rule

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Hannah has left her alcoholic, dependent mother in Maine for the University of Virginia. There she uses deceit and some dirty tricks to get onto the Innocence Project. In particular, she gets herself onto the case of Michael Dandridge.

Dandridge has been in jail for 11 years, found guilty of rape and murder. However, his sentence has recently been vacated. The original prosecutor is determined to retry him.

Hannah’s goal is to interfere with the project’s defense of Dandridge. We learn why slowly as passages from her mother’s diary are revealed, dated 25 years before.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about McTiernan’s change of locale, her other novels being set in Ireland, but her storytelling took over, and I found myself reading another page-turner. Although I was not sure that things could turn out the way they did, I found the novel thrilling.

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Review 1825: A Gingerbread House

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Catriona McPherson, in her standalone novels anyway, is a master at creating creepy situations that eventually resolve into the making of warm communities. I guess that makes her the queen of gothic cozies. In A Gingerbread House, she’s hit it with another one.

Tash Dodd has discovered that her family’s transport business is involved in trafficking. She wants to take over the business and put things right, so instead of informing the police, she lodges her proof and presents her father with an ultimatum—retire or else. Then she goes into hiding to give him a week to think it over.

While she’s been away training to turn her business to greater good, she’s caught glimpses of some women just before their lives completely change. Someone is creating elaborate hoaxes to lure one lonely woman after another into a Victorian gingerbread-style house. The first is Ivy, an older woman who would like a friend but would settle for a cat. Instead, she meets Kate, who claims her twin sister looks just like Ivy. Please come to the house to meet her. Kate has a surprise in store for Ivy.

As usual, McPherson creates likable heroines—this time four of them—and there are friendly neighbors and a hint of a love interest. I enjoyed myself very much.

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Review 1820: The Drowning Kind

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Jax’s sister Lex has been calling a lot lately. Jax knows that means Lex is off her meds and in one of her manic phases. So, Jax, who has been estranged from her sister, doesn’t answer the phone. Lex’s messages are cryptic and incomprehensible, something about measurements. Later, Jax’s aunt calls to tell her that Lex is dead, drowned in the spring-fed pool behind her house. Since Lex has spent much of her life in the pool, suicide is assumed.

Back in Vermont for the funeral, Jax finds the family home a wreck, filled with notes and other documents Lex collected about the history of the house. The house had been their grandmother’s, the place where the two sisters spent every summer. One reason Jax was angry was because the house was left to Lex, whom she believes everyone liked best. Jax decides to try to find out what happened to Lex, what Lex discovered. It all seems to center around the pool, which has a local reputation of being cursed. Several people have drowned in it.

In 1929, Ethel and Will Monroe take a romantic trip to a new hotel next to a spring-fed pool. The spring has a reputation for granting wishes and healing. Ethel has been trying to conceive, so she goes to the pool and says she will give anything to have a child.

Back in 2019, Jax finds wet footprints in the house and catches glimpses of something in the pool. She also figures out that Lex has been measuring its depth, although the girls have always been told it was bottomless.

In general, this is a nice, creepy story, although I felt that maybe it signaled the truth of the pool a little too early. Of course, that adds to the suspense, as the reader knows more than Jax does. Another good one for McMahon.

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