Annnnnnd I’m back with another batch — or dump, as it were — of NetGalley reviews. My ratio is seriously suffering, and I’m starting to feel guilty, so please bear with me while I try to cleanse my book nerd soul.
Reviews in this post:
- Everyone Who Can Forgive Me is Dead by Jenny Hollander
- A Killer’s Game (Daniela Vega, #1) by Isabella Maldonado
- Find Me (Inland Empire, #1) by Anne Frasier
- Unmissing by Minka Kent
- The Resting Place by Camilla Sten
*All books were provided to me in exchange for a review.
🔪Everyone Who Can Forgive Me is Dead
JENNY HOLLANDER
★★½
Minotaur Books | 2024
Filed Under: Black(ing Out) Christmas
It’s disappointing to find out that the best thing about this novel is the title.
First of all, this book and I immediately started off on the wrong foot because I strongly believe memory loss as a thriller plot device can get fucked. Joke’s on me because the entire plot, and everything the reader experiences, is told through a lens of ohhh nooooo I can’t remember, but if I could that would fix everything. Like, honestly, I hate it.
During college, Charlie survived a deadly massacre on campus over Christmas break, which left three people dead and others severely injured. Charlie has no memory of this night, but if she could remember then, gosh, there would be no plot. Nine years later, Charlie is engaged to a generational wealth bro, living a very fortunate life while being the editor of a well-respected magazine. When she finds out someone is making a true-crime documentary about that deadly night known as Scarlet Christmas, she loses her ever-loving shit.
In that, this novel is messy as hell.
The plot is all over the place, taking the most silly turns and using lazy miscommunication to keep Charlie on edge. The poison cookies? Come on. Those therapist appointments? Painful. Yes, I’m going to drive and do deep memory work at the same time. That sounds super helpful and safe! The constant reminders that Charlie is British when it has nothing to do with anything? But Charlie, in particular, is the worst. Ironically, her Main Character Syndrome was off the fucking charts. Combined with the constant guilt-plaguing, her emotional stupidity and the fact that she abandoned her friends for a decade after a shared trauma that she wasn’t nearly as affected by? So fucking unlikable. She got not an OUNCE of sympathy from me.
The only part that worked for me was the mystery. It kept me reading to the end when all the missing pieces of Charlie’s memory fell into place. But speaking of endings, that feel-good jump to the future? Was that written for a different book? I don’t know what it was doing here.
The whole thing is just a little… off.
The vibe for this one:
🔪A Killer’s Game (Daniela Vega, #1)
ISABELLA MALDONADO
★★★
Thomas & Mercer | 2023
Filed Under: Almost as heated as a round of Monopoly
I’m very 50/50 on this. It’s Saw and Escape Room meets Die Hard, but doesn’t really capture the magic of any. Instead, it manages to make those elements kind of fucking boring.
I love a badass female lead. I love wild FBI shit. I love a really fucked up mystery and bad guy who seems to have thought out his evil plan very carefully. But I can’t stand writing that is all telling and no showing, and holy shit, this author really beats you over the head with all the telling. Combine that with repetitive over-explanation — as if the author thought I might be too stupid to understand the more complex information dumping — and the pace was seriously impacted, and like 50 pages too long.
FBI Agent Daniela Vega uncovers a deadly conspiracy when the Chief of Staff of a New York senator is assassinated. The only way to get ahead of the insidious plot is to partner with the assassin — now an FBI informant — and infiltrate a remote facility where they believe the terrorist mastermind is hiding. The underground labyrinth turns out to be a trap, and the only way to survive is to solve lethal puzzles set up by an anonymous, brilliant host.
My hopes were high for this one — action and murder and puzzles — so it’s definitely a bummer that this didn’t live up to the synopsis. The execution is off, and the pacing is jarring. The action and suspense were swallowed by clunky flow, with tedious, meandering paragraphs. Like, at one point, Agent Vega is trapped, there’s a deadly puzzle before her that could kill every single person in the room with one pull of a wire. The tension is high, the suspense is palpable… and then the author goes into a three-page explanation about the facility they are trapped in.
Honestly, the life could not have been sucked out of this more. But the good parts were good, and there was no romance to make things worse.
The vibe for this one:
🔪Find Me (Inland Empire, #1)
ANNE FRASIER
★★★★
Thomas & Mercer | 2020
Filed Under: Marco Polo in the desert
This is my second time reading Anne Frasier, and I think I’m officially a fan. Her particular style of twisted mystery really works for me. There’s something unexpected about the choices she makes, stylistically. The setting, the character traits, the dialogue… she brings it all together in such a way that I’m transported into a story that feels familiar, but also new.
Former FBI profiler Reni Fisher, having suffered a mental breakdown that forced her out of the job, is rebuilding her life in an isolated desert cabin, making pottery and bringing those arid hippie vibes. To top things off, Reni’s father happens to be Benjamin Fisher, a convicted serial killer of twenty women, maybe more. After 30 years, he meets with San Bernardino detective, Daniel Ellis, and agrees to disclose where his victims are buried in the vast desert, but only on one condition — Reni has to be a part of the process.
The basics have been done before — but the author takes the familiar and breathes fresh air into it, using character development that is super rich, an intense setting that becomes as much a character as the characters themselves, and a demented twist on the father/daughter relationship.
But the pacing has issues, mostly coming from the flashback scenes that played flat, dragging things down. And the ending was… definitely a choice.
Still, I will be back for the next book in the series.
The vibe for this one:
🔪Unmissing
MINKA KENT
★★★★
Thomas & Mercer | 2022
Filed Under: The Real Housewives of Unsolved Mysteries
When someone says a novel is a page-turner, I usually think, “Yes obviously, because that’s how books work.” And then every once in a while, I read a book where page-turning takes on a whole new vibe outside the literal. The phrase is overused, and that takes some kick out of it for me, but in this case, I have to say this novel is fucking page-turner.
I struggled to find moments to stop reading, so I could do things like eat food and sleep and pay attention to my husband lest he feel second fiddle. I just had to know what was going to happen next, the suspense was toit like a tiger with a bonkers plot.
Merritt and Luca are living their best Coastal Rich People lives, running a high-end restaurant and about to welcome their second child. Then one night, Luca’s first wife, long presumed dead, knocks on their door… and that’s literally all I’m going to say about it. Go into this read with an open mind and with as little information as possible.
It’s a wild, twisted plot that kept me locked in, trying to understand what the actual fuck was going on. I just ate this shit right up over two sittings. And I very rarely do that. This is a true page-turner, even if it leans towards convoluted. I was so engrossed with the drama and the characters and the pacing that I got on board with the ridiculousness.
The only negative for me was that I found the writing style too minimalist — I think there was a way to keep the pace while still creating a more robust setting and atmosphere — but overall, this was a winner and has me adding more Minka Kent to my TBR.
The vibe for this one:
🔪The Resting Place
CAMILLA STEN
★★★½
Minotaur Books | 2022
Filed Under: Swedish Berries in the Swedish woods
This is my second read by Camilla Sten, and I’m feeling like the relationship has fizzled out. It’s me, not you, I want to say. Maybe it’s a lost-in-translation thing? It’s not bad, it’s just that things are not quite right for my tastes. She really leans into a slow burn when the plot just screams for something more, and I think that throws me off each time.
In this, Eleanor — who suffers from face blindness — witnesses the murder of her grandmother, the cold woman who raised her. But because of Eleanor’s prosopagnosia, she’s unable to identify the killer. From her grandmother’s will, she inherits a looming family estate in the Swedish woods. You know those woods? In Sweden? Anyway, Eleanor and a ragtag group of interested parties travel to the mysterious estate to check things out, as no one has lived in it for 50 years. Soon, they are stranded by a snowstorm, secrets and lies come to the surface, and strange things start to happen. When a body is discovered, Eleanor suspects her grandmother’s killer might be in the house, too.
Dun dun dunnnnnn…
The pace of this novel really matches the cold, snowy, stuck-in-a-house vibe — it’s very chill. Slow, actually. So many chapters drag, and opportunities to build momentum are wasted. There are multiple timelines, the past presented as diary entries that became tedious for me, pulling down the pace even more. The setting was lacking, the characters were flatter than a crêpe — Eleanor in particular, I found grating — and all the female characters had names that started with V, which was annoying. Like, giving distinct character names is one of the easier ways to keep your readers from getting confused, maybe?
On the other hand, the mystery is solid, there are moments of tension and twists, and the family secrets are juicy.
I liked this better than The Lost Village, but both books are just so blah that I can barely remember them. And that’s not great, what can I say?
The vibe of this one:
heresthefuckingtwist.com 