Review: Tear Me Apart by J.T. Ellison

“The words I’ve heard in the past few days are ones I never expected – new, untried, untested. Casket. Body. Funeral. Viewing. Embalming. Autopsy. Severed. Seven-inch non-corrosive steel blade. Homicide.”

★★★★

MIRA | 2018

Filed Under: Broken bones, broken dreams.

Okay, okay, OKAY. Y’all know I love me some J.T. Ellison.

It all started with her Taylor Jackson series more than a damn decade ago (ugh, that makes me feel old), and I’ve been a loyal reader ever since. I love women writing tough women. It’s a thing.

Ellison’s move from series writer to standalone started with Lie to Me, which most people loved, except for yours truly.

What can I say? I’m a picky fucking reader.

I had a few issues with the pacing of Lie to Me (the second half sucked the life out of it) and with the ending (“it was all for nothing, just a giant misunderstanding” doesn’t really work for me. That’s not a twist), but I’m happy to say that I liked Tear Me Apart a lot. A lot, a lot. It’s almost love.

But five-star ratings are so hard to predict. The reading vibe just has to hit me the right way, and I have to feel it in my soul. You know when you know.

So, with perspective, 4 stars is a really good rating for me.

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Review: Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

“What about the house? The pentacle? The empty coffins? The symbols written in blood?!”

★★★

Double Day Books | 2017

Filed Under: Jinkies and Zoinks!

Here’s a fun fact about me: one of my go-to stress-relieving pastimes (and just pastime, in general) is getting as baked as a potato. And what often follows is watching Scooby-Doo.

I have always had an affinity for mystery-solving kids because I wanted to be a mystery-solving kid. But as it turned out, I had really boring neighbours growing up, so as much as I tried to catch them committing nefarious acts, my Rear Window/Disturbia moment never happened. I had to live vicariously through shows like Ghostwriter, The Secret World of Alex Mack and the Scooby Gang.

So, kick me in the crotch and spit on my neck if I wasn’t through-the-roof excited to find that someone had taken my beloved Scooby Gang and used it as the basis for a brand new adult caper! Not only that, it’s mixed with a little Lovecraft flair?!

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED IN YOUR LIFE, my heart screamed.

Turns out, my heart jumped the gun, and it is still firmly in the “cartoons and weed” category.

That’s not to say that this wasn’t a fun read. It totally was. It just didn’t live up to the hype or the nostalgia it so clearly was trying to honour. But A for effort!

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Review: Fellside by M.R. Carey

“Rough edges were what you needed because they were what you sharpened yourself against. Nobody ever got sharp from lying in a feather bed.”

★★½

Orbit | 2016

Filed Under: Casper but in prison.

I was really interested in reading this, but once I cracked this baby open my interest quickly petered out, giving way to an overall feeling of not really giving a shit, mixed with annoyance and yawning.

Jess has been given heavy prison time for deliberately starting a house fire that not only destroyed her face and injured her asshole heroin addict boyfriend but also killed a 10-year-old boy named Alex.

Jess essentially martyrs herself, accepting her punishment with a heaping side of self-flagellation, deciding her time in prison will be short once she goes on a hunger strike/suicide mission. The only problem is that Jess can’t remember any of the sins she’s been told she committed, so she just takes everyone’s word for it (like you would.)

As she withers away in the prison infirmary, dead Alex comes to her with an afterlife request – find out who really killed him, because he’s sure it wasn’t Jess and he can’t find his ghosty peace without knowing the facts.

The blurb is essentially Orange Is the New Black but with ghosts and mystery.

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Review: It Takes One (Audrey Harte, #1) by Kate Kessler

“Doing a bad thing doesn’t make you a bad person. People do bad things for the right reasons all the time.”

★★★★½

Redhook | 2016

Filed Under: That wasn’t me, that was Patricia.

Audrey Hart left Edgeport years ago after being released from the local juvie, Stillwater, for killing her best friend’s father when they were teenagers. She doesn’t regret it for a second – Maggie’s father was a daughter-raping piece of shit, and killing him – and the consequences that followed – have made Audrey who she is today: a successful child psychologist and contributor to a true crime tv show, Kids Who Kill.

Talk about turning your life around – from murderer to famous psychologist. It’s kind of like from serial rapist and bankrupted conman to President of the United States. What a glow up!

When Audrey gets a call to return home to Edgeport, she’s dreading it. The whispers, the glances – all eyes are always on her whenever she’s in town. That is certainly true when Audrey walks into the local watering hole to pick up her drunk-ass father and Maggie spots her. They speak for the first time in years and it’s not friendly. Audrey gets mean, Maggie gets nasty, gets pushed onto her ass and Audrey storms off. The next morning, Maggie is dead and Audrey is a suspect.

So begins all the twisted, romantic, dramatic events that will lead to the disturbing discovery of what exactly happened to Maggie. And when I say twisted, I mean twisted. There is so much history to unravel, so many secrets and lies to uncover, that while there aren’t necessarily any “thrilling” or “dangerous” moments, you are totally engaged the whole time.

There are just so many elements of this novel that I loved.

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Review: Medea’s Curse (Natalie King, Forensic Psychiatrist, #1) by Anne Buist

“‘Let it never be said that I have left my children for my foes to trample on.’…Medea killed her children to punish her husband.”

★★★½

Text Publishing | 2015

Filed Under: “I won’t be ignored, Dan!”

This book wasn’t really what I expected it to be – it’s a mystery, but definitely not a thriller, and has a lot more erotic elements than I would anticipate from a story without any obvious tells that it’s got serious erotic content.

But Dr. Natalie King isn’t really what you expect a forensic psychiatrist to be either, so the vibe is consistent at least. She’s outspoken, emotionally dysfunctional and has no problem pushing a prosecutor down courthouse steps. She’s bipolar and irresponsible with her meds. She rides a motorcycle, fronts an amateur band and has a pet parrot. She lives in a warehouse and has affairs with married men. But she’s a fucking queen in her field – dedicated to her patients and to finding the truth.

I basically fell in love with her as a lead character.

It’s a good thing that this is the first in a series, because there is so much more that can be done with a character this badass and damaged.

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Review: The Body Reader (Detective Jude Fontaine, #1) by Anne Frasier

★★★★

Thomas & Mercer | 2016

Filed Under: If a roller coaster was an onion.

I really liked this. It’s dark. It’s interesting. There are so many layers to the story, to the mystery. It’s never what you think it is.

I’ve never read anything by Anne Frasier before, though I do have a few of her books on my TBR. I will definitely be moving those books closer to the top of the pile.

Det. Jude Fontaine makes a daring escape after 3 years in captivity at the hands of a psychopath. She’s not herself anymore. She’s been subjected to unknown tortures and horrors. She sees everything in the world with new eyes, including herself.

Clawing her way back to some semblance of stable mental health, Jude goes back to work as a Homicide detective, while trying to find new ways to just be alive. (Sleeping on the roof, for instance.) Everything about Jude is switched off after her return. She has no sense of humour, she is flat and unemotional. She doesn’t know how to exist anymore. And this starting point requires that the plot elements, and secondary characters, have some A+ development.

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Review: The Good Girl by Mary Kubica

★★½

Harlequin MIRA | 2014

Filed Under: I was playing mindlessly on my phone.

After all of the glowing reviews I’ve read for Mary Kubica, this was actually a disappointment. Whomp, whomp.

Someone has paid to have Mia kidnapped. Colin, her kidnapper, is hired to do the dirty work. But instead of taking her to his boss, he whisks Mia away to a remote cabin and keeps her for himself.

As one would if they were kidnapping another human being.

My god, doesn’t it just seem like SO MUCH WORK? Who would want to kidnap someone?

Like, I get home from work and all I want to do is take off my bra and lay face down on my mattress while I make exhausted noises and then my husband asks me what’s wrong and eventually rubs my back.

The last thing I want to do is get off of work and then take care of a person chained up in my basement. Then you have to empty their piss pots and make their food? I bet it smells down there, too.

No, thank you. You have to be a special kind of psychopath to want to abduct someone for the “joy” of getting to take care of an adult-sized baby.

But I digress…

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Review: The Dry (Aaron Falk, #1) by Jane Harper

★★★

MacMillan Australia | 2016

Filed Under: I didn’t want to be involved as much as the MC didn’t.

Ok, I’ll do it! I’ll go against the majority on this one! HERE I COME, MARTYRDOM.

But really, I have to say I found The Dry, to be, well, rather dry.

Yeah, the writing is technically good. The characters are fleshed out enough. The setting was different from the usual for me. There was a crime with a mystery to it. Past and present storylines were interwoven, and that can be tricky to do.

So, on the surface, it checked all the boxes. But, I just found it kind of boring. Again, I gotta say dry.

I think perhaps I’m not a huge fan of cold case-style mystery – where the predominant crime is old or closed. There’s no real crime to immerse yourself in. There’s no immediacy to the investigation. The crime scene is gone and you’re really just relying on people’s memories. That shit is iffy, at best.

Both crimes in this book fit this category, but the attention each was given felt lopsided. The murders of Luke Hadler and his family were the most recent. It is what pulled the MC, Falk, back to his shitty hometown. Their deaths are what he’s supposed to be investigating, it’s where the red herrings and misdirection come into play. But, the characters seemed too emotionally focused on the death of Falk’s friend Ellie from 20 years ago, while no one cared too much about Luke Hadler, except for his parents.

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Review: Caged (Agent Sayer Altair, #1) by Ellison Cooper

★★★★

Minotaur Books | 2018

Filed Under: Jigsaw meets the Unabomber

Okay, here’s my issue, I really over-hyped myself for this one.

I heard “police procedural” and “FBI agent” and “serial killer” and just lost my ever-loving crime fiction book nerd mind, expecting to fall rapidly in love with this; for it to be everything I need a book with those descriptors to be. I consciously recognized that I was doing it in the moment, but I made a decision to allow myself to be hyped for this.

…and almost immediately once I started reading, I needed to readjust my expectations because I knew I would be massively disappointed otherwise.

So no, this was not the mind-blowing read I wanted it to be. But, it was still good and I’m definitely on board for this as a series.

It has a very dark atmosphere with a Criminal Minds vibe. Profilers and some bureaucracy, but mostly disturbing puzzles that need solving. This completely connected with me, bringing together a lot of my favourite things, especially the psychology behind the murders.

It’s heavy on the procedural, medium on the twists (focused on the science side of the evidence, and less on physical events) and low on thrills. But that’s pretty typical for procedurals, and there’s room for all kinds of mystery/thrillers on my TBR.

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Review: Tideline by Penny Hancock

★

Plume | 2012

Alternate Title: Kept in the Dark

Ugh, what the fuck did I just read?

This missed the mark on being a psychological thriller in a big way – it’s basically borderline pedophilia fiction.

*shivers*

I just can’t EVEN with this shit.

I was so uncomfortable my entire reading time, beginning to end. I’m still uncomfortable thinking about it to write this review.

A quick synopsis: Middle-aged Sonia – unhappily married with a grown daughter – plies 15-year-old Jez with drugs and alcohol in order to make him compliant so she can hold him captive in her home, because he reminds her of her first real love, Seb, who died when they were teens ( and also another thing that I won’t spoil, but really, it’s disgusting. I won’t say it, but you probably know somewhere deep down what I want to say. I won’t say it. But I’m saying it without saying it. Like telepathically. You get it.)

So, you know…gross.

Sonia gave me the worst case of heebie-jeebies I’ve ever had. She 👏 is 👏 so 👏 fucked 👏 up.

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