Review: The 17th Suspect by James Patterson & Maxine Paetro

★★★

Little, Brown & Company | 2018

Filed Under: B for Beffort.

So, this is the first review I’m posting on my blog for this series, but here’s the ~~sordid~~ background on me and this series:

I have read every single one of the books in this series. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Even the novellas.

You can find all of my reviews on Goodreads if you’re so inclined to watch my descent into pure, unadulterated hatred.

Oh, yes, that’s right. Hatred. I am well-versed in the Women’s Murder Club. And I fucking hate-read this series with a fiery, binge-y passion. Truthfully, I hate mostly everything Patterson writes.

Gather around, children and listen to your elder millennial: James Patterson is a fucking mediocre writer.

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Review: The Confession by Jo Spain

“That was us at the beginning of our fairytale. But here’s the thing about fairytales: sometimes they’re darker than you can ever imagine.”

★★

Quercus | 2018

Filed Under: I guess anything can be called a thriller these days.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a “thriller” this uneventful before. And by that I mean, it’s like the author wasn’t even trying. For real, this was slowwwwwwwww.

I’m in the minority with my opinion and that’s fine. But my opinion is the right one. HAHAHA just kidding (kind of.)

The Confession by Jo Spain is billed as a dark thriller, but it’s really more of a depressing autobiography of the main characters, whose switching POVs we ~~have to endure~~ get to experience; how they got to that moment in 2012 when a banker is getting his head bashed in by a stranger with a golf club. These POVs take us all the way back to childhood in some cases, and quite honestly it was tedious as hell and in most cases, completely fucking irrelevant.

This approach to the storytelling drained all the energy out of the plot, making it feel sluggish, washing out anything that could be considered a shock or a twist.

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Review: There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins

“People live through such pain only once; pain comes again, but it finds a tougher surface.”

★★★

Dutton Books for Young Readers | 2017

Filed Under: Start your egg timers.

I’m going to try to be nice.

And I’m going to try to be nice because while I didn’t really love this like I wanted to, I also didn’t hate it on its face. It’s not a bad novel in terms of writing, in fact, I think Stephanie Perkins has a hell of a narrative voice… she just doesn’t know what she’s doing with a horror novel.

I read this as part of my search to find a YA thriller that I actually want to rave about after I finish the last page, and I had high hopes this would be that novel.

It’s supposed to be a horror/thriller. It’s supposed to be, as per the promotion, “Scream meets YA.” The title, the cover – it’s all saying READ ME SO I CAN SCARE YOU!

You compare something to Scream and I say GIMME NOW.

I love Scream. I love all teen slashers. I grew up on that shit. It’s an important part of my developmental stages from child to teen to adult… which probably explains a lot.

But this is only comparable to Scream in the most basic way.

Teens. Killer killing those teens. Small town scared. End of.

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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 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: Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew J. Sullivan

★★★

Scribner | 2017

Filed Under: Gonna need to go to the bookstore for a boost of serotonin after reading this.

I went into this book pretty blind. I wasn’t totally sure what it was about. Maybe a bookstore called Bright Ideas? Something to do with suicide? But it kept popping up on my feed, and when a mystery novel has “bookstore” right in the title, how can a genre-lover like me resist? Plus, that cover! Come on!

It’s not often that I go into a book without a clear idea of what I’m about to read. I can be pretty particular in my reading criteria, so I’m not necessarily good at the whole “Oh, just surprise me!” thing. My personal levels of neurosis start to kick in when I hear words like go with the flow or spontaneity.

This novel starts immediately. No dicking around. I was pretty hopeful that meant I was buckling in for a cozy little thriller with a side of darkness.

Bookseller Lydia is closing up shop at the Bright Ideas Bookstore. She goes to look for regular “BookFrog” Joseph Molina, who hasn’t left the store yet. She finds him hanging. Suicide. She can’t figure out why Joseph would choose to commit suicide in her shop. But even more curious is why he died with a picture from her 10th birthday party in his pocket. The mystery becomes too much to ignore when she inherits Joseph’s belongings and finds coded messages directed to her inside his books.

Lydia’s attempt to unravel the mystery of just what was going on with Joseph leading up to his death, and what the hell she has to do with it, forces her to reexamine a tragedy from her childhood — a household massacre that only she survived.

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Review: The Walls by Hollie Overton

“Love blinds us all…”

★★★

Century | 2017

Filed Under: Had a point but lost it halfway through.

I’m on the fence about this one.

It feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to be — a domestic thriller? A contemporary drama?

It touches on a lot of heavy subjects — domestic abuse, the justice system, the morality of the death penalty, wrongful convictions, motherhood and family, and guilt and self-preservation. But it lacks meaningful analysis of all of those things, so it ends up feeling shallow and gimmicky. And it’s missing the suspense and sinister atmosphere to be a thriller. Ultimately, it leaves a lot of things exposed, but unexamined.

For a story about a single mother who has to plan a murder in order to save her family from her abusive new husband, this was exceptionally slow and, at times, straight-up boring.

The first 40% is all build-up, focusing on the story of Kristy and Lance — how they met, following the progression of their relationship from dating to marriage. I was not expecting this much emphasis on the romantic element. I experienced a cloud of confusion lingering around my reading experience. I kept thinking, do I keep reading this? I didn’t want to read a romance? Is anything going to fucking happen?!

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Review: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

“People turned a blind eye, though, didn’t they? No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day.”

★★★½

Riverhead Books | 2017

Filed Under: Troublesome women for the win.

My favourite book of 2016 was The Girl on the Train. And yes, I know that’s such a cliché thing to say in starting this review. And it’s such a shit thing to do — to compare these novels. It’s not like I want to compare them. I’m trying really hard not to, but I read this novel because I wanted to consume The Girl on the Train in order to have it inside of me, I LOVED IT SO MUCH (shit movie though.)

So, honestly, I’m going to try to divorce myself as best I can from my previous experience with Paula Hawkins, and just focus on the merits of this novel as a standalone piece of fiction.

That said, I did like this. But I didn’t LOVE IT.

Quick synopsis: Small UK town. Nel Abbott is writing a novel about the many deaths in a local river nicknamed The Drowning Pool. Then Nel dies in The Drowning Pool. Was it suicide or murder?

“Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women.”

I got off to a shaky start with this because of the sheer volume of characters and changing POVs. I think there are 10 different voices, as well as excerpts from Nel’s manuscript that are essentially quick POVs of each of the women who have died in The Drowning Pool. Bringing the grand total up to 14 voices (if I’ve not forgotten anyone.)

I settled in about 50% of the way through, finally getting a handle on whom each character was and why their POV was important. There wasn’t a single time I thought a character’s chapter was useless, but I still have to question whether there was a way to write this novel by cutting some of them out? Just to un-muddy the waters, no pun intended.

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Review: In A Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

“It was growing dark, and somehow the shadows made it feel as if all the trees had taken a collective step towards the house, edging in to shut out the sky.”

★★★

Gallery/Scout Press | 2016

Filed Under: The first time Reese Witherspoon lied to me.

This is an atmospheric oddball suspense mystery novel that I liked, and at the same time, I fucking hated? Like I’m so torn. Save me.

Here’s the problem. The main protagonist, Nora, is a fucking loser. I’m just going to put it out there. She’s a loser.

She’s 26 years old and still pining away for the boyfriend she had when she was 16. That’s weird to me. Ok, sure, it was a messy breakup, he broke her heart into a million tiny teenage girl-shaped pieces and she never got closure. But how does someone never move on, like at all? Has she ever had sex with someone else? Gone on a date? It’s just so pathetic to me.

How many grown-ass women are out there decidedly becoming Bridget Jones-esque spinsters because their high school sweetheart peaced out during a difficult time in their life? SHOW OF HANDS PLEASE. I won’t judge, despite what this review might suggest. I just need a headcount and to tell you to get over it. Find a man (not a boy) that knows how to work a G-spot and make you dinner, and you’ll be over that high school flake in no time. Goddammit, NORA!

“I have not spoken to him for ten years, but I thought of him every single day.”

BARF.

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Review: Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris

★★★

St. Martin’s Press | 2016

Filed Under: No one has this much time!

I am feeling pretty meh about this whole thing.

I don’t know if it was the hype, or my standards are at some level that not even I understand, but other readers seemed to fucking love this and for me, it fell short.

It got off to a slow start. There’s an obvious thread of unease to Grace and Jack’s marriage — her, the beautiful housewife and him, the successful lawyer — that you are quick to pick up on, but it takes quite a while to get around to just how nefarious Jack actually is. And by the time his true self is revealed, the story has taken on a stagnant quality.

Oh, more threats about Millie? Great. Did you want to use the word “perfect” a few hundred more times? Excellent. Grace’s friends are going to continue to think nothing is fucking weird as all hell? Okie-dokie.

So much focus is put on the small interactions — the paranoia Grace experiences in trying to figure out just how to act, and just what to say, in order to “win” against Jack — that it becomes quite tedious to read. And the plausibility is laughable. A high-powered attorney — who wins big and has his face splashed on the news, and who probably works 60+ hour weeks — also has time to monitor every single thing Grace does, to intercept all interactions, to feed her and care for her like a pet? How would any regular person have the energy for this, let alone a successful, busy attorney?

… Even if he is a fucking Looney Toon.

Oh yes, let me clean my prisoner’s poop bucket and cater their meals after a long day of work, that sound soooooo rewarding. Please.

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