Books

Book and literature reviews. Interviews with authors. Book-related blog posts. A focus on fiction including suspense, thrillers and crime fiction. I love a good mystery.

Book review: The Secrets We Hide by Karin Slaughter

Book review: The Secrets We Hide by Karin Slaughter

2 min read

The Secrets We Hide by Karin Slaughter is the second book in her North Falls series. I LOVED the first, We Are All Guilty Here, and was excited it was labelled #1, knowing more would come. I commented at the time how much I loved the characters and they would be wasted if we didn’t meet them again. And…. they’re back. Well… not all of them. 🙄 #ahem

We have two narrators here, Acting Chief Emmy Clifton (in the role following the events of book one) and her sister, Jude a former FBI profiler, who returned home in book one after over 40 years in the family wilderness. The case here involves a murdered cop and her barely-clinging-to-life daughter and, as the mother bore the brunt of her husband’s violent tendencies, it seems obvious he’s finally gone too far. Things change however, as a number of other factors and potential motives appear.

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four-half-stars

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Book review: The Death Row Club by VA Vazquez

Book review: The Death Row Club by VA Vazquez

2 min read

The Death Row Club by VA Vazquez was the second book I’d read in a short amount of time involving an adult daughter discovering their father was (in fact) a serial killer. Though this has a very different flavour to Happy Woman.

I found elements of this a little confusing and I’m unsure if Vazquez means for that to be the case (duping us), or if it doesn’t flow as well as it could or I missed obvious details or foreshadowing. For example, it’s not clear (initially) that Nicola’s father’s murders were committed twenty years earlier. And there’s reference to true crime show host Greer playing a role in uncovering Nicola’s father’s crimes but then we learn Nicola had been helping Greer on the case. And it seems that was coincidental until we (eventually) learn it wasn’t. Huh? That aside, I became sufficiently invested in the unfolding events so needed to hang in there.

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three-stars

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Book review: For All The Dead Girls by Sherryl Clark

Book review: For All The Dead Girls by Sherryl Clark

3 min read

I hadn’t realised For All The Dead Girls by Sherryl Clark was the second in a series, following Louisa (Lou) Alcott’s first outing in Woman, Missing. She’s a PI here but was (at one point) a police officer and this opens as her estranged father – also the Assistant Commissioner of Police – offers her a job back on the force. I gather Lou wasn’t one to toe the rather-prescriptive blue line and she’s seemingly happy working at Paul Marshall Investigations. Paul is obviously her mentor who seemingly cares and respects Lou, and she likes ‘Gang’ PMI’s tech-genius who plays a big role here as we dip into the murky online incel-like world of women-haters. Trigger-warning that this centres around women and children exposed to domestic violence and those who try to support them are targeted viciously via online ‘pile-on’.

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four-stars

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Book review: Every Time She Wakes by Petronella McGovern

Book review: Every Time She Wakes by Petronella McGovern

3 min read

I was a bit worried going into Every Time She Wakes by Petronella McGovern because it features a Groundhog Day scenario… so I made some assumptions about how it would play out. But… wow, McGovern throws that trope on its head as the world in which Suzanna (Suze) wakes each time is very different. Eventually she reflects on her daughter’s philosophy studies about timelines and dimensions, not in a woo-woo way, rather trying to make sense of her same-but-different adventures (and I’ve written before about my fascination with the parallel lives concept). In each though, Suze’s family is abducted, which ends in a tragic accident… at which point she wakes up. Again. In the past.

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four-half-stars

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Book review: Find Me by Holly Craig

Book review: Find Me by Holly Craig

3 min read

Find Me by Holly Craig is a well-paced and action-packed read that goes beyond the thriller genre, digging into family relationships and roles we fall into… even into adulthood. Craig gives us three voices here: that of estranged sisters Hallie and Gertie who team up following their mother’s death for a last-ditch effort to find their brother Pete who disappeared in Tasmania three years earlier. We also offered another storyteller, one whose identity remains shut-off to us for much of the novel. We also hear from Pete through emails he sent home and (eventually) his journal.

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four-stars

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Book review: The Damned by Matt Rogers

Book review: The Damned by Matt Rogers

2 min read

The Damned by Matt Rogers is the second in the series featuring former CIA assassin Logan Booth and I just need to say I bloody loved this book. Rogers again gives us a complex and fully formed (albeit slightly flawed) character in Logan along with ex-crack addict Alice (thankfully with new teeth, her old ones ruined by her habit)*. Here Logan travels to Columbia where a former lover has been (briefly) kidnapped. Unfortunately for him, her new boyfriend is connected to a cartel family which now has multiple reasons to hunt him down.

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four-half-stars

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Book review: The Butler by Clare Mackintosh

Book review: The Butler by Clare Mackintosh

3 min read

I read The Butler by Clare Mackintosh in a sitting (though it is quite short at just over 200 pages). I’ve long been a fan of Mackintosh, ever since a twist in her 2015 debut novel I Let You Go almost made me drop my iPad into the bathtub (where I read). Here, what starts as a somewhat tense week-long birthday celebration in a luxurious mansion in the French Riveria, becomes a whodunnit and I very much liked the way Mackintosh pairs amateur sleuth and butler (Baxter) up with an unlikely but surprisingly canny partner when unpicking clues, motives and means to uncover the murderer.

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four-stars

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Book review: The Second Wife by Ali Lowe

Book review: The Second Wife by Ali Lowe

2 min read

The Second Wife by Ali Lowe is the third book I’ve read by the English-born Aussie author and features warring siblings of the grown kind and a punitive and ill-tempered father… albeit one who’s a billionaire and celebrating his 70th birthday. It unfolds from several points of view that of birthday boy Irving’s wife, (Gen), Irving’s daughter in law (Celia) and Molly the cruise concierge for the elite 9th deck revellers. Their stories are interspersed by transcripts of a podcast, made following the fateful cruise which ends in a death… or two.

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four-stars

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