Tag Archives: Thriller

Zora Neale Hurston, Behave, Innocents and Others, Darkest Corners, Rereading Roald Dahl, All Of A Kind Family

Reading to my kids is the best. In the last month we’ve reread The BFG, The Witches, and George’s Marvelous Medicine by Roald Dahl. I also shared with them the first two books in the All of a Kind Family series and my girls love those girls as much as I did when I read them as a girl myself. Such a treat to hear them say the same kinds of things I said to myself when I read the books. In grown up reading:…

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The Lie by CL Taylor

In The Lie, we meet Jane Hughes, a seeming do-gooder who works at an animal shelter and lives a relatively quiet life. But it seems that her past is about to catch up with her, because someone knows who she used to be, and why she has worked so hard to flee from her past. Five years ago, Jane went to Nepal with her three best friends–and only two of the came back. The other woman sold her story to the papers and dragged Jane…

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Sweet Lamb of Heaven, Girls and Sex, Wink Poppy Midnight

Lydia Millet’s Sweet Lamb of Heaven sounded like it had everything I could want from a book. Anna’s in a bad marriage and has a baby her husband doesn’t want. Now, several years later, her husband is running for public office and Anna is on the run, desperate to keep him from finding her and Lena and using them as pawns. What’s more, she constantly hears a voice running a largely incoherent and incomprehensible monologue in a mix of English and other (possibly unknown) languages.…

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The Singing Bone by Beth Hahn

Synopsis: When a documentary filmmaker decides to take on the infamous Jack Wyck murders, Alice, a professor of folklore, finds herself forced to confront the summer she and her best friends fell under the sway of the charismatic man who tattooed his name on the insides of their legs, and for whom they would do absolutely anything. Review: This is the one you need to read. So much beauty and horror and terror and humanity and tragedy and sadness and lightness, all perfectly calibrated and…

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Where I Lost Her by T. Greenwood

My love for T. Greenwood has been well-documented in this blog, and I eagerly await every one of her new novels. Thankfully she’s prolific, and with Where I Lost Her, she adds a level of suspense and mystery to complicated family dynamics she so deftly creates for each book. Tess is in trouble. She drinks too much, and she’s just learned something awful about her husband, Jake. On a visit to her childhood friend, Effie (from Greenwood’s debut Breathing Water), Tess is drunk driving home…

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The Winter Girl by Mark Marinovich

Synopsis: When Scott and his wife Elise move into her father’s Hamptons home to await his death in hospice care, he becomes fascinated by the house next door, which is seemingly empty and not-empty at the same time, and the actions he takes to alleviate his curiosity have devastating consequences. Review: The Winter Girl is a dirty piece of business that makes Gone Girl seem like a romance. I was fascinated by the extremity of the story, repelled by the depravity, and sucked in by…

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The Handmaid’s Tale, Academy Girls, and the Worst Bachelorette Party Ever

I have read The Handmaid’s Tale maybe 4 times since college, so when my book club picked it for our December meeting, I thought I’d see if the audiobook version was any good. Oh my my, oh hell yes, time to put on that Handmaid’s Dress because Claire Danes simply kills it. As Offred, trapped in a bizarre patriarchal system where she has to bear children for wealthy men or else risk exile or worse, Danes finds a beautiful balance between the handmaid’s naiveté and…

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Thrillers and Revenge–Mary Kubica and More

I’m a big fan of relaxing my brain through literature, but my love of genre means that you can’t really fool me much. I recently enjoyed two thrillers–Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica and The Hand that Feeds You by AJ Rich–and while both were well written with fabulous characters and lots of suspense, I couldn’t help but wish that I could read a thriller that didn’t basically end up in the basement with Jame Gumb. In the case of Hand, the very fact of a…

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The Silver Chair and Two About Murder

We finished listening to the audio version of The Silver Chair by CS Lewis this week. I have always loved the humor of this book (particularly Puddleglum), and Jill Pole was the Lewisian girl I most connected with. I got teary-eyed at the end listening to the tender depiction of good King Caspian’s death and resurrection into Aslan’s country. It means more to me now that I’m an adult then it ever could have when I was a child. The title Anne Perry and the…

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The Disappeared by Roger Scruton

Synopsis: In a community in Yorkshire, a disparate group of individuals are brought together when two women go missing and a third seems to be under threat from Arab sex traffickers. Review: I had a really mixed reaction to The Disappeared. On the one hand, I found a certain satisfying level of suspense and intricacy in the plotting. But on the other hand, I couldn’t forgive the numerous plot contrivances that made the overall story implausible and a bit frustrating. Knowing that Scruton is a…

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