I haven’t done a “what I’m reading” post in a while, in part because I’m reading so little (sad face). But I thought I’d do a short rundown of recent suspense books I’ve read (spoiler: not a hugely successful lot):

Last Night by Luanne Rice

If I recall correctly, I read one book by Rice years ago. It was women’s fiction and featured, I think, an abused wife. I will be blunt and say I thought it was boring and hadn’t tried the author since. But this book came across my radar, and the fact that Rice has delved into suspense, plus the setting, intrigued me. Specifically, the story is set in an iconic hotel in Rhode Island in the midst of a fierce blizzard.

Maddie Morrison resides at the hotel with her young daughter CeCe; Maddie is a famous artist in the middle of a divorce from a European movie star. As the blizzard approaches, Maddie is preparing for the arrival of her sister Hadley. For unclear reasons she treks outside the hotel with CeCe, assuring the staff that she’ll be back soon and that she and CeCe will be fine. But that’s not the case – Maddie is shot dead by an unknown assailant, and CeCe is kidnapped. Hadley arrives in the midst of this chaos.

Also on the scene are a couple of characters who were introduced in a previous book – a detective named Conor Reid and his girlfriend Kate. Kate’s sister was also murdered, apparently, in this previous book, which felt like a weird coincidence. Anyway, because of Kate’s history and Conor’s profession, they quickly become entangled in the investigation.

There are various suspects – the soon to be ex-husband and a previous ex-husband among them. But I suspect Rice is just not the author for me (which is fine; she’s obviously very successful!). I found Last Night as dull as the previous book of hers I read all those years ago. The characters, save one, a teenaged criminal, did not move me at all. The resolution to the mystery was….okay, I guess? I didn’t really figure it out ahead of time but I guess it made sense? I don’t know. My grade for this is a C/C-.

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Good Half Gone by Tarryn Fisher

This one was weird.  It was one of those books with a messy plot; those types of books confuse me because I’m never sure if the chaos is gritty realism or just bad plotting. Anyway, our narrator is Iris Walsh, and she’s had a hard life – absent father, drug addicted and thoroughly selfish mother, and at 15, a rocky relationship with her twin sister Piper. Piper is stereotypically the pretty, popular twin, in contrast to bookish Iris. They live with their grandmother, who is not conventionally grandmotherish, but who does take good care of the twins and loves them very much.

Things get exponentially worse when Piper is kidnapped in front of Iris from a movie theater. It takes the police a while to even believe Iris’s account of what happened, and by the time they make any sort of effort to get out the word about a missing teenager from the wrong side of the tracks, Piper is long gone.

About a decade later (the timeline was…challenging at times, and I stopped trying to make sense of things based on the information that I had), Iris is living with her son and her grandmother, and plotting to get a job at an asylum on an island off Seattle. Iris thinks she’ll discover some truth about who took her sister and why, but the details take a long time to come out, and when they do they don’t bear close scrutiny.

Anyway, Iris gets involved with her boss, the charismatic director of the institution, and tries to get closer to the truth. All this while she ignores the weirdness around her – a worker goes missing; various other workers seem to be suffering from substance issues or just plain falling apart. The dénouement was batshit even by my fairly expansive batshit monitor. And that was before I read a Goodreads review that pointed out a gaping and obvious plot hole that I’d missed which made the ending even more insane and ridiculous.

I’ll give Good Half Gone a bit of leeway for being relatively entertaining for most of the story. Still, I’m giving this a C-.

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The Silence in Her Eyes by Armando Lucas Correa

I heard about this book somewhere and was intrigued by the premise – the narrator, Leah, has suffered from akinetopsia, aka motion blindness, since she was eight. As close as I can understand it, akinetopsia is a visual disorder in which the subject has trouble perceiving motion, which, as it turns out, makes it hard to see accurately. I struggled to really understand what Leah saw; it seems like maybe a combination of seeing things and people as static images, and seeing them in movement as blurs.

Leah’s mother has recently died (her father died when she was a child, around the time her akinetopsia started, though the connection doesn’t become clear until late in the book). Leah lives a very proscribed life in a New York city highrise, and has for a long time; her mother’s loss makes her circle smaller. A new neighbor, Alice, moves in next door, and Leah is instantly intrigued. (One unsettling fact about Leah is that she tends to get laser-focused on people and let her imagination run a bit wild about them.)

Leah’s other senses are honed to almost superhuman levels by her disability (this felt like a bit of a cliche, but whatever). She has both acute hearing and a very strong sense of smell. She begins to suspect that Alice is in trouble – something about her ex-husband, who Leah deduces carries the smell of sandalwood when he visits. Eventually, Leah and Alice become friends, though Alice is erratic and secretive. Leah has her own problems – she is awakened at night by an intruder who smells of sandalwood, though nothing comes of it and she does not report the break-in to the police. Leah has a pervading fear of being taken away; there is a past incident of instability that is kept vague and Leah is compelled to visit a doctor regularly.

Things go sideways in a less-than-shocking way, and from there the story is weirdly split between being predictable and being surprising. On the predictable track: not everything having to do with Alice and the less-than-shocking event is as it appears. On the surprising track: Leah ends up developing some interesting relationships in the wake of the event, and then…(I feel like I need a batshit ending alert, like a red flashing light or something?) comes the ending. To be fair, there were signs that I should have picked up on. Let’s just say there are a LOT of deaths in this book, and I didn’t question them as they occurred, but I should have.

It’s definitely an ending that upends everything I thought I knew. That’s not a bad thing, I guess, but it left me unsettled (which also isn’t categorically a bad thing but I don’t like it much). I’m not sure how to grade The Silence in Her Eyes – I thought it was decently written and it held my attention, though the plot was pretty slow early on. I might grade it a little higher but I think my negative feelings about the ending make it a B-.

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The Alone Time by Elle Marr

I felt like this one had potential: dual timelines (which I generally like) follow two sisters, Fiona and Violet Seng. In the earlier timeline, set 25 years ago, the girls and their parents Janet and Henry are flying a small private plane from their home in San Diego to British Columbia. Henry has recently gotten his pilot’s license and borrowed the plane from a friend; the trip is somewhat impromptu and intended to ease tension in the parents’ marriage.

The plane malfunctions and crashes in the Washington wilderness, and Fiona and Violet aren’t rescued for 12 weeks. Henry and Janet do not survive;  the specifics of what happens to them – and when – are doled out throughout the book.

In the present day, Fiona sculpts using found natural materials; it’s her way of dealing with the trauma of her past. She has a big show upcoming and is garnering increasing interest as an artist. Fiona is estranged from Violet, who is one year sober after more than a decade of drug abuse and antisocial behavior (she stole from both Fiona and the aunt who raised them after their parents died, for one thing). Violet is making another of many attempts at community college; she hopes to earn a living as a writer some day.

The Seng sisters lives are disrupted when a woman named Geri Vega comes forward, alleging that she was having an affair with Henry Seng at the time of his death, and intimating that she knows secrets that Fiona and Violet would prefer to keep hidden. Still, for reasons, the sisters decide to cooperate with a documentary film producer doing a story on the tragedy.

There were a lot of aspects of The Alone Time that just weren’t credible even on the surface. The idea that the world would still be intently interested in a sensational case from 25 years before was not realistic. No one would care that Henry Seng had a mistress all those years ago – stories like this move through the public consciousness fast. Further, the sisters fear that the police will reopen an investigation into the case, but whatever they did all those years before, it would seem impossible that the cops would be as suspicious as they appear to be of two women who were 13 and 7 at the time of the crash.

The latter half of the story is taken up with nonsense with the mistress and the documentarian, and dire implications that either Fiona or Violet is a psycho. I didn’t find this hugely compelling, particularly given that Violet, at least, was a little tot at the time and it just seems absurd that she was running around in the wilderness committing vile crimes.

The denouement is silly, with a return to the scene of the crime and various characters acting in ways that make no sense. I stopped caring what happened and who was responsible. I gave this a C.

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Dear Julie Ann Long:

This is the latest (the seventh) installment in the Palace of Rogues series; I believe I’ve read every book except book three, though I started out of order. I began with book four, After Dark with the Duke, which is still by far my favorite in the series.

Anyway, on to My Season of Scandal. Catherine Keating is a young country miss in London for the Season, courtesy of an acquaintance named Lady Wisterberg. There’s not room for Cat at the crowded London townhouse that Lady Wisterberg and her goddaughter are staying at. So Cat is staying at the Grand Palace on the Thames, where the proprietresses will serve as chaperones when she’s not in the care of Lady Wisterberg. Cat is the sensible daughter of a widowed country doctor; at 22, this is likely her only chance to come to London, experience some adventure, and perhaps meet a husband.

Lord Dominic Kirke is also staying at the GPotT; his home is unlivable currently due to his mistress having set it on fire. Dominic is 35 (I side-eye such age differences, especially coupled with life-experience differences, in a way I never used to) and a notorious member of the House of Commons. I’m a tiny bit confused, in retrospect, about him being a lord and being a member of the House of Commons, though to be fair I don’t really know how that all works, and Dominic’s title is definitely not inherited, so perhaps it makes sense.

Cat and Dominic first encounter each other after he visits her room late at night to complain about the noise Cat is making; freshly arrived in London, and unused to her new surroundings and relative freedom, Cat is belting out a naughty song she learned in the GPotT’s drawing room, and dancing around, inadvertently knocking over furniture. The encounter is brief but Kirke makes an impression.

They meet again the next evening, at a ball. Catherine, overwhelmed by the crowds, is hiding among ferns when she overhears an encounter between Kirke and an obnoxious aristocrat, Farquar. That meeting ends with Farquar trying to punch Kirke, and Cat hurries away, only to run into him again minutes later in a secluded location (of course). They engage in banter and she confesses to him that she was made to feel bad about the age of her dress and not having the most in-fashion sleeves. There’s an attraction; hesitant on Cat’s part due to Kirke’s infamy and dangerous air, and somewhat detached on Kirke’s part, because he knows they aren’t suited (I’ll give him a bit of credit there). Still, after they part he does her a service – pays a footman to make sure that Lady Wisterberg, apparently a gambling fiend, leaves on time with Cat in order to get Cat home before the GPotT’s curfew.

The two continue to be thrown together at balls and at the mandatory GPotT’s dinners and evenings spent in the sitting room. There’s a slow-ish build up to admiration and attraction, which I appreciated, and as mentioned above Kirke is pretty sure that it can’t go anywhere, and Cat is probably a bit too dazzled and unworldly to imagine that it could, either. Kirke does go out of his way to do something unusual for him – he dances with Cat publicly at a ball, thus setting her up as the Next Big Thing in the minds of the ton.

Cat is happy with her newfound social success but she is still very drawn to Kirke. Kirke is nursing a secret (though some in the ton know, so I guess it’s not entirely a secret) and eventually he shares it with Cat.

Eventually Cat and Kirke’s relationship progresses to doing naughty things in the garden of balls, which…no, I am just over that at this stage in my life. Maybe once it seemed daring and sexy, now it just seems dumb and I wonder what the h/h think they are doing.

I felt like there was perhaps a bit less time spent at the GPotT than in previous books. I had mixed feelings about that; on the one hand I really like the cozy “found family” conceit of the setting, however twee and unrealistic it may be. On the other hand there is just so much lore and insider information that gets repeated in every book, and it can get tedious.

To borrow a phrase from today’s youth, My Season of Scandal was very mid for me. I think I would have gotten a lot more out of it at another time in my romance reading. It has good writing, a nice, simple plot without a lot of extraneous nonsense, and sympathetic characters. But it’s a plot and characters that, with minor variation, I have seen a thousand times. And that just doesn’t do much for me anymore – maybe it never will again. I just know that when I dip my toes back into historical romance, nine of ten (or more) books just aren’t moving me because they aren’t unusual enough. After Dark with the Duke might actually be the last one that qualifies.

So, my grade for My Season of Scandal is a C+, with the qualification (one I seem to be making almost every time I review historical romance these days) – I think a lot of other historical romance fans might like this more than I did.

Best,

Jennie

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Dear Ms. Unger:

I requested this from Netgalley and then sort of sat on it for a bit; what I remembered of the blurb hadn’t really resonated. Said blurb:

Rosie and Chad Lowan are barely making ends meet in New York City when they receive life-changing news: Chad’s late uncle has left them his luxury apartment at the historic Windermere in glamorous Murray Hill. With its prewar elegance and impeccably uniformed doorman, the building is the epitome of old New York charm. One would almost never suspect the dark history lurking behind its perfectly maintained facade.

At first, the building and its eclectic tenants couldn’t feel more welcoming. But as the Lowans settle into their new home, Rosie starts to suspect that there’s more to the Windermere than meets the eye. Why is the doorman ever-present? Why are there cameras everywhere? And why have so many gruesome crimes occurred there throughout the years? When one of the neighbors turns up dead, Rosie must get to the truth about the Windermere before she, too, falls under its dangerous spell.

When I did get around to starting the book, I was quickly drawn in. Rosie is a sympathetic and relatable narrator, and the story moves along at a brisk pace. Rosie is an author who is pitching her next book, which happens to be about the history of the Windemere, the evocative and storied apartment building that she became familiar with while nursing her husband’s uncle Ivan through his final illness. As the story opens she’s having lunch with her friend and agent Max to discuss the project. Their lunch is interrupted by a tragedy on the sidewalk outside – a bicyclist is hit and killed by a car, dying right in front of the window Rosie and Max are sitting by. The unsettling incident isn’t connected to subsequent events, but nevertheless casts a macabre pall over the story. (It’s not the last time Rosie will encounter a dead body; not by a long shot.)

Shaken, Rosie heads home to take a pregnancy test – she and Chad are trying to conceive, with no luck so far. She’s interrupted by an unexpected visitor – Ivan’s daughter Dana, whom Rosie has never met. Estranged from Ivan, Dana angrily confronts Rosie with the news that she and Chad have inherited Ivan’s apartment, which Dana had expected to go to her. Chad quickly arrives and attempts to placate Dana, who leaves spewing threats of legal action and ominous declarations that Rosie doesn’t know the man she married.

The news that Rosie and Chad have been gifted this beautiful apartment is met with euphoria on Chad’s part. Rosie’s feelings are a bit more complicated. First of all, she feels guilty about Dana. Also, while the absence of a rent payment helps – Chad is a struggling actor and Rosie needs to get a deal for this next book to bring money in – there are also taxes and maintenance and co-op fees to consider. Rosie, the pragmatist of the two, is already thinking they may not be able to hold onto the place for long before having to sell it.

This book had obvious parallels to Rosemary’s Baby, from the protagonist’s name to her husband’s profession to the seemingly benign elderly neighbors (but are they?) to the intriguing but increasingly unsettling apartment building. The author acknowledges the homage in the notes at the end of the book. I am ambivalent about supernatural elements in suspense, but I thought it was rather well done, for the most part, in The New Couple in 5B. (Possible spoiler: there are no Satanists and no demon babies in this book.)

The supernatural touch extends to something that Rosie experiences after moving in: she sees dead people. (Shades of another horror movie!) One is a silent little boy that she first encounters in the basement; later she sees a mysterious young lady in the landing outside her apartment.

Rosie’s sixth sense goes back to childhood, a childhood that she alludes to as difficult early in the book. She is estranged from her parents, and when her younger sister contacts her, she gives off a weird cult vibe. The truth is a bit less ominous, to the point that I wondered why it was such a big deal. (To be fair, I shouldn’t judge anyone for being traumatized by their crazy relatives.)

In my last review, of The Devil and Mrs. Davenport, I said there was a lot going on in that book, and it’s true for The New Couple in 5B as well. Though the books are *very* different, they actually share a few similarities, such as the paranormal abilities of their heroines.

Things that are going on in this book: both Rosie and Chad at professional crossroads, trying to push themselves to greater success in challenging fields; their attempts to conceive; the big move into the new place; and the fact that bodies start piling up shortly after that move. (That last one is probably a bit out of place with its prosaic predecessors.)

Other concerns: Rosie wonders about the odd, apparently ageless and seemingly on call 24/7 doorman, Abi. She’s disturbed by a newly installed speaker system in the apartments, in which residents can contact Abi by simply saying his name, like a corporeal Alexa. (Who thought THAT was a good idea? Rosie seems to be the only one remotely concerned about privacy implications.)

Weird things start to happen, like a box of Ivan’s stuff that she was trying to transport disappears. She sees a woman staring daggers at her at the opening of Chad’s play, but when she’s later introduced to the woman in another setting, the woman claims that she wasn’t at the play. There are a number of these sorts of unsettling incidents in the book, and while some of them don’t go anywhere, they are effective at conveying a sense that things are not quite right.

Also, there is a secondary storyline set in 1963; in the same apartment Rosie and Chad inherit, a couple named Willa and Paul live. These chapters are narrated by Willa; she’s a discontented wife to a novelist husband, and she’s cheating on him with an unnamed man. These interludes are interesting even though the resolution of the story can be seen coming from a mile away, and the identity of Willa’s lover is obvious as well. I’m not sure the storyline adds much to the overall story, but it doesn’t detract from it.

One also wonders about the solicitous neighbors, Ella and Charles. Charles grew up in the apartment they occupy, and in fact both apartments used to be one unit; Rosie’s apartment having been sold off long before. They seemed nice, so I wondered if it was the Rosemary’s Baby connection that was making me uneasy?

Of course, as bodies start to pile up, Rosie has more to worry about than weird neighbors. She and Max find an apparent suicide, and Rosie’s inability to reach Chad in the aftermath pings her suspicion. An acquaintance (apparently) jumps off the roof of the Windemere. In both cases, the dead person had reached out to Rosie and planned to tell her something important, but died before they could. Another character goes missing and then is found dead, and the police detective investigating the two previous deaths starts to focus on a suspect close to Rosie.

Chad appears devoted to Rosie, but he has a feckless air and a disturbing incident in his past that Rosie knows about. She trusts him, but should she? She’s aware that he gets away with a lot using his good looks and charm, and that does make her uneasy, particularly at certain key points in the story.

The New Couple in 5B had a reasonably non-batshit ending (or should I say endings?). The characters’ behaviors more or less made sense, as much as murder ever does. But I noticed there was still a bit of book left, which made the second ending predictable but somehow a little irritating to me? I’m not sure why but I think I would’ve preferred a slightly different ending. But overall this was a really solid suspense read for me – I’ll give it a B+ and look for other work from the author.

Best,

Jennie

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Dear Paulette Kennedy:

This book was described as incorporating elements of “surrealism, history, mystery and romance” and being for fans of “Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier and historical fiction.” I was intrigued, even though the story didn’t necessarily sound like something I’d usually read.

The story begins with this provocative first line:

September 1955

The first day of autumn brought the fever, and with the fever came the voices.

Loretta Davenport is a 27-year-old housewife and mother living in a town in the Missouri Ozarks (the fictional town is apparently based on Springfield, Missouri). As the book opens she is suffering from an unspecified flu-like illness that leaves her bedbound and depleted for several days, on the edge of delirium. She foggily worries about her husband Pete and his ability to manage the household and their two young children, Lucas and Charlotte. On the third day she rises shakily and tries to resume her normal life, but she almost immediately suffers an attack that has her falling to the floor and waking up outside in the backyard, with no idea of how she got there. Loretta also suffers a disturbing vision of being buried alive before losing consciousness.

A local girl, Darcy Hayes, has gone missing, and Loretta comes to believe that she is having visions of what happened to her. After Loretta calls in an anonymous tip to the police department, Darcy’s body is found right where she envisioned that it would be. Loretta asks Pete, who is a professor at a local Christian college, if he thinks she may be having prophetic visions, but he denies the possibility and warns her against demonic influences.

Loretta met Pete when she was 16, four years after she was involved in a car crash that killed her mother. She dropped out of high school when they married, and since then she has lived a constricted life as the wife of a man who dismisses her as a person and seems to care more about her being the appropriate testament to his domestic order. Loretta is already rebelling in small ways – she is hiding money in the house, not so much with the idea that she’ll use it to leave Pete (at least not at first) but so she can have a tiny bit of agency. She also impulsively takes her children trick-or-treating on Halloween, something Pete has previously deemed ungodly.

Loretta and Pete’s marriage is strained by his demands and negging, her previous experience with post-partum depression (she secretly uses a diaphragm, not wanting to go through pregnancy again) and his sporadic alcohol binges.

Loretta grows more rebellious after attending a lecture by a local parapsychologist, Dr. Curtis Hansen. She begins to have secret sessions with Dr. Hansen, in which she reveals the visions that have begun to distract and at times terrify her. She has visits from her dead mother, which she finds comforting. But other visitors who seem to want her to do something (sort of ala The Sixth Sense) trouble her, and when her daughter Charlotte mentions a lady who visits her at night and stands at the end of her bed, Loretta worries that they are being haunted by a malevolent presence.

Darcy Hayes’ sister asks for Loretta’s help in finding Darcy’s killer, and a trip to the police station leads to Loretta’s gifts being dismissed by the lead detective. But another detective approaches her in the parking lot about a cold case – a local girl who went missing and was never found. It turns out that this detective has ties to Dr. Hansen, and Loretta soon discovers more “gifts” – she is able to tell things about people if she holds objects that those people have owned, an ability called psychometry. (She also experiences involuntary telekinetic fits when angry – these scare her as she’s worried about hurting her children accidentally.)

All of these abilities can be traced back to the illness Loretta suffered, though she apparently had some fledgling experience with premonitions when she was younger – she suffers from guilt over her mother’s death because she had a bad feeling all that day, but didn’t know what it was or where it was coming from.

There is a lot going on in The Devil and Mrs. Davenport – there is a strong central storyline having to do with Loretta coming into her own, and butting up against the sexism of the era and of her controlling husband. In one scene she tries to open a secret bank account – she’s been making some money writing for the Kansas City Star – and is told that she can’t open an account without her husband present. She’s also dealing with past traumas, chiefly the death of her mother. Loretta’s relationship with Pete deteriorates throughout the course of the novel, and the Davenport home is crumbling literally, not just metaphorically – cracks appear in the foundation and a leak causes the bathtub to fall into the kitchen below.

There’s the mystery of Darcy’s murder and the other girl’s disappearance, as well as a girl named Joan who Loretta has premonitions of danger about. I wasn’t sure how (or if) the disparate mysteries were related, though I assumed there would be some personal connection for Loretta. As such I was suspicious of the two male leads, Pete Davenport and Dr. Curtis Hansen, though I don’t know that I was supposed to be suspicious of both of them.

On top of these two elements there’s the paranormal aspect. I hesitate to call this the weakest part of the novel, because it did serve as a way for Loretta to come into her own – her abilities gave her a sense of self-worth that had been lacking for a long time. I appreciated them as a metaphor but when Dr. Hansen talked about the phenomena as if they have scientific validity, I didn’t like it. I couldn’t reconcile my real-world beliefs with something that feels not just not real, but like a hoax, a scam. So there’s that – it didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the book but it was a negative for me.

The story gets increasingly gothic and nightmarish, and Loretta has to find the courage to confront the truth and vanquish an enemy, for her own sake and for her children. The ending was fine but the epilogues piled on heavy with an HEA that didn’t work for me.

I am a little ambivalent (as usual) on a grade – Loretta was a strong heroine, and the good elements were probably A-. The things I didn’t like were maybe C+, making an average grade of B. But I’d recommend this to readers who like the 1950s setting or simply are in the mood for a little something different.

Best,

Jennie

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This was an Amazon First Reads offering. Blurb time:

When Mia Sinclair-Kroner wakes from a coma, all she can remember are the movies she’s known and loved. Her college friends quickly assemble for a weekend party, in an effort to help her remember. But with old friends come old wounds, and it soon becomes clear that Mia’s accident might not have been an accident at all.

Was it Agnes, driven by her unspoken resentments? Or Zoey, who covets everything Mia has? Have the years apart only fanned the extinguished flame between Ethan and Mia, compelling him to violence? Or did Victor, who moved away, return with an agenda? Or was it Martin, the wealthy husband, who put a country estate between Mia and her past?

As old tensions and new suspicions rise, these friends must wade through their film knowledge, shared history, and everything that’s kept them apart in order to figure out which one of them is trying to end things once and for all.

I chose this from the Amazon First Reads offerings because it had a couple of elements that usually entice me: a group of college-to-adulthood friends and the “everyone gathers in a house and takes turns being the focus of suspicion” trope (there’s even a storm at one point!).

There are three narrators:

Agnes: a gay Midwestern transplant to New York, Agnes has not achieved her professional goals (she’s in a dead end job in the publishing industry, rather than being a writer herself as she’d planned). She is experiencing some significant financial troubles and is in danger of being evicted from her apartment. Agnes has nursed a crush on Mia for their entire friendship, one that seems sort of obsessive at times. But she also appears to have been a good friend to Mia.

Zoey: she lives with her long-time boyfriend Ethan (he was one of Mia’s rejects). Zoey is a bit tightly wound; she is resentful of Agnes, who she sees as a rival for Mia’s attention. Zoey is trying to get pregnant and it’s suggested that the injections she’s taking are making her a bit edgier than usual (she isn’t really warm and fuzzy under the best of circumstances). Zoey and Ethan have a Youtube show about movie continuity errors that has become successful.

Mia: the It girl, and as is often the case with It girls in books, I didn’t entirely see the appeal. But she’s an interesting character (more on that in a moment). She’s another person who isn’t where she thought she’d be in life (a theme in this group). Mia has married Martin, an older, wealthy businessman, a move her friends widely saw as settling for comfort and security. They split their time between their New York brownstone and a house in the country in Connecticut.

Several other characters show up or end up at the get-together, which Agnes has organized as a girls’ weekend, a “remembering party” for Mia. Ethan, who is both under Zoey’s thumb and rather pathetic in his naked longing for Mia, manages to Uber from New York to Connecticut (he doesn’t drive) on the first night, in spite of being explicitly not invited.

Mia’s older sister Stephanie is also there. Mia seems to trusts Stephanie the most, even though she doesn’t remember her. (I didn’t feel like the parameters of Mia’s memory loss were well defined.)

Cameron, Martin’s teenage son, who Mia seems to have vestigial motherly feelings for, is around for the weekend and chimes in with some background on what was happening the night Mia was hurt. He is defensive of his father but also lets the group know that Mia and Martin fought that night.

Martin himself, Mia’s seemingly concerned and solicitous husband, is in and out of the house early on in the book and then pops up in a surprising way later.

Rounding out the group is the mysterious Victor, who shows up in person about halfway through the book. He is part of the college group but seems to have mostly separated himself from them in adulthood; he’s the only one who’s not still in New York, having moved to Los Angeles.

The film angle felt a little shaky; I had somehow missed the mention of it in the blurb above, so it took me a while to catch on to the various references. In college Ethan, Victor and Zoey had been film students; Agnes and Mia (English majors) met them when they were all enrolled in a film class together.

Mia at first identifies the other characters, none of whom she remembers, as movie characters or actors – she calls Ethan “Ducky” (from Pretty in Pink) and Martin “Clive” for Clive Owen. The references get a little more heavy-handed as the novel progresses. The whole thing honestly felt more like a conceit than something organic.

The cohesion of the friendship group was also shaky, but perhaps that’s realistic? There are stronger bonds between Mia and…well, everyone, than the characters have with each other. Zoey and Agnes almost seem more like frenemies, forced into proximity by their mutual desire to be around Mia. It feels like Ethan has mostly stayed with Zoey due to ennui and the fact that Zoey was a pipeline to Mia. Victor really seems to have drifted away from the group almost entirely, though a secret relationship is revealed late in the book.

The early chapters establish the relationship between Agnes and Zoey and introduce us to post-incident Mia. The ostensible accident was her slipping and hitting her head on the corner of the marble countertop in her kitchen, but that’s mostly conjecture since Mia doesn’t remember anything, and various characters have their reasons for being uncertain about what really happened. It’s natural that their suspicions turn to each other, given that they all have uneasy feelings about each other’s relationships to Mia.

What made Mia interesting to me was that, as someone who didn’t know herself in relation to these people, she’s almost like an outsider looking in. She concludes that maybe she wasn’t the greatest person or friend, and I had come to a similar conclusion, so I felt in sympathy with her on that. It’s not that pre-injury Mia was a villain, but she exerted her considerable charm often to the point of manipulating people, even her friends. She wonders the same things her friends have wondered, about her relationship with Martin and whether she just gave in to being a trophy wife. She’s in the odd position of sort of “meeting” herself and being unsure that she actually likes herself.

The pace is a bit uneven – as with many suspense novels, the early chapters are sort of scene-setting and the action comes at the end. There’s an odd but admittedly quite funny descent into farce late in the book, where somehow the group decides that VOTING on who they think attacked Mia is the best idea.

The guilty party was not surprising and in fact the revelations are pretty straightforward. There are some nice central-mystery-adjacent twists and a relatively happy ending – at least happy enough for a story where someone is almost murdered. My final grade is a straight B.

Best,

Jennie

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Phoebe Dean was the most popular girl alive and dead.

For the last ten years, the small, claustrophobic town of West Wilmer has been struggling to understand one thing: Why did it take young Grant Dean twenty-seven minutes to call for help on the fateful night of the car accident that took the life of his beloved sister, Phoebe?

Someone knows what really happened the night Phoebe died. Someone who is ready to tell the truth.

With Phoebe’s memorial in just three days, grief, delusion, ambition, and regret tornado together with biting gossip in a town full of people obsessed with a long-gone tragedy with four people at its heart?the caretaker, the secret girlfriend, the missing bad boy, and a former football star. Just kids back then, are forever tied together the fateful rainy night Phoebe died.

Perfect for fans of Jane Harper and Celeste Ng, Tate’s literary suspense Twenty-Seven Minutes is a gripping debut about what happens when grief becomes unbearable and dark secrets are unearthed in a hometown that is all too giddy to eat it up.

Dear Ashley Tate:

This book took me a bit of time to get into; none of the four narrators were compelling and the story didn’t grab me at first. As with most suspense books, it did catch fire for me about halfway through and I was turning the pages quickly after that. Does that mean I liked Twenty-Seven Minutes? Not exactly.

Our narrators are Grant Dean, brother of the dead girl Phoebe; Becca Hoyt, a troubled young woman who shares a secret with Grant; June Delroy, another young woman whose mother has just died of cancer; and Wyatt Delroy, June’s brother returned to town after 10 years gone (he disappeared on the night that Phoebe died).

Interspersed with the narrator chapters are chapters set 10 years back, right before the accident. These are seen from the perspective of various townspeople and focused usually on on of the narrators or on Phoebe.

In the present day, Grant is a depressed, anxious mess; as a high schooler he had a promising future in football, but the accident that killed Phoebe damaged his leg and ruined his prospects. Now he works at a chicken processing plant, drinks heavily and picks up random women, and is stuck living with his mother, who disapproved of him when Phoebe was alive (Phoebe was the golden child) and silently loathes him now.

Becca works at a grocery store and fends off her parents’ concerned entreaties that she consider returning to therapy. She is big mad that no one in West Wilmer seems to care about her or the fact that she was in the accident that killed Phoebe. It quickly becomes clear that she’s delusional about her “relationship” with Grant, among other things.

June seems like a somewhat nicer, though mousier version of Becca – her life is going nowhere, and with her mother’s recent death she’s all alone in the world. She lives in a dilapidated house (if she has a job I’m not sure I ever caught what it was), and is so poor she doesn’t have a car and has to walk a mile to town when she needs something, or borrow her elderly neighbor’s car. With Wyatt’s unexpected return, June becomes interested in finding out what really happened the night that Phoebe died and Wyatt disappeared. Was Wyatt at the high school party that Phoebe, Grant and Becca left together? What was he doing there? Did he and Grant have some sort of conflict?

Finally, we have Wyatt – formerly a town troublemaker and drug dealer, allegedly to Grant. His thoughts and motives remain frustratingly elusive throughout the book; he’s alternately protective of and menacing towards June, and he appears to be suffering from some sort of (possibly fatal?) disease that is taking a toll on his body (he keeps losing teeth, for one thing). Wyatt puts off June’s questions, for what feels like plot purposes more than anything else. He seems intent on confronting Grant at Phoebe’s memorial.

Not a lot happens for much of the book; the characters mostly spin their wheels, wallowing in their misery. It’s clear that everything is heading for a reckoning at the memorial, so a lot of the story before that feels like filler. But I did feel compelled to find out what actually happened, and I appreciated that the revelation, when it occurs, is straightforward, without twenty shocking twists. Actually, much of it was telegraphed and quite obvious, but the one twist actually *did* surprise me, though in retrospect the signs were there, so I’m thinking other readers might guess it earlier on.

What it came down to in my lack of enthusiasm for Twenty Seven Minutes is two things: unlikable characters and a grubby aesthetic. Of the four narrators, only June could be viewed as “probably a good person, more or less.” She’s also a sad-sack, so while I could feel sorry for her, I couldn’t like her. Grant is spiraling – has apparently been slowly spiraling for 10 years – but he’s full of anger and self-pity, and the way he strings Becca along is gross. Speaking of Becca, she’s not the worst of the four, but she is the most irritating. Sure, she’s clearly not well, mentally, but that doesn’t excuse how petty, mean and self-obsessed she is. Wyatt is the most opaque of the four; he seems to have been a troublemaker at one time but mostly seems pathetic at this point.

Pathetic is a fair description of the main four characters, most of the people in West Wilmer, and honestly the town itself. There’s a reason I gravitate towards suspense books set in upper-class London or New York, or at posh universities. As when I primarily read romance, I prefer a bit of glamor in my reading. At the very least I don’t want *everything* to feel both depressed and depressing. This is a personal preference, so it’s not a criticism of the book – the sense of hopelessness, low-grade poverty and the dead-end quality of West Wilmer is well depicted. I just really don’t vibe with any of that at all.

One smallish thing that I felt was a missed opportunity – Phoebe never really came alive for me, and I think that’s important when you have a story that centers around a dead character that other characters are mourning. I was told that she was beautiful, smart, ambitious, and kind. It later becomes clear that she’s in her own way as messed up as everyone else, and she has an obsession with controlling her brother that verged on creepy. Somehow I never really cared about her or the fact that she died young and tragically.

The ending featured some arguably supernatural elements – depending on how you read things, but I definitely read them in a way that suggested the supernatural. It was a little unexpected, but I liked that aspect of the story. I’m not sure what grade to give Twenty Seven Minutes – readability is a B+, enjoyment is more like a C. I guess I’ll give it a B-/C+.

Best,

Jennie

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When a young nanny is found dead in mysterious circumstances, new mom, Tash, is intrigued. She has been searching for a story to launch her career as a freelance journalist. But she has also been searching for something else—new friends to help her navigate motherhood.

She sees them at her son’s new playgroup. The other mothers. A group of sleek, sophisticated women who live in a neighborhood of tree-lined avenues and stunning houses. The sort of mothers Tash herself would like to be. When the mothers welcome her into their circle, Tash discovers the kind of life she has always dreamt of—their elegant London townhouses a far cry from her cramped basement flat and endless bills. She is quickly swept up into their wealthy world via coffees, cocktails, and playdates.

But when another young woman is found dead, it’s clear there’s much more to the community than meets the eye. The more Tash investigates, the more she’s led uncomfortably close to the other mothers. Are these women really her friends? Or is there another, more dangerous reason why she has been so quickly accepted into their exclusive world? Who, exactly, is investigating who?

I read the author’s debut Greenwich Park last year and gave it a B+, though in my recollection it’s a little lower, probably a B. Still, I liked the book well enough to request this, Faulkner’s second book. It covers some of the same themes as Greenwich Park and has some similar issues as well.

The story is told in alternating chapters by Natasha (Tash) and Sophie. Tash is a youngish married journalist (her husband Tom is hospital resident) with a two-year-old son, Finn. Since giving birth, Tash has felt her career slipping away – she is trying to freelance but finding it hard to break in; she’d previously been with a newspaper. Tash is also a bit at sea in her personal life – motherhood has put a predictable strain on her in a variety of ways, and also, money is tight. (I guess NHS doctors make considerably less than their American counterparts.)

It wasn’t clear to me how the “other mothers” of the title ended up in the same playgroup as Tash and Finn – I would presume that they would have enrolled their tots in expensive and prestigious preschools, but again, this may be a “it’s different in the UK” thing.

But they are in the same playgroup, and Tash particularly notices the three of them: Claire, a waifish and delicate blonde; Nicole, a sharp and acerbic American (Nicole is so unpleasant I sort of took it personally as a fellow countrywoman), and Laura, who it turns out is a doctor at Tom’s hospital. The trio, apparently inseparable since birthing classes, invite Tash into their group and she quickly finds herself drawn to their comparatively glamorous lives.

At the same time, a woman comes to Tash about an article that she wrote – a short piece about a young woman that drowned in a local nature reserve. The authorities had ruled it an accident. The woman is Jane, mother of the dead woman, Sophie. Jane doesn’t believe Sophie’s death was accidental, and she wants Tash to look into it.

Tash is mildly intrigued, if skeptical. But then she discovers that Sophie was a nanny for Claire for a period of time leading up to her death.

One thing that frustrated me about Tash was that for a reporter, she is surprisingly reticent about investigating, at least early on. At times it feels like most of the clues about Sophie’s death that move the story forward kind of fall into Tash’s lap, rather than being a result of hard investigative work on her part. Sure, she works to get Sophie’s recovered phone working, but she doesn’t directly confront the various players and ask questions. Instead she skulks around nibbling at the edges of the story. This makes sense for the plot and pacing of the book but doesn’t make Tash look good at her job.

Though to be fair, one could argue that it demonstrates the duality of Tash’s interest in the other mothers – she’s investigating, but she’s also just drawn to their lifestyle and the way those two things overlap while remaining in opposition is one of the central themes of the story. I think my issue has to do with the fact that I read a lot of suspense books that feature a young female protagonist trying to dig up the truth about something. I am ambivalent about how many of the women share certain traits: raging insecurity, an inferiority complex, and a heightened sense that they don’t belong (often having to do with issues of class). The central character in Greenwich Park was very mousy and intimidated by her glamorous sister-in-law.

On the one hand, I understand why so many of these protagonists are the way they are – for one thing, they are meant to be relatable. But the more I read them, the more irritating I find them. Give me a heroine (if we’re calling these women heroines) with some confidence, some competence, some VERVE. I wouldn’t want to read about that type of protagonist all the time either, but I would like some variety.

(I think low-key I was also thinking that Tash’s actions weren’t particularly ethical from a journalistic standpoint; I kind of wish that’d been addressed.)

In the earlier Sophie timeline, she develops an infatuation with Claire’s husband, Jez. Claire is pregnant with the child who ends up being Finn’s contemporary in the later timeline; Sophie is chiefly a caretaker for Jez’s son Jude, whose mother died of cancer shortly after his birth. Jude is a strange child, particularly in the later timeline with Tash. Sophie becomes devoted to him and finds herself in the position of default caretaker of Claire and Jez’s household. Claire becomes more neurotic and reticent before her son’s birth, and afterward clearly suffers from postpartum depression, though it takes a long time for anyone to do anything about it. Meanwhile, Sophie bonds with Claire’s infant, Beau, and increasingly imagines herself in Claire’s place in the household, as wife to Jez and mother to Jude and Beau.

The class issues are intriguing and front and center in The Other Mothers. Sophie finds the idea of going back to the drab lower-middle class life she lived before coming to live in Claire and Jez’s house untenable. Her friend Sal is also a nanny; she cares for the daughter of another mother from the playgroup, Christina. (As an aside, I figured out a biggish twist about Christina fairly early on.) Sal is a bit more hard-bitten than Sophie and she has a fairly cynical attitude toward the wealthy mothers in the group. Later in the story, Sal tries to help Tash with some critical information that may be relevant to Sophie’s death, with tragic results.

Tash appears to have grown up middle-class (her father was a noted photographer who died in Iraq on assignment when she was 15), but she’s not happy with her place in life now – she and Tom both want something better for Finn than their sad little flat in a non-fashionable area without much of a yard. She ends up as drawn as Sophie was to the life that Claire leads, as well as a bit to Claire’s husband, Jez.

I thought The Other Mothers did a good job of laying out enough possible suspects and motives to keep me guessing (except for Christina’s secret, that is – but I wasn’t clear on whether that fit into Sophie’s death or not).  The initial ending was a bit unsatisfying. Not because of the resolution of the mystery – that was fine – but because Tash makes some choices that felt not quite true to character (or maybe I just wanted to believe that she had more integrity than she did). Then there’s a whole second ending, with several batshit twists.

(I really overuse the word “batshit” when reviewing suspense, because that’s how these twists feel to me. I’m ambivalent about them – I admit I kind of like the craziness, but I also shake my head at how over-the-top they are.)

The second ending didn’t quite work for me either – there’s a fair amount of moral ambiguity about several characters’ actions and I’m not sure how I felt about it. There’s also a sort of emergent second villain (well, the story actually has quite a few villains), and that character’s villainy, or at least the extent of it, felt out of left field and overblown.

Complaints aside, I really found The Other Mothers a compelling read. I would wake up in the morning wanting to read more of it, and I was even sad that it was ending as the final chapters approached. I’m going to give this an A-/B+, and eagerly look forward to Faulkner’s next book.

Best,

Jennie

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They met when they were teenagers. Now they’re adults, and time has been kind to some and unkind to others—none more so than to Bea, the one they lost nine long years ago. They’ve gathered to reminisce at Bea’s family’s estate, a once-glorious mansion straight out of a gothic novel. Best friends, old flames, secret enemies, and new lovers are all under one roof—but when the weather turns and they’re snowed in at the edge of eternity, there’s nowhere left to hide from their shared history.

As the walls close in, the pretense of normality gives way to long-buried grief, bitterness, and rage. Underneath it all, there’s the nagging feeling that Bea’s shocking death wasn’t what it was claimed to be. And before the weekend is through, the truth will be unleashed—no matter the cost.

I am a fan of closed circle mysteries, though I wasn’t sure if this one would qualify, since it at first seemed to be about friends reuniting nine years after the death of a beloved friend, rather than one where a character is killed and there are limited number of suspects. Things developed in the latter direction, but it took a while.

The narrator, Luna, is 29, and we find out almost on the first page that she is going blind. This is a huge fear of mine, so I was inclined to be sympathetic even if at times I got annoyed by the constant reminders that soon she would not be able to see. Ironically, I guess, Luna is a photographer, and she’s determined to get as much on film as she can while she can.

The story is set in New Zealand, with a diverse cast (something Singh excels at). Luna is ethnically Chinese, though she is adopted, presumably by a white family (it’s not made clear except that she notes the difference in coloring between her and her mother). The group includes a native Maori, a child of refugees from Sudan, and a character of Indian descent, among others. I really do like Singh’s commitment to portraying a melting pot with her characters.

At the start of the story, Luna is headed north, to a part of New Zealand that she refers to as “alpine” (Washington state was my point of reference, but I have no idea how accurate that was). She’s getting together with old friends she met as a teenager. There actually *are* eight in the group, since one member brings a new girlfriend. Our cast of characters:

Luna; narrator, photographer, secretly going blind;

Darcie and Ash; the hosts – it’s Darcie’s dilapidated but still impressive family estate that is the site of the reunion;

Vansi and Phoenix, Luna’s best friend and her husband – Vansi is a nurse and Phoenix is a doctor on the verge of becoming a surgeon;

Aaron and Grace; he is part of the group and she is his new fiancée – Aaron is sweet-natured and religious (though the latter is conveyed with a light touch) and Grace is very bubbly;

Kaea; handsome, charming and promiscuous; he’s a lawyer.

The missing person the – “should have been” – is Darcie’s younger sister Bea. Nine years before she had disappeared from the group, then died at a distant location, ostensibly by suicide. Luna is even now not reconciled to the loss of Bea. I mentioned that I was inclined to be sympathetic to Luna because of her impending blindness, but by a quarter of the way through she was working on my nerves hard.

Luna’s devotion to Bea felt unwholesome and honestly creepy. Luna states on several occasions that she would do anything for Bea. She mentions that her attachment is not sexual, twice I think, but it feels like it kind of is? Which – that part is not creepy, but the dynamics of the relationship, the intensity of Luna’s devotion and her insistence that Bea was the most beautiful, wondrous creature to ever walk the Earth – all of that was really strange and off-putting. It made me view Luna as an unreliable narrator, which I don’t think was the intent, since her view of Bea is never really challenged by the other characters. It’s just…very, very weird.

The group passes an uneventful first night, but things start to fall apart the next day. A freak storm hits while most of the group are out hiking, and they return soaked, with Kaea injured. Kaea is the strongest and most competent hiker of the friends, and later he shares with Luna that one of his shoes was apparently deliberately damaged right before the hike, leading to his fall and injury.

It’s at this point that I kind of wondered what would happen if Kaea and Luna just confronted the group with the evidence of sabotage. But that never happens in this type of book, so they keep it to themselves. There’s also some business with a doll of Bea’s that keeps turning up unexpectedly and traumatizing Darcie. It begins to be clear that either one (or more) of the group is acting with bad intent or….there’s someone else in the house. Did I mention that the house has a number of secret passages?

Then the rain turns to snow and soon the group are genuinely snowed in. Tensions rachet up as a character disappears and is later found in a secret room with an unexplained head injury.

There is some business with Darcie’s ancestors, the original tenants of the mansion. The mother of the family (whose secret diary Luna finds) was essentially a mail-order bride brought over from England, and her husband was at best dour and at worst erratic. Their oldest daughter seemed to hate her younger siblings, and eventually the mother and those younger siblings died in a house fire that caused great damage to the house (the damaged parts were never torn down, for reasons unclear).  The suggestion seems to be that perhaps the eldest daughter, Elizabeth, killed her mother and siblings.

It’s further suggested that there is a strain of madness that affects the family’s descendants to this day. Darcie confides in Luna that Bea was severely mentally ill, and in fact was medicated heavily from the age of 13. Luna finds this hard to believe, both because she never saw signs of mental illness in Bea and because Luna literally worships the ground Bea walked on and doesn’t like to hear anything that could be construed as bad about her. She instead suspects Darcie; for a longtime close friend, Luna doesn’t actually seem to like Darcie that much. Luna resents that Darcie has Ash, who loved Bea first (Luna is convinced he still does).

I have complaints about some of Singh’s writing tics in her Psy/Changeling books, but there were different prose issues with There Should Have Been Eight. For some reason Luna constantly refers to Vansi as her “best friend” – by my count 22 times in the book. It was in situations where it made more sense just to use her name; e.g. “my best friend walked into the room”, “my best friend hates kumquats.” It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it really annoyed me, and it increased my annoyance with Luna.

Luna was really my big problem with the book. A few issues aside, the writing was good and the plot was strong. The denouement was twisty as expected (though I half-guessed the identity of a villain). As a mystery There Should Have Been Eight was a reasonably satisfying book. There are aspects of the plot that don’t bear close scrutiny, but I can live with that.

But: Luna. She is a cipher. We know a collection of facts about her – she’s adopted, she’s a photographer, she has a rare disease that will shortly take her eyesight – but the only sense in which she comes alive is in her bizarre obsession with Bea. My problem was really two-fold: 1) I didn’t like Luna, found her creepy, and didn’t trust her version of reality and 2) we only get Luna’s point of view and nothing in the story really challenges that POV, which left me feeling off-kilter.

If the book had dialed down the depiction of Bea as a magical fairy of goodness and light *or* if it acknowledged that Luna was cuckoo for cocoa puffs where Bea was concerned, I’d be able to judge it more fairly. As it is, that aspect of the story cast a pall over everything else for me. Because it was still readable and the twists were decent, I’ll give this a C.

Best,

Jennie

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For fans of Verity and A Flicker in the Dark, Midnight is the Darkest Hour is a twisted tale of murder, obsessive love, and the beastly urges that lie dormant within us all…even the God-fearing folk of Bottom Springs, Louisiana. In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist. Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than the God and the Devil are the myths that haunt the area, like the story of the Low Man, a vampiric figure said to steal into sinners’ bedrooms and kill them on moonless nights. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Bottom Springs is thrown into uproar—and Ruth realizes only she and Everett, an old friend with a dark past, have the power to comb the town’s secret underbelly in search of true evil.

A dark and powerful novel like fans have come to expect from Ashley Winstead, Midnight is the Darkest Hour is an examination of the ways we’ve come to expect love, religion, and stories to save us, the lengths we have to go to in order to take back power, and the monstrous work of being a girl in this world.

Given how much I enjoy sturm und drang and good old melodrama, I am always surprised that I don’t like gothic novels more, and that Southern gothic novels, specifically, often irritate me. Gothics can feel so self-conscious and self-referential, and adding the Southern atmosphere amps up those qualities. It’s all just too much for me, usually from the start. (It doesn’t help that the typical gothic heroine is relentlessly insipid.)

This novel layers the Southern gothic atmosphere on from the first scene: our protagonist, Ruth, is part of a group of townspeople gathered to hear the sheriff declare the discovery of a human skull that shows signs of violence. There are murmurings about the Low Man (a local mythical boogeyman) and dark happenings, and attention turns to Ruth’s father, the town preacher, who seems to hold more power over the residents of Bottom Springs than any of the other men of standing in the community. He manages to whip everyone up with a rousing speech about demons walking amongst them and Christ’s deliverance.

The story is told in alternating timelines: the present, when Ruth is about 23 and the past, starting when Ruth is 17. I usually enjoy alternating timelines, but this one got confusing for me – Ruth has Dark Secrets that she keeps from her best friend Everett and I found it hard to keep track of just what secrets Ruth was keeping and when she started keeping them.

Teenaged Ruth is extremely shy and quiet, the only child of ultra-strict parents who are central casting archetypes: Preacher and Preacher’s Wife. She has a rebellious streak (well, duh) but it’s pretty well hidden. When she begins to receive attention from an older itinerant worker, Renard, Ruth’s romantic dreams (fueled by her reading of forbidden books, such as Twilight) take flight. But a secret meeting with Renard (in the swamp, the most romantic of rendezvous locations) ends very badly. Which leads to present-day Ruth thinking she knows who that skull might belong to.

The bad date with Renard also leads Ruth to a fast and intense friendship with Everett, who she previously knew simply as the town weirdo. Everett is the son of an alcoholic father; they are poor and Ever is what passes for a goth outcast in Bottom Springs. Ever teaches Ruth about the natural world around her and the wonders of the swamp (!) and on one memorable occasion sucks snake venom out of her inner thigh, which both turns Ruth on and maybe saves her life? I don’t know. Ruth’s terrible parents are disapproving of the relationship but don’t forbid it outright (not believably, given the control they have over Ruth).

From there the book gets kind of crazy with drug-dealing motorcycle gangs, secret occult groups and some vigilante shit that made me uncomfortable. Both Ruth and Ever have secrets, and also neither seem to realize or at least acknowledge the sexual tension between them for YEARS, for reasons that were unclear.

Ruth gets a condescending boyfriend in the form of a sheriff’s deputy. She continues to kowtow to her parents and doesn’t just skip Bottom Springs like she wants to at 18. This made no sense to me and honestly kind of infuriated me, though it was finally explained as being related to her Dark Secret.

As mentioned, the Southern atmosphere is ladled on heavily, with references to colorful local characters: “…Hardy Tullis-you know, that crazy fella that tries to wrestle gators?” and “Old Man Jonas” and a lower-class cadre of actual fishwives, whose husbands are employed by the major business in the area. None of it feels realistic. Nor do the main characters – while the protagonists of the author’s previous books In My Dreams I Hold a Knife and The Last Housewife where flawed but sympathetic, Ruth and Ever feel too much like a collection of cliches to ever come alive. To the degree that Ruth felt real to me, I found myself irritated with her for her unwillingness to just cut her parents off, already. When she finally does, it’s a overcorrection that leads to tragedy.

Speaking of which, the denouement features an actual lynch mob, Ruth doing very stupid things that somehow work out as planned, and an ending I really wasn’t thrilled with.

BIG SPOILER

I rarely give actual bad grades to suspense books, mostly because they tend to hold my attention and I value that highly when grading. Maybe I’ve just read enough of them now that that doesn’t count for as much, or maybe I was just too annoyed with the aspects of Midnight is the Darkest Hour that annoyed me. I’m giving it a D.

Best,
Jennie

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I pivoted in my Amazon First Reads recently and eschewed a thriller in favor of a genre I have rarely read – Young Adult. I have long been into New Adult novels, but they have a very different vibe to me – the difference is a few years for the characters but the situations usually feel vastly different to me.

I was intrigued by the blurb to Woke Up Like This:

For two high school seniors, it’s seventeen going on thirty—overnight—in a magical romantic comedy about growing up too fast and living in the moment.

Planning the perfect prom is one last “to do” on ultra-organized Charlotte Wu’s high school bucket list. So far, so good, if not for a decorating accident that sends Charlotte crash-landing off a ladder, face-first into her obnoxiously ripped archnemesis J. T. Renner. Worse? When Charlotte wakes up, she finds herself in an unfamiliar bed at thirty years old, with her bearded fiancé, Renner, by her side.

Either they’ve lost their minds or they’ve been drop-kicked into adulthood, forever trapped in the thirty-year-old bodies of their future selves. With each other as their only constant, Charlotte and Renner discover all that’s changed in the time they’ve missed. Charlotte also learns there’s more to Renner than irritating-jock charm, and that reaching the next milestone isn’t as important as what happens in between.

Navigating a series of adventures and a confounding new normal, Charlotte and Renner will do whatever it takes to find a way back to seventeen. But when—and if—they do, what then?

There’s an obvious plot connection to the Jennifer Garner film 13 Going on 30, which I saw back in the day (when I used to actually go to the movie theater – I can’t believe the movie is almost 20 years old!). I remember enjoying the movie enough that I was interested to see how a similar concept would play out in a book.

Charlotte is our first-person narrator, and she’s a definite type; think Tracy Flick from Election, dialed down several notches. She’s uptight and intense, but still manages to be a sympathetic heroine.

In Charlotte’s 17-year-old life, she’s trying to finish out the school year strong with a successful prom. Charlotte, as a member of the student council, is heavy into the planning. Charlotte is not student council president, a fact that absolutely sticks in her craw. Charlotte worked hard all four years of high school towards her goals, and student council president was one of those goals. J.T. Renner entered the race at the last minute (again, shades of Election!) and easily won, because everyone loves J.T. (except Charlotte, that is).

Charlotte has other stressors that are making her last weeks of school challenging. She’s going for a scholarship that she needs to finance college; her parents are divorced and her mother is not wealthy. Her father’s contributions are unclear (which in retrospect may be a bit of a plot hole, or perhaps I missed an explanation).

About Charlotte’s father: since the divorce he’s not been a great dad; he’s a workaholic who hasn’t been there for his daughter. His absence from important milestones in her life, like her middle-school graduation, has been a source of pain for her. She’s surprised to hear from him early on in the book and find out that not only does he have a serious girlfriend, but the girlfriend is pregnant. Charlotte isn’t sure how to feel about these developments.

Charlotte has two best friends – cool, edgy Nori and cheerleader Kassie. Kassie has long been Charlotte’s “best friend”, but she’s not actually that great a friend, and lately that fact – along with their impending separation for college – is weighing on Charlotte. Kassie is self-absorbed and frequently ditches Charlotte for her longtime boyfriend, Ollie.

Finally, Charlotte is worried about going to the prom solo – she says she doesn’t care, but she kind of does. She has had a longtime crush on Clay Diaz, and has almost worked up the nerve to ask him to prom, when she’s derailed by an embarrassing faux pas involving tampons in the school hallway. She blames this on Renner, further increasing her enmity (which could hardly be greater, honestly).

The book takes a while to get to the flash forward, but I didn’t mind; it helped establish the characters and their relationships. It’s a quarter of the way into the story when Charlotte and Renner find themselves flung into the future. They react with the incredulity you’d expect, but slowly acclimate to their reality, if not to their impending wedding. From there Charlotte learns some Important Lessons about life and relationships, and realizes that Renner has some hidden depths (I hope I’m not spoiling anything with that extremely predictable plot point).

I enjoyed Woke Up Like This quite a bit – the writing was strong and the characters likable. It’s an easy-breezy read; nothing earth-shaking, but not all books (especially not all YA books, I think) need to have big, heavy, dark themes.

That said, the plot sometimes sacrifices realism for machinations in ways that I found irritating. The biggest issue I had was after future Charlotte and Renner confide in Nori about their time travel dilemma, and she believes them (which, oddly, felt realistic to the character). What totally doesn’t make sense is that they don’t get more information from Nori or show that much curiosity about the events of the past 13 years. They get some basics about their relationship, but there are so many other things I would ask in that position. In fact, were it me I would have kept Nori glued to my side and downloaded every bit of knowledge I could. Charlotte’s failure to do so made no sense to me (especially given her Type A personality). It does set up a “shock” for her that was telegraphed heavily enough to be not surprising at all.

There’s also a couple of things near the end that are probably spoilery:

I did like Woke Up Like This well enough to give it a B+ and to seek out other books from this author.

Best,

Jennie

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This was an Amazon First Reads, I think. Here’s the blurb:

From debut author Jamie Sogn comes a twisty thriller about the allure of the past and the danger of the truth as a young woman dives headlong into a cult in a desperate search for answers.

In the far reaches of the Pacific Northwest, three best friends spend a day at the lake…but only two come home.

Ten years later, Delia Albio is tormented by the mystery of what happened to fifteen-year-old Zee on the lake that day. When she receives an email from Cara, the remaining friend in the trio, she can’t resist the pull of the “life-changing” news in the message. Delia, hopeful for answers, travels home to see her old friend.

But Cara is gone by the time she gets there, setting off another mystery. When Delia hears about the women’s empowerment group that Cara joined, she sets out for the group’s retreat property on the Oregon coast to find her. Delia feels this could be her chance to reconnect with Cara and reckon with that fateful day at the lake.

Instead, Delia uncovers a possessive group with a dark agenda. As their leadership closes in, Delia hurtles ever closer to the truth—if only she can survive a cult that will protect its secrets at any cost.

Delia has just turned 25 and is living in Seattle, freelancing as a legal copywriter (she dropped out of law school after her father died in a car accident). She has a boyfriend, Teddy, a nice guy who she soon breaks up with. Delia is haunted by Zee’s disappearance and the way in which it destroyed her sense of safety and the unit she’d formed with Cara and Zee. She’s a bit of a prickly loner, and seems older than 25 (at least to me).

When she hears from Cara, it ignites something in her that leads to her pursuit for answers. She returns to her hometown and finds that Cara has gone radio silent. Delia meets with Cara’s older brother Tom (and hooks up with him, as she had done after Zee disappeared) and tells him she’s going to find Cara.

This search leads to a mysterious group called Artemis Wellness, a “woman’s wellness and empowerment organization.” Cara was involved in Artemis and now she’s disappeared. Delia attends an Artemis seminar and is later chosen to receive a scholarship to a retreat at Salthouse Place, a complex where Artemis Wellness is based.

Delia puts her life and work on hold and heads to Salthouse Place. There, she rooms with Jenny, whom she met at the seminar, and Gillian, a slightly older married mother who is financing Artemis’ pricey offerings on her credit card.

The founder of Artemis is actually a man, Everett Ware – it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call him a guru. Everett has been absent from Salthouse for a while (also somewhat mysteriously), and business is being conducted by his sister and right hand, Sage. Delia comes to know Sage and other Artemis employees and gets a sense of the darkness roiling underneath the “woman empowerment” surface.

Delia is an interesting character; growing up biracial (her father is white, her mother Filipino) in a very white environment has formed her character, and the loss of Zee has solidified a certain coolness that seems intrinsic to her personality. As the novel progresses, she ping pongs between viewing Artemis (and the disappearances of Cara and Zee) as a mystery to be solved, and falling under the spell  of Salthouse Place a bit.

Salthouse Place was yet another suspense novel that felt marred (?) by too many twists at the end. I include (?) because there is a part of me that likes the crazy twists – I’m certainly entertained by them. But it feels like most of the novel is fairly naturalistic, with good prose, strong characters, and an interesting setting. Then it just goes haywire at the end, with multiple dramatic deaths and shocking revelations. It feels a bit like being given a plate of McNuggets at the end of a fine dining experience. I enjoy McNuggets (my digestive system may not) but that’s not what this meal was about up until this point, and it doesn’t feel like a strong thing to end on.

I’m probably being a bit too harsh – I do feel like Salthouse Place was a cut above, and I’d definitely give the author a try again. My grade is a high B/B+.

Best,

Jennie

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I was looking for the upcoming book by this author, whose first book In My Dreams I Hold a Knife I read and enjoyed last year. I discovered I’d missed a whole book in between. I read a sample of The Last Housewife and was hooked enough to order the whole book and start reading it immediately.

Shay Deroy is a 30-year-old writer (currently unemployed but ostensibly working on a book) living with her husband Cal in Dallas. Shay previously worked for online publications (writing what sound like Buzzfeed-type articles), but quit at the wealthy Cal’s suggestion, and now she’s at loose ends. As the book opens, Shay indulges in a recent habit: listening to the latest episode of a true-crime podcast hosted by her childhood friend Jamie.

Shay is shocked to hear that the subject of this episode is a college friend of hers, Laurel, who apparently died recently under suspicious circumstances. Shay’s even more shocked when Jamie appeals to her personally during the podcast to get in touch regarding the case. Before she can think better of it, Shay has booked a flight to upstate New York, a return to the site of the darkest and most turbulent period of her life.

Shay grew up lower-middle class in a small town in Texas. Her father left when she was 10, and Shay watched her mother sink herself into a series of bad relationships in a desperate search for love and validation. Shay herself turned to beauty pageants to escape her life, and learned the dichotomy of being beautiful – being desired was both a burden (even a danger at times) and a form of power.

Pageant prize money won Shay a ticket out of Texas and into an elite liberal arts college in New York. There Shay made two close friends – sporty, sarcastic Clem and shy, dreamy Laurel. It’s Laurel’s death – murder or suicide? – that Jamie reports and that sends Shay racing back to confront her past.

Clem had committed suicide in their senior year at Whitney, and the similarities between the two deaths shake Shay to her core. She hasn’t seen or spoken with Laurel since graduation, but she feels compelled to try to understand why Laurel would kill herself – if indeed her death was a suicide.

Shay makes contact with Jamie and finds that the local police are not helpful, to say the least. The police chief was an officer 10 years before when Laurel was assaulted, and his disdain for young women, particularly the young women of the fictional Whitney College, is clear. But Shay and Jamie get a lead when Laurel’s landlady (rather unbelievably, I thought) allows them to search her apartment.

From there, the book goes in a direction I wasn’t really expecting –  the world of sex clubs, and further, sexual subjugation of women. It’s not subject matter I really have much of an affinity for – even consensual D/s stories are usually offputting to me.

For Shay, it brings her back to the time during her junior year in college that she, Clem and Laurel were in what can only be described as a sex cult – under the sway of Don, a charming, charismatic and ultimately evil man.

As Shay gets closer to uncovering the truth of what happened to Laurel, she also gets drawn back into a world she had turned her back on, but one that still holds some twisted appeal for her.

I didn’t quite buy the way the three young women fell under the control of Don; it was convincing at times but felt trite at other times. Clem was the most resistant, which made sense, because nothing in her character seemed to indicate an interest in the things that Don does to them and forces them to do. Laurel is a more understandable subject; a seeker who is looking for someone to take care of her and tell her what to do.

Shay is in the middle – ambivalent, both attracted to and repulsed by the lifestyle, both in the past and the present. Knowing how things turned out 10 years before should be a powerful motivation for Shay to hate everything that reminds her of that time. And it is, and yet…there is still a draw towards that darkness that she can’t quite resist.

The story turns kind of predictable; Shay’s relationship with Jamie deepens and her relationship with Cal deteriorates. Cal is a cardboard character – a finance bro asshole who Shay never indicates any actual interest in. How they got married is a mystery, though it’s chalked up to Shay sort of settling for the life that she thought she wanted.

The last quarter is also predictable, in a different way: several crazy twists as the stakes heighten and Shay gets closer to the truth. Shay takes a lot of chances with her safety that don’t really make sense and seem simply to be in the service of the story. There was also the late introduction of a villain that was telegraphed from a mile away (in a suspense story, whenever the characters specifically think or say, “this person will help us!” – that person is not going to help you and you should stay FAR away from them).

I found The Last Housewife compelling, but it left a bitter aftertaste that actually kept me from starting another book for about a week. The misogyny inherent in the world that Shay inhabits – it’s not that it’s not realistic; maybe it’s too realistic or rather it’s just a very specific slice of reality that was ugly to read about. I gave this book a B. I’m still looking forward to Winstead’s upcoming book; she’s a strong writer.

Best,

Jennie

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Blurb: He clawed his way up from the gutters of St. Giles to the top of a shadowy empire. Feared and fearsome, battered and brilliant, nothing shocks Lorcan St. Leger—not even the discovery of an aristocratic woman escaping out a window near the London docks on the eve of the storm of the decade. They find shelter at a boarding house called the Grand Palace on the Thames—only to find greater dangers await inside.

Desperate, destitute, and jilted, Lady Daphne Worth knows the clock is ticking on her last chance to save herself and her family: an offer of a loveless marriage. But while the storm rages and roads flood, she and the rogue who rescued her must pose as husband and wife in order to share the only available suite.

Crackling enmity gives way to incendiary desire—and certain heartbreak: Lorcan is everything she never dreamed she’d wanted, but he can never be what she needs. But risk is child’s play to St. Leger. And if the stakes are a lifetime of loving and being loved by Daphne, he’ll move any mountain, confront any old nemesis, to turn “never” into forever.

This is book six in the Palace of Rogues series; I’ve read five books in the series (all but book three, I’m Only Wicked with You). I read four of these books last year, starting with book four, After Dark with the Duke, which remains my favorite (it was a B+, almost A range – the grade went down a bit because the ending was weak, I thought).

On to How to Tame a Wild Rogue:

Lorcan comes upon Daphne as she’s escaping the unwanted attentions of her employer’s husband by climbing out a second-floor window. He rescues her and they end up traveling a short way to the Grand Palace on the Thames together to seek refuge from the coming storm. They are assumed to be a married couple, a fiction they maintain for…reasons.

The hero of an earlier book in the series (and the husband of one of the two female proprietors of The Grand Palace on the Thames) objects to them staying when he recognizes Lorcan. Captain Tristan Hardy is a former Navy man who was tasked with catching smugglers. Guess what Lorcan’s former profession was? This causes some interesting tension between Tristan and his wife, Delilah, as she bristles at him dictating who she can accept at her boardinghouse. It turns out that Delilah actually knows Daphne from her former life and remembers Daphne as kind as well as respectable. After some tense moments, Lorcan and Daphne are granted use of a suite in TGPotT (I can’t keep typing that name out). They figure they’ll stay and maintain the façade until the storm blows over and they can go their separate ways.

Of course, it doesn’t quite work out that way. The enforced closeness leads to the couple learning about each other’s lives. Lorcan grew up dirt poor in St. Giles, with a mother that died when he was very young and an abusive father who died when he was 10. He’s had to make his own way in the world, and he’s hardened by his experiences.

Daphne has suffered as well, albeit in a more genteel manner. Her mother died when she was young and her selfish father allowed Daphne to take over management of the house and finances, the latter of which were reduced by his gambling habit. Daphne was jilted by her fiancé, who fell in love with a governess. As the book starts she is reduced to being a lady’s companion to earn some money to keep her father and brothers afloat. Her life has not turned out as she once hoped, and she is genuinely unhappy and lonely in a rather low-key, repressed way.

There’s a fair amount – not too much, but maybe almost too much – of revisiting the couples from the first two books (Tristan/Delilah, and Angelique/Lucien). It makes sense, I guess, since they are the proprietors of TGPotT, and thus on the scene quite a bit. There are tensions caused in part by a missing ship that should have arrived at port weeks before. It’s owned by Tristan, Lucien and Mr. Delacorte, a permanent resident of TGPotT, and if it has gone down at sea, their company, the Triton Group, is in financial trouble.

How to Tame a Wild Rogue opened strong, I thought. I enjoyed the set up – a raging storm that isolates the hero and heroine as well as the other denizens of the Grand Palace on the Thames.

There’s some comic relief offered by the other guests, particularly three German musicians who are excessively jolly and seem determined to eat every crumb of food TGPotT has to offer.

As for the hero and heroine, I liked Daphne more than Lorcan. He just felt very bland to me – how many self-made, London-slum-bred semi-pirates have I read about at this point? A lot, that’s how many. There was little about him that stood out or made him come alive for me. Daphne is a familiar type as well – the dutiful spinster – but she had a poignant quality about her that made me root for her happiness.

I really do like the conceit of the Grand Palace on the Thames – lonely people discovering a home and sometimes a found family in an unusual place. I wish the characters in most of the books were as interesting to me as the unusual setting. My grade for this one is a B-/C+.

Best,

Jennie

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Blurb: It’s murder in paradise as a woman uncovers a host of secrets off the rocky California coast in a gripping novel of suspense by New York Times bestselling author Rachel Howzell Hall.

Colette “Coco” Weber has relocated to her Catalina Island home, where, twenty years before, she was the sole survivor of a deadly home invasion. All Coco wants is to see her aunt Gwen, get as far away from her ex as possible, and get back to her craft—writing obituaries. Thankfully, her college best friend, Maddy, owns the local paper and has a job sure to keep Coco busy, considering the number of elderly folks who are dying on the island.

But as Coco learns more about these deaths, she quickly realizes that the circumstances surrounding them are remarkably similar…and not natural. Then Coco receives a sinister threat in the mail: her own obituary.

As Coco begins to draw connections between a serial killer’s crimes and her own family tragedy, she fears that the secrets on Catalina Island might be too deep to survive. Because whoever is watching her is hell-bent on finally putting her past to rest.

This was an Amazon First Reads book. The story starts in 2001, when teenaged Coco meanders home in the middle of the night after slipping out to drink with local kids. Coco, a recent import from Long Beach, wants to fit in but finds Catalina Island a challenge, particularly as her family comprises a fair percentage of the island’s miniscule Black population. Coco, queasy from mixing various liquors, walks in on a horrific scene at home: her father dead in a pool of blood in the kitchen. Coco discovers that her mother and brother have also been murdered, before narrowly escaping the killer by hiding in a closet.

The story then moves to March 2020 (yes, the beginning of the pandemic). Coco has come back to Catalina and claimed the house her family was supposed to move into all those years before. Or perhaps it’s better to say she’s reclaimed it from her elderly aunt Gwen, who has lived there for years and seems hazy on the ownership, among other things. The house is decrepit, but it’s a refuge for Coco from her life in Los Angeles, her estranged husband Micah and his demands that she return to him an expensive ring that she has absconded with. Coco, an obituary writer, has a job lined up with her friend Maddy, who runs the family newspaper on Catalina.

Coco hasn’t processed her family’s murders very well over the past two decades (which: understandable), despite being in therapy the entire time. Shortly after she arrives on Catalina, she finds out that the man who was arrested and convicted of the killings, Harper Hemphill, has been released based on the sudden reappearance of the murder weapon, a knife that contains DNA that doesn’t match Hemphill’s.

I had a lot of questions about this plot point. It seems to me that Hemphill’s release would have been something that Coco, who testified against him at the trial, would have been informed about through something other than word of mouth. I don’t know a lot about the law, but I would think there would have been a hearing to overturn the conviction and then the prosecutors would have decided not to retry Hemphill, and all of this would have happened with Coco being kept in the loop. But the way it plays out in the book it feels like an afterthought.

Further, I would think that Coco would have huge mental anguish knowing that the person who is responsible for slaughtering her whole family is still out there, and perhaps guilt that an apparently innocent man spent almost 20 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Other than occasionally fretting that Hemphill will come after her, Coco has little reaction to the news of his release; she is mildly upset that they will apparently never know who killed her family, but it doesn’t seem to bother her more than some of the other stressful stuff that’s going on in her life.

And she does have a lot going on: her complicated relationship with Gwen, a former housecleaner and inveterate thief; the aforementioned Micah, who texts increasingly angry messages to Coco regarding getting what he thinks is his; weird threatening messages and eventual vandalism of her home from an unknown enemy; and finally, the mysterious deaths of several older women on Catalina, a mystery that begins to absorb Coco as the book goes on.

Oh, also, the looming pandemic.

Old women dying is not exactly newsworthy, and at first it seems that the women in question all had ailments that reasonably explained their deaths. What is strange is the out of the way locations that the women are found in – a remote campground, for example. None of the women die at homes in the own beds, and no one seems to know why they may be at the locations they’re found at. Coco isn’t the only person in town who starts to suspect something untoward is happening.

At times it feels like there is too much going on in this book: the start of the pandemic, the central mystery (or mysteries?), Coco’s messy life and her complicated grief and the history of racism on Catalina and, you know, in general. Coco’s also trying fitfully to make contact with a book agent who wants her to write a memoir about her family’s murders, and she’s starting a romance with Noah, an almost too-good-to-be-true fellow journalist. Noah is handsome, rich and seems very into Coco, but she’s wary because wary is Coco’s default setting.

This book had a few things going for it: I liked Coco a lot and rooted for her. Catalina is an interesting setting and the history and present state of the island were woven into the story well. I was interested in what really happened to Coco’s family all those years ago.

But there were several issues for me as well. I liked Coco (again, a lot!), but her “voice” took a little getting used to – it’s sort of…breezy? Almost but not quite stream-of-consciousness? I did adjust to it but it took some time.

A bigger issue is the plotting and how believable the characters’ thoughts and actions were. First, the aforementioned issue with Coco and the exonerated suspect. Also, Coco vacillates between being very concerned about the threats and vandalism directed at her, and not showing what seemed to me to be basic common sense in response to them. The resolution to the mystery wasn’t hugely compelling, and it made less and less sense the more I thought about it.

Probable spoilery stuff:

Sometimes I’m not that bothered by “crazy ending made no sense” but it did bother me this time – maybe because it wasn’t entertainingly crazy enough? Overall, this book ended up being a C+ for me.

Best,

Jennie

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Dear Catherine Chidgey:

This book was mentioned to me by the esteemed Janine, who has more than once (or twice) directed me towards smart thrillers, even though it’s not a genre she reads herself. Pet ended up being very smart and unexpectedly dark.

Justine Crieve is a 12-year-old in 1984 Wellington, New Zealand. Her mother has died recently after a long struggle with breast cancer, and her father, who owns an antiques shop, drinks and grieves. Justine attends the local Catholic school, and vacillates between feeling the same numb grief for her mother that her father experiences, and being a typical adolescent, concerned with the doings of the popular girls and the rowdy antics of the handsome boys. Justine also suffers from epilepsy, a condition that embarrasses her. She finds comfort in the family of her best friend, Amy Fong, whose parents welcome Justine into their home and treat her like part of the family.

Justine is in the 8th grade (or the New Zealand equivalent; next year she’ll be in high school). Her teacher, newly arrived from Christchurch, is the glamorous Mrs. Price. Blonde and charismatic, Mrs. Price holds sway over her class and picks favorites – choosing certain students to clean erasers at the end of the day, run errands for her, and eventually, inviting a group of them to her home. Justine falls into being a favorite, a move that alienates her from Amy.

Interspersed through the book are scenes set 30 years later, where Justine is a mother of one and concerned with the care of her father, who suffers from dementia and is in a nursing home. There Justine meets an aide who strongly reminds her of Mrs. Price.

Back in 1984, Mrs. Price is both inappropriate and creepy, but her adoring pupils don’t seem to see it. She forces one of the students to amputate the leg of the class pet, an axolotl named Susan, after it’s injured (the circumstances of the injury appear to be suspicious). Throughout the year, there’s a rash of thefts of small items from almost every student in class. Eventually Amy alone appears not have been targeted, so suspicion falls on her as the thief. Mrs. Price eventually has the students all write their prime suspect’s name on a slip of paper; later she announces the consensus to the class.

(As someone who went to Catholic school in the same time period, albeit in San Francisco, not Wellington, the 8th graders in Pet feel both familiar and alien to me. They seem at times more innocent than I remember being – I don’t think we were interested in Cabbage Patch Dolls at that age – and paradoxically more vicious. The girls in class seem to think nothing of throwing “you should just kill yourself” out as an insult.)

So Mrs. Price is not exactly Teacher of the Year, but again, few are able to see it. One of the students, Dom, a boy from a large Catholic family, befriends Justine and cautions her about Mrs. Price. An older nun at the school, Sister Bronislava, seems to be onto Mrs. Price, but the school’s headmaster and others champion her. Justine is mesmerized by her. It takes the better part of the book, a shocking tragedy, and Mrs. Price’s eventual romantic involvement with Justine’s father for the scales to begin to fall from Justine’s eyes.

Justine is a challenging narrator; while one feels sympathy for her loss and empathizes with her desire to fit in, her increasing cruelty towards Amy is painful to witness. There’s a certain hardness in Justine that’s unsettling; it’s evident in the short sections featuring her as an adult, as well. Also, her epileptic episodes result in her losing time and memories, casting a sinister pall over her recollections of some of the later events in the book.

The denouement was surprisingly lurid; I did not quite expect such melodramatic happenings. I’ve often said I love melodrama, so I can’t complain too much. But it does deliver an extra punch of darkness into a book that was already kind of dark to begin with. Justine, and through her the reader, is left with an unanswered question that affects how one feels about her as a character and thus the book as a whole. I decided on what I believe, but there’s still a little niggle of doubt.

Pet is very well written and compelling, but it’s a book that my head liked better than my heart (my heart doesn’t do as well with moral ambiguity). I’m giving it a straight B; I will be on the lookout for future books from the author.

Best,

Jennie

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We usually start the reviews in this series by noting how many books are in the series and how many Janine and I have reviewed together. I insist on doing this for some reason, even though I find the math confusing and challenging at this point. But anyway, by my count, this is our 11th year reviewing these together. Resonance Surge is the 22nd book in the series (which is technically two series – the Psy/Changeling books – 15 and the Psy/Changeling Trinity books – 7). This is the also 11th book we’ve reviewed together, meaning we’ve reviewed exactly half the series together.

Janine, please check my math!

Janine: You are correct, Jennie. The main reason I know this is because last year was the year I joked about that being our aluminum anniversary.

Jennie: With that out of the way, onto Resonance Surge:

StoneWater bears Pavel and Yakov Stepyrev have been a unit since birth, but now Pavel’s life is veering in a new direction, his heart held in the hands of Arwen Mercant, a Psy empath—and the only man who has ever brought Pavel to his knees.

This is it. A point of irrevocable change. For Pavel . . . for Arwen . . . for Yakov . . . and for another pair of twins whose bond has a far darker history.

A low-Gradient Psy, Theodora Marshall is considered worthless by everyone but her violently powerful twin, Pax. She is the sole person he trusts in their venomous family to investigate a hidden and terrible part of their family history—an unregistered rehabilitation Center established by their grandfather.

The Centers are an ugly vestige of the Psy race’s Silent past. But this Center was worse. Far, far worse. And now Theo must uncover the awful truth—in the company of a scowling bear named Yakov, who isn’t about to take a Marshall at face value . . . especially a Marshall who has turned his dreams into chilling nightmares.

Because Yakov is the great-grandson of a foreseer . . . and he has seen Theo die in an unstoppable surge of blood. Night after night after night . . .

I’ll admit I was hesitant when I saw that the hero was a bear – Silver Silence didn’t work so well for Janine, in part, I believe, due to …the somewhat unromantic image of bear shapeshifters. They aren’t sinuous leopards or noble wolves, to be sure.

That said, I think Singh does a pretty good job of leaning into the virtues of the bear persona as depicted in the Psy/Changeling world; bears here are fun-loving and mischievous. I appreciate the lightness of Yakov, at least a partial contrast to the super-intense typical Singh hero. To be sure, Yakov’s manly manliness and “dominance” (a concept that *I* don’t really like about this world) are attested to frequently, but he’s also playful and relatively happy-go-lucky.

Janine: I groaned when I heard this would be a bear book but I ended up really, really liking Yakov. I thought he was fun, caring and sexy, and that he was right in the happy middle between overbearing or not having enough spine for my taste.

Jennie: Which means of course that it’s our heroine, Theo, who has to be uber-tortured and convinced that she is unworthy of love. Theo does indeed have tragically traumatic background – rejected by her powerful family due to her apparent lack of psychic gifts; separated from her beloved twin at an early age and subjected to abuse from her evil grandfather, who she fears used her to carry out dark deeds. Adult Theo has a lot of anger and guilt. She meets Yakov when they are tasked with working together to uncover the mystery behind a secret “rehabilitation center” owned and operated by Theo’s family.

Janine: I really liked Theo’s anger. We don’t really encounter a lot of angry heroines in romance even now, and I haven’t seen many in Singh’s. I liked that Theo’s anger manifested in dangerous ways that were not entirely under her control, but she didn’t want to harm anyone and that tortured her.

Jennie: I think that’s a good point. Theo’s anger was definitely justified and I appreciated that she wasn’t a stereotypical forgiving female.

Janine: I also really, really liked the creepy mystery about the rehabilitation center, and I thought it gave the book a Guild Hunter-ish flavor. For those who don’t read them, Singh’s Guild Hunter novels often have scenes where the couple investigate a creepy / eerie place together. Singh does that kind of atmospheric darkness well. I have a preference for the Guild Hunter series over the Psy/Changeling one—the books are more varied and not generally focused on fatal brain diseases or dominance and submissiveness—and the GH vibe gave this book some positive associations.

Jennie: Both Yakov and Theo are immediately struck with the usual attraction that is to be expected in this series. For Yakov, there is more – he recognizes Theo. Specifically, he recognizes her from his dreams, where she has been a featured player for many years. First as a loving companion and partner, but most recently – horrifically – as a victim. Yakov has been haunted by dreams of Theo being slashed by an unknown assailant while he watches, bound and unable to save her.

It is when Yakov and Theo first approach the apparently abandoned rehabilitation center on the outskirts of Moscow that Theo has a revelation – she’s been here before. Flashbacks show her being taken there by her grandfather and subjected to painful experiments. Theo’s memories from ages 8-16 are fragmented and she doesn’t have full recall of what happened to her at the center, but she has a strong negative response to even being there. The trauma of it is an opportunity for Theo and Yakov to grow closer and for him to both admire her grit and take care of her, which of course his bear wants to do.

Janine: I thought this was interesting too. The only other character I can think of who spent time in a center like that was Ivy, but we really don’t know anything about what it was like or what happened to her there. Dark though the glimpse of it here was, it was a nice expansion of the psy/changeling world.

Jennie: The trajectory of Theo’s and Yakov’s story is pretty familiar for fans of this series. She’s tortured. He’s protective. She has a dark secret that makes her feel like they can never actually be together. I’d complain about the repetition and the almost Madlibs style plotting (insert [tortured Psy/tortured changeling] add [physical challenge/emotional challenge] blocking the HEA, etc.), but complaining about a formula on book 22 seems silly.

Janine: Yes, I’m pretty much in the same space. At least here the impending death had to do with murder more than anything brain-related. I liked the characters very much (better than average for this series, I would say) so I was willing to go with it although the scene in the nightclub was a little too familiar (also in GH way, I think).

Jennie: I haven’t read any of the Guild Hunters books, but I feel like some of the “Changelings size up the Psy partner” scenes were rather familiar at this point.

Janine: That was not actually the aspect that reminded me of the Guild Hunter series. It was Theo’s private interaction with the club owner–it felt very Elena to me. It reminded me of when Elena met her business partner in the flavored synthetic blood business and of other interactions Elena has had. I love Elena so it wasn’t a terrible thing, but it felt a bit like it fell short of how much I like that kind of thing when Elena is actually involved. I like Theo so this isn’t a criticism of her.

Jennie: There is an aspect of the story that is fresh and gives insights into the beginnings of Silence. The beginnings of some of the chapters feature letters back and forth between Yakov’s great-grandfather, Dewei Nguyen and his sister Hien. Dewei was a Psy who mated into the Stonewater bear clan. Their early correspondence is loving and light, but after Hien suffers a tragedy she begins to be drawn to the promise of Silence, a protocol that is being debated at the time. It’s sad to see the break in the family as Hien choose what she believes is the right path for herself and her child, a path that cuts her off from Dewei and her parents forever.

Janine: As I was reading this correspondence, I kept expecting Hien to end up in a rehabilitation center and for the storylines to connect in this way. I was relieved that wasn’t the case, but this expectation cast a pall over the letters for me (not the author’s fault, I know—my brain often sees twists where there aren’t any).

Jennie: I wasn’t expecting that but was expecting some sort of twist or resolution to the letters that never came. That said, I wasn’t disappointed; I found them poignant and I felt that they gave some nuance to the origins of Silence, which usually just seems like a really bad idea that made the Psy even more messed up than they already are (the Psy=bad and Changeling=good being a general complaint I’ve had about the series).

Both Theo and Yakov are twins, and their twin relationships are central to who they are. Yakov is able to understand Theo’s situation with her brother, Pax, better than most people. Pax Marshall is a very prominent Psy (I sort of see him as Kaleb Krycheck 2.0) and Theo has been the dirty little secret of the Marshall clan for as long as she can remember.

Janine: Yes, I think I dubbed him Baby Kaleb several books ago. That said, we see a softer side to Pax here and I liked it (especially child Pax). However there was one Pax and Theo thing that confused me.

Janine: I really like Arwen but I thought Pavel was a little boring in this book. Arwen had a small arc here that was not 100% convincing to me, but I went with it.

Jennie: As if there weren’t enough going on, there’s a serial killer stalking blonde-haired, blue-eyed Psy in Moscow. Guess Theo’s coloring?

There were some things I found confusing at the end of the book. Theo remembers committing some dark deeds at her grandfather’s behest, but isn’t clear if she was controlled or did them of her own free will. I found the resolution of this a bit unclear.

Janine: Yeah, I can see why, it was a blinked-and-you-missed-it thing.

One thing I keep forgetting to mention was that “Bozhe!” and “Bozhe Moi!” appeared almost often enough for a drinking game.

Jennie: Resonance Surge was an average entry into the series for me. I’ll give it a B/B-.

Janine: As usual I liked this one a bit better than you did. It was not a standout, and in fact, I read it more slowly than I typically read the psy/changeling books. But I did really like the main characters very much, and I’m giving it a B.

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