Déjà vu can be deadly…

A year ago, Rose Mcgovern’s sister was found dead at the bottom of a bridge. A tragic accident. That’s what the police called it. What they still call it. What everyone except Rose believes to be true. But she won’t change her mind. No matter how many seconds and minutes and days go by, no matter how much time she’s had to spend in the psych ward, and no matter how much her life falls apart. She will never give up on her quest for the truth.

And now, it’s happening again.

Another woman’s body has been found. The circumstances are far too similar to be a coincidence. There might even be more victims. Which would mean that Rose was right all along. But the police have long since dismissed her as paranoid, and she’s driven away every friend she’s ever had. With nothing but her own conviction on her side, how can she prove that an accident is really a murder? And even if it’s possible, can she do it before she makes a deadly mistake and the killer claims her life, too?

Dear Ms. Di Lorenzo, 

Another one of our reviewers reads a lot of mystery/thrillers and I decided to give one a try. This one attracted my attention because of the fact that Rose has had to battle not only with her own fears but the fact that so many others see her as being paranoid and won’t believe her. I wanted to know how she was going to solve this mystery and get people to take her seriously.

This was a fast read. Rose is a sympathetic character and I was on her side from the get-go. Not only has she lost her beloved sister (no mention of the parents) but despite the fact that she’s taken her concerns to the police sergeant in charge of the (non) investigation of her sister’s “accident,” not only has nothing been done but Rose has ended up in a psychiatric hospital twice for a few days each. It’s never made explicitly clear but from what I gather, she left her stove on twice to the point the fire department was called (though there’s no mention of smoke damage to her apartment) and she hears her dead sister talking to her in her head and (I’m guessing) sometimes talks out loud in reply. Then she finds something that she’s sure will get the sergeant to see what Rose has been saying all along – Daisy’s death was no accident and not only that, her death mirrors that of another woman six months prior. 

Of course nothing works out as Rose hopes but she catches a break when she discovers and unexpectedly connects online with someone who also lost a person to an “accident.” Orin actually believes Rose and Rose believes Orin. Together the two begin to try and find what might have linked Daisy to Orin’s sister-in-law only to realize that they’ve got something much worse on their hands. 

Orin and several other characters are written in such a way that Rose is alternatively sure and unsure of what their motives might be. Things happen, people act strangely but there are reasons for all this. Right? This could just be Rose being more paranoid (both mentally and due to what she’s worried is happening) or a coincidence. Yes? Or is someone really after Rose, trying to cut off her investigation and maybe kill her? 

I waffled back and forth a bit before settling on my pick for whodunnit. Rose and Co finally realize who the killer probably is which sets up a fast paced finale showdown. Rose does her fair share of “I know I shouldn’t do [whatever]” before she goes ahead and does just that but to her credit, what she does isn’t TSTL level stuff. There are some slightly, okay fairly, unbelievable things that conveniently occur to speed the plot along but I wanted to know what was going to happen and how all the pieces of the puzzle were going to fit together. I was left with a few niggling questions such as how did the killer choose his victims and manage to kill the last person, but most everything else was wrapped up and the feeling I get is that Daisy won’t be “talking” to Rose anymore. The twist at the end? That did catch me by surprise though. B-   

~Jayne

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THE PRINCESS IS FAKE. THE MURDERS ARE REAL • From the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant and The Lioness, a Princess Diana impersonator and her estranged sister find themselves drawn into a dangerous game of money and murder in this twisting tale of organized crime, cryptocurrency, and family secrets on the Las Vegas strip.

Crissy Dowling has created a world that suits her perfectly. She passes her days by the pool in a private cabana, she splurges on ice cream but never gains an ounce, and each evening she transforms into a Princess, performing her musical cabaret inspired by the life of the late Diana Spencer. Some might find her strange or even delusional, an American speaking with a British accent, hair feathered into a style thirty years old, living and working in a casino that has become a dated trash heap. On top of that, Crissy’s daily diet of Adderall and Valium leaves her more than a little tipsy, her Senator boyfriend has gone back to his wife, and her entire career rests on resembling a dead woman.

And yet, fans see her for the gifted chameleon she is, showering her with gifts, letters, and standing ovations night after night. But when Crissy’s sister, Betsy, arrives in town with a new boyfriend and a teenage daughter, and when Richie Morley, the owner of the Buckingham Palace Casino, is savagely murdered, Crissy’s carefully constructed kingdom comes crashing down all around her. A riveting tale of identity, obsession, fintech, and high-tech mobsters, The Princess of Las Vegas is an addictive, wildly original thriller from one of our most extraordinary storytellers.

CW/TW – honestly, if you have something that will trigger you, this book might have it. Suicide/murder, sexual abuse, violence, PTSD from mass shootings, drug/alcohol abuse, eating disorder

Dear Mr. Bohjalian,

I guess Diana, or her sorta image, does still sell just about everything. I know both the cover and the title grabbed my attention and made me look deeper into what the book is about. I enjoyed a previous book of yours, “Skeletons at the Feast” so I crossed my fingers and dove into this one.

For a book mainly set in sunshiney Las Vegas, this one has a whole lot of dark shadows and darker people. Honestly I think only one character didn’t make me either snarl, sigh in disgust, want to throw my hands up, mentally mutter “really? really??” or some variant of “I’m not pleased with this person.” Nobody gets away with being a totally good person except for Nigel and even something he does might annoy people. Everyone else?      Sigh.

The book starts off with a bang but then slows down a lot in order for all the (many) characters to be introduced and pertinent information about them to be revealed. Wait, sort of revealed as there are obviously lots and lots of secrets and I don’t just mean who is willing to shoot, kick, slug, or threaten people at the drop of a hat. I guessed a few of the issues that are festering between Crissy and her almost look alike sister Betsy and that haunt them both years to decades after they occurred. Some of these will be triggers but I think readers might be able to see the reveals approaching. There’s also a lot of time spent on cryptocurrency and a fair amount of disbelief is needed about some plot points and actions. 

Things pick up as all the pieces and threads begin to fit and weave together. The action is tighter and the pace increases. But the wheels also start leaving the ground a bit as the plot swerves around corners at full throttle. And yet as things got worse, I had to know what was going to happen next. How were the (relatively) good guys going to get out of this alive? Some clues had been sprinkled along the way but in sort of an obvious way, too. Everything does come together and yet I was left with a few worries – we are talking about ruthless people – and a feeling of slightly unrealistic happiness and unresolved issues. Maybe as Crissy is redoing her show now that (the real) Charles is King, she can work in some therapy sessions. B-       

~Jayne    

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A young couple find themselves haunted by a string of gruesome murders committed along an old deserted road in this terrifying new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Cold Cases.

July 1995. April and Eddie have taken a wrong turn. They’re looking for the small resort town where they plan to spend their honeymoon. When they spot what appears to a lone hitchhiker along the deserted road, they stop to help. But not long after the hitchiker gets into their car, they see the blood seeping from her jacket and a truck barreling down Atticus Line after them.

When the hitchhiker dies at the local hospital, April and Eddie find themselves in the crosshairs of the Coldlake Falls police. Unexplained murders have been happening along Atticus Line for years and the cops finally have two witnesses who easily become their only suspects. As April and Eddie start to dig into the history of the town and that horrible stretch of road to clear their names, they soon learn that there is something supernatural at work, something that could not only tear the town and its dark secrets apart, but take April and Eddie down with it all.

CW/TW – mention of past domestic abuse, mention of past racism, mention of past mental health issues

Dear Ms. St. James,

Whoa and damn. What a wild ride this book is. I zipped through the first half in a few hours (note to self, do not read a murder/thriller before going to bed). Then I tore through the rest the next day. After finishing it, I realize I can’t really say much about it without risking spoilers galore. My advice to readers is not to peek at the end. Don’t ruin it for yourself. Just stick with the blurb.

The unsolved murders outside this small, rural Michigan town are riddles wrapped in enigmas. Is it a serial killer doing these? Over the course of nineteen years? Or is this town just cursed with a series of killers stalking lone people? Or is there something else going on?

Of course I played detective with the clues that are known and discovered along the way. I turned them and flipped them and tried to come up with a solution that made them all fit together. Nope, didn’t happen until nearly the end when the pieces fell into place and All Is Revealed. This happens in a way that hooked me and swept me along. I think by now that most readers familiar with your books will know to expect a few types of things and that it probably won’t be pretty along the way.

Stories don’t always end the way they’re supposed to. They don’t always end well.

Eddie and April Carter both have some issues in their pasts to go along with their quick marriage after only a short time knowing each other. Eddie has post Iraq PTSD while April’s backstory is amazingly convoluted. Late in the story April muses that “I saw someone who was so different from me, yet whose darkness mirrored my own.” And somehow they fit together, know each other, are ready and willing to take on each other’s demons. What I really like about these two is that they are working class, living in a cheap apartment, headed for a low rent honeymoon when “life” sweeps them into this free-for-all and they want to stay and investigate. At first it’s to get them out from under police suspicion but then it’s a quest that they just won’t give up on solving. For all their faults, Eddie and April are decent people.

There are some other fantastic characters here. The Snell sisters are pieces of work. As one person says, they should be in the FBI because we want them working for us and not against us. Rose is another wonderful though crotchety older woman. She’s been given a hard road to travel, fills her house with kitsch, holds an unshakable grudge against the town police (for Reasons) but deep (really deep) inside she’s also a person you want on your side. Brava for what they all do at the end.

The police? Oh, dear. Just about every bad thing that can be said about police could be said about these police. But one of them does see Eddie’s truth and, backhandedly, gives him sage advice. One is a bastard but also determined to get to the bottom of these killings. The way he rounds things off is maybe – no, totally – unbelievable but this does answer some questions that would have been left flapping around in my brain so, there is that.

When I saw that this book was coming out, I immediately asked for it after only a cursory look at the blurb. I didn’t even go back and refresh my memory before starting to read it. Some authors I will just trust to give me a wonderful story and that has happened again with this one. It’s dark and twisted. Secrets are unearthed and loyalties are tested. The answers, when they’re finally discovered, are things that most people would probably never admit to believing. April does one really stupid thing but then, it gives us answers. There are a few other things done that are brushed away with “Why did this person do that? We don’t know.” but overall this is one hell of a good read. B+

~Jayne

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Consumed with grief, driven by vengeance, a man undertakes an unrelenting odyssey across the lawless post–Civil War frontier seeking redemption in this fearless novel from the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of News of the World.

Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John’s beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered.

Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North in the late unpleasantness, and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down.

Traveling through the unforgiving landscape of a shattered nation in the midst of Reconstruction, John braves winter storms and confronts desperate people in pursuit of his quarry. Untethered, single-minded in purpose, he will not be deterred. Not by the U.S. Marshal who threatens to arrest him for murder should he succeed. And not by Victoria Reavis, the telegraphist aiding him in his death-driven quest, yet hoping he’ll choose to embrace a life with her instead.

And as he trails Dodd deep into Texas, John accepts that this final reckoning between them may cost him more than all he’s already lost…

Dear Ms. Jiles,

I saw that you were going to have a book coming out and I immediately requested it, no questions asked. Reading the blurb I figured it was going to be bloody, brutal at times, harsh, perhaps bittersweet with “morally complex” characters, and told at a slower pace. That didn’t stop me at all. It was everything that I thought it might be as well as having female characters who are smart and courageous. It is a book that will not uplift people and make them smile. There is little that is happy about it for a long time. But it sucked me in and I could not stop reading until I knew “what happened.”

He wakes up, confused as to where he is, and startled at the amazement with which someone – a nurse? – reacts to him speaking. Then a doctor appears, also delighted at his consciousness. He begins to think, groping for answers to their questions. Slowly John Chenneville remembers bits and pieces of his history and learns of the terrible accident that landed him for months in a military hospital in Virginia. He learns the war is over and – from one of the letters his uncle wrote to the doctor – that he must not be told something that could disturb him.

Traveling slowly back home to MIssouri – that land of Civil War lawlessness now under martial law – John continues to relearn the basics of life, regain his balance, and his memories. At home he finally learns the truth. His lovely, laughing sister, her husband, and their year old baby were murdered and their bodies tossed in a spring to be found and identified by those who knew and loved them. But John can’t set out yet to avenge the loss. It takes another year before his body can support his quest. Then he learns that his family are not the only victims of this man, this former soldier who has worn a badge and been protected from answering for his crimes in the chaos that still pervades the area. But now he knows that John is after him and the killer is on the run.

This is another book set during the post-Civil war years of early Reconstruction. Travel is again important and this occurs at the slow pace of horseback. Even a man who mercilessly drives the horses to lameness and death that he buys or steals from others in order to stay ahead of John Chenneville can only go so fast. John has the aliases the killer uses (extracted from an brutal associate in a not so nice manner), the intuition of what environments the killer would seek (after talking to witnesses and near victims), a set of forged discharge papers ($20 but worth every penny) for when he doesn’t want others to know his real name, and the driving determination to kill his sister’s murderer.

Before condemning John, remember that his family sought justice from the law and got nowhere. At one point John encounters someone who knows the killer, might know what the killer has done but who refuses to tell John where the killer is.

Along the way, John meets and interacts with others trying to move forward with their lives. The country is wrecked but John has little empathy for those in Confederate states who built it from the enslaved labor of others. He just wants to keep moving and close in on his prey. The man he seeks is out there, maybe a few days before him or perhaps falling a day or so behind but John is close. Things get more personal when the murderer strikes again, killing another person John met. And though John meets a young woman who knows his quest and with whom John feels he could happily live his life, his goal remains paramount. So anyone looking for a romantic HEA, just put that aside. This is historical fiction.

As the pages left to read dwindled, I got more anxious. Would John find the man he seeks and would John deal out the justice that burns in him to deliver? Another character says “There’s the law and then there’s justice. Sometimes the two overlap.” I didn’t see this wrap up coming, no not at all. And yet it fits and for Reasons I’ll take it. It also makes me wonder who among the many characters in this book (with nods here to Jefferson Kidd and Simon Boudlin) will be seen again in your next one. B

~Jayne

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Murder once again stalks the proprietors of The Right Sort Marriage Bureau in the surprisingly dangerous landscape of post-WWII London.
In the immediate post-war days of London, two unlikely partners have undertaken an even more unlikely, if necessary, business venture – The Right Sort Marriage Bureau. The two partners are Miss Iris Sparks, a woman with a dangerous – and never discussed – past in British intelligence and Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge, a war widow with a young son entangled in a complicated aristocratic family. Mostly their clients are people trying to start (or restart) their lives in this much-changed world, but their new client is something different. A happily married woman has come to them to find a new wife for her husband. Dying of cancer, she wants the two to make sure her entomologist, academic husband finds someone new once she passes.

Shortly thereafter, she’s found dead in Epping Forest, in what appears to be a suicide. But that doesn’t make sense to either Sparks or Bainbridge. At the same time, Bainbridge is attempting to regain legal control of her life, opposed by the conservator who has been managing her assets – perhaps not always in her best interest. When that conservator is found dead, Bainbridge herself is one of the prime suspects. Attempting to make sense of two deaths at once, to protect themselves and their clients, the redoubtable owners of the Right Sort Marriage Bureau are once again on the case.

Dear Ms. Montclair,

Brava! This series continues to get better and better by digging deeper and deeper into the lives of the characters as they go about matchmaking clients and solving murders. Well, if Iris and Gwen continue to become lead suspects and the Met hasn’t solved things yet, someone has to.

I was hoping that there would be a bit more matchmaking in this book and indeed there was. In fact, that’s what kicks things off. Several potential clients appear at The Right Sort Marriage Bureau but the one who captures their attention is Mrs. Remagen, who tells the duo that she eventually wants her husband to become their client at a suitable time after her death. Gwen is in tears by the time Mrs. Remagen has told her story but it’s Iris who adds some codicils to the standard contract and suggests getting the final £20 fee put in escrow. Gwen, who has an unmatched (no pun intended) ability to “read” clients secures from Mrs. Remagen a pledge not to commit suicide but to look for the joy in what time the woman has left before her painful cancer claims her life.

So when Mrs. Remagen is found dead only days later, Gwen and Iris are stunned, saddened and also skeptical. They are not the only ones as a young police Constable begs his superior to let him follow his instinct that “something” about the crime scene isn’t right. Meanwhile Gwen’s day in court to determine whether or not she will regain her freedom and be declared sane again – in the eyes of the law, King, and everyone else – is coming up. She wants to prepare for stepping into her role on the board of the Bainbridge owned business where she has inherited her husband’s 40% of the shares but a surprise move at the meeting throws things there and at her court hearing into chaos. Then more murders occur.

Let me tell you, the last 90 pages of the story had me hanging on for a “hell for leather” ending. I felt as if I was zipping along on Constable Quinton’s motorcycle with no concern for gas ration coupons. The clues with which Iris and Gwen managed to solve the various murders – and the bodies were really piling up thick and fast – were there. It needed both women putting their individual skills to work to suss through who did what to whom when and why. The plot would zig and zag then put (mainly) Gwen in a worse place causing me to (mentally) bite my nails and (silently) scream, “NO!” Then with each reveal I grinned at the subtlety with which everything was worked into the plot without adding any neon CLUE! signs. It was masterful.

But wait, there’s more! The story is packed with unfolding additions to our knowledge of Gwen and Iris and Sally. Talk about layers of characterization. Iris gets a chance to revisit an old romance and compare this to her relationship with Archie – something she intends to triumphantly announce to Dr. Milford. Gwen faces losing all the momentum in her case to (legally) regain her sanity but reveals a keen mind for business which earns her the growing approbation of her starchy father-in-law. Meanwhile Sally, who has been at Gwen’s feet for a few books, finally gives us a hint of what he did during the war, why he has set Gwen on a pedestal, and what he can and can not endure in a relationship with her. Intense, sometimes painful, self discovery stuff for all.

I finished the book reading flat out and punching the air at the way Gwen and Iris handle one suspected criminal confession and how Gwen’s knowledge of single malts helps her in another. The final scenes of dealing with grief almost had me tearing up – okay, okay yes I was tearing up – but one character has had this coming and desperately needed it while another has only just begun to confront his loss – the depth of which we realize from a conversation Iris has with a former Army commando. I was wrung out and satisfied at the same time and I can’t wait to see what happens next. A

~Jayne

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