Category: Mystery/Thriller

The It Girl

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Ruth Ware
Genres: Mystery, Thriller
Pub. Date: Jul. 2022

The title of this book has been driving me nuts ever since I saw the cover. I hate that the title is in all-caps because I can’t help but read it as The I.T. Girl every time! After having read it, I can confirm this is about an “it” girl and in fact has nothing to do with I.T. In case you also work in a technical field and were unsure, lol.

It’s no secret that I love Ruth Ware. I’ve read everything she’s ever written. In terms of storytelling, I don’t think she’s the best mystery/thriller writer ever and I actually rate most of her books very middle of the road. But I do think she is an excellent suspense writer and I find her books so compulsively readable, which is why I return to them over and over again. Even though I haven’t loved all her books, this was the first one where I actively struggled to read it.

This book is about 50-100 pages longer than all of her other books, and it felt like it. She employs the dual timeline in this book and while I think it was effective, in the first half, it only served to slow down the story. Hannah Jones is our main character and we learn from the start that her Oxford University experience came to a quick end when her roommate, April, is murdered at the end of her first year. An Oxford Porter is convicted of the crime based on Hannah’s testimony and when he dies in prison, Hannah starts questioning her memory and whether there was more to that night than she remembers.

The story is told between flashbacks to her time at Oxford and her cool group of friends that centered around “it girl” April Coutts-Cliveden, and her quiet current day life in Edinburgh. I was mildly interested in her life at Oxford – April is an interesting character. She is manipulative and makes a lot of questionable choices, but you know from the beginning that she ends up dead, so it’s hard to be overly critical of her. Hannah is more of a forgettable character, which is not aided by the fact that in her desire to forget April’s death, she is leading a very forgettable life herself – a life that is undeniably tedious and boring to read about. 

I understand why Ware uses the dual timeline and I do think it is effective later in the story, but it’s too indulgent in the early stages and it slowed down the pace. I think if the book had been shortened by about 50 pages, it would have tightened up the story a lot and made the whole book more compelling. In general, the second half of the book was executed better and I was much more invested in the story past the 50% mark. It has some classic Ruth Ware twists and I felt like we were finally getting to the grit of the story.

Overall, I think Oxford is a compelling setting for a story like this because of the whole “closed campus” intrigue. The notion of the “it girl” was interesting – April is a vibrant and outgoing character with a lot of self-confidence, yet there’s no denying that she is mean-spirited. Why do these two things often seem to go hand in hand? Do people get drunk on their popularity and privilege? Why do other people tolerate such meanness from their supposed friends? These are all interesting questions (to me anyways), that I would have loved to see Ware address to give the book more depth. Unfortunately, we don’t look at any of these themes and I was left feeling conflicted about what I was supposed to think about April. 

Overall, I think this book held a lot of promise, but unfortunately was poorly executed. Not her best.

In the Dark we Forget

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Rating: ⭐⭐
Author: Sandra S.G. Wong
Genres: Mystery, Fiction
Pub. Date: Jun. 21, 2022 (read Jun. 2022)

Thanks to Harper Collins Canada for providing me with a free advance copy of In the Dark We Forget in exchange for an honest review. I don’t read a lot of mystery books, but I was really excited for this one because it’s by a Canadian author and set in the Canadian Rockies!

The premise of the book is very intriguing. A young Asian-Canadian woman wakes up in the woods with no memory of where she is or how she got there. As she starts to remember some of the details, including that her name is Cleo, we learn that her parents recently won the lottery and that they are now missing too. As the police delve deeper and find little information, we begin to question Cleo’s relationship to both her parents and their disappearance.

Sadly the premise was the most compelling part of the book. This is being sold as a mystery-thriller, but I think it would have worked a lot better as literary fiction (and to be honest, I think that’s what the author was going for as well). Wong had some great ideas in terms of theme and characters, but the plotting of the book really just didn’t work for what I felt she was trying to accomplish. This could have been a moderately interesting book about diaspora and Asian-Canadian culture if it had been further and better developed, but instead it’s a poor mystery novel that bogs itself down with poor writing.

I do really hate to rag on the book because it is a debut, but I can’t deny the writing wasn’t strong. I was expecting this to be really fast paced, but it’s actually incredibly slow and boring because the author insists on taking us on an almost totally linear trajectory, with no time jumps between scenes to move the story along. While everything before Cleo’s accident is foggy in her memory, every second after is accounted for in great detail. I felt like there was a lot of pointless filler and it really made the book drag. It took way too long for us to find out anything meaningful about Cleo. If you’re going to center a mystery around a family dynamic, you can’t waste 100 pages before even revealing who any of the characters are.

I honestly felt like barely anything happened in the entire book. The author gives up absolutely nothing in terms of the mystery element, which is why I questioned why it’s shelved as mystery. You have to give your reader some details to keep them interested and guessing, but this book presents the scenario and then does almost nothing to advance the details. It has a very ambiguous ending, which can work in a literary fiction, but I thought felt very out of place in a mystery. It’s not ambiguous in the way that it leaves me wondering which of 2 scenarios might have occurred, but ambiguous in the way that I have literally no idea what actually happened. I feel that there should be some kind of payout at the end of the book, but I didn’t even get that, so it really left me frustrated at why I had invested so much time in the book when absolutely none of the questions presented in the synopsis of the book are answered.

Anyways, I don’t want to go on and on. It was a disappointing read for me, but others might like it. Go into this knowing it’s definitely not a thriller and only partially a mystery. If I’d taken a different approach I might have liked it a bit more.

The Maid

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Rating: ⭐⭐.5
Author: Nita Prose
Genres: Mystery
Pub. Date: Jan. 2022 (read Mar. 2022)

The Maid was my Book Club’s pick for March. I admit I wasn’t super enthused for it because mysteries aren’t generally my favourite, but it had good early reviews, so I was intrigued. Unfortunately, very little about this book worked for me and it was not popular in our book club discussion.

The Maid tells the story of Molly Gray, a young 20-something woman raised by her grandmother and working at an upscale hotel as a maid. In her work, Molly mostly blends in with the shadows, but when she discovers one of the hotel guests dead in his bed, she is catapulted into the limelight and her awkward social demeanor makes her one of the prime suspects. 

Let’s start with talking about the writing style. It wasn’t my favourite, but it reminded me a bit of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, with less charm. It’s never stated outright, but Molly struggles with how to interact in social situations and I think the reader can assume she likely falls somewhere on the spectrum. Her grandmother played a large role in helping Molly navigate the world, but has recently passed, leaving Molly struggling both socially and financially. As the protagonist, I thought the writing style suited Molly’s voice, but sadly the characterization and storytelling were lacking. 

Molly grows a lot throughout the novel, learning about herself and others around her as several new people enter her life to help her through the police investigation. But while she supposedly grows as a person, her growth didn’t feel organic or natural to me. The entire story happens in the span of 5 days and was too neatly packaged for me to buy into it. Molly has struggled her entire life with social interactions and suddenly at the climax she has all these revelations about how other people react. I thought this to be super unlikely if she has struggled her whole life with reading people and I didn’t think it was a particularly good message, as if people on the spectrum can suddenly change the way they see and interpret the world.

But my biggest problem with the book is that the plot is just not very sophisticated. For a mystery novel, I found it to be incredibly boring. I wanted the mystery to be clever and have lots of twists and turns, but the author reveals almost everything to us upfront! It’s clear that there’s something sinister going on in the hotel, we don’t necessarily know who the murderer is, but we know who the key suspects at the hotel are, so it’s not a stretch to see where the story is going. Arguably there are a few twists towards the end of the book, but even these fell flat to me. So before I get into discussion about this in the spoiler part of my review, I’ll just say that I wouldn’t recommend this book because unfortunately it’s lacking in both plot and characterization. 

Okay, now for SPOILERS.
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What drove me nuts at the end is that this whole book is marketed and sold as a “closed door mystery novel” reminiscent of Agatha Christie. People love these kinds of books and it’s a great premise. So WHY IN THE WORLD is the murderer not someone from inside the hotel! It’s such a cop-out and just read like lazy writing to me. The author hands us Rodney and Giselle on a silver platter as suspects in the drug scheme at the very least, but even if they didn’t commit the murder, there were still lots of other suspects – from the hotel manager, to Cheryl, to Juan Manuel, to the other maids, and of course, even Molly. I was just flat out annoyed that the author decided to make the murderer someone from outside the hotel. It’s disappointing and it’s not clever. I could understand why Molly would want to protect Giselle (if she was the murderer), but I really don’t see why she would protect Ms. Black. She had no reason to keep this information secret.

Then there’s the unnecessary twist near the end where Mr. Preston appears to reveal that he is Molly’s grandfather?! It wasn’t totally clear to me if this was the case, but I don’t think it added much to the novel and it actually, if anything, made me more sad because it means Mr. Preston likely only ever wanted to help Molly because she was his granddaughter and not just because he happened to like her. Also the whole lawyer bailing Molly out of jail thing seemed super unlikely to me.

Finally, my friend at book club brought up an excellent point about the very end – why on earth was Charlotte questioning Molly on the stand? Molly was no longer a suspect, she was only a witness, so she would have been questioned by either the prosecution or the defense (for Rodney), neither of which Charlotte was likely to be representing. It’s a small detail, but it does highlight the lack of forethought that seems to have gone into the novel. I just didn’t think the plot was sophisticated enough. It was too easily resolved and the character growth too easily realized. It had the potential for a good story, but sadly, I just don’t think this author is there yet. 

So 2.5 stars from me – not a favourite, nor would I recommend.

Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
Author: Elle Cosimano
Genres: Mystery
Pub. Date: Feb. 2022 (read Feb. 2022 on Audible)
Series: Finlay Donovan is Killing It #2

Finlay Donovan Is Killing It was an impulse purchase for me last year and I ended up really loving it, so this was one of my most anticipated reads for 2022. I can’t help but always compare this book to a train wreck because the plot goes off the rails in the most out of control way and I just can’t look away from it!

Finlay Donovan is not high brow literature in any sense, but it’s one of the most fun mystery thrillers I’ve ever read. It reminds me a lot of How to Get Away with Murder in that the plot keeps escalating so quickly that it’s hard to imagine how your characters got here, but unlike HTGAWM, Finlay Donovan never takes itself too seriously. Cosimano creates the most hilarious characters and has a heavy dose of comic relief, so even though the plot is super compelling, it’s never dark or bleak. 

Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead isn’t quite as strong as the first book, but I still think it’s a romping good time. It starts off a little bit slower and I got frustrated by Finlay and Vero keeping secrets from one another, but the plot picks up quickly and they get back to the same kind of shenanigans as the first book. If you get annoyed by characters who miscommunicate and make stupid decisions, then this book is probably not for you, but if you’re here for a super fast-paced good time then I think you will like this sequel.

I don’t want to say too much about it because it’s definitely one of those books you should read blind, but I just wanted to say that, Damn, I was into Nick in this book. I couldn’t really remember him from the first book, but he made a nice addition to this storyline. The only thing I thought could be improved was that the author/book writing plot aspect was too deja-vu from the last book. We get a new mystery, but some of the plot still felt recycled from the first book. 

The ending makes it pretty clear that we’ll be back for a 3rd book and I will 100% be continuing with this series. Highly recommend the audiobook, the narrator is excellent!

Apples Never Fall

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Liane Moriarty
Genres: Mystery, Fiction
Pub. Date: Sep. 2021 (read Oct. 2021 on Audible)

Apples Never Fall is my book club’s pick for November. We’ve read a lot of Liane Moriarty books in the club and she does consistently write good books, but nothing has ever quite had the same impact as Big Little Lies and I’m starting to get a bit fatigued with her writing. This book was fine – I didn’t love it, didn’t hate it, pretty standard 3 star read. 

Apples Never Fall focuses on the Delaney family, Joy and Stan and their 4 adult children. They are a family of tennis players and have had a pretty decent life until a girl named Savannah shows up on Joy and Stan’s doorstep and subsequently moves into the house, puting the Delaney children on edge. When Joy Delaney goes missing a year later and Stan looks poised to take the fall for her disappearance, it stirs up old resentments in the family and brings some family secrets to light.

Let’s start with what I liked about the book. It is a pretty good character portrait of each of the Delaney’s. Sometimes things aren’t always what they appear to be on the surface and Moriarty explores the theme that every marriage has its weaknesses, no matter how stable or loving it may appear from the outside. Moriarty tackles a lot of issues, from gender roles, to mental health, to physical health, to domestic violence, to the weight of our parents expectations and how they shape children into adults. 

What I didn’t like – Moriarty tackles a lot of issues. While it’s great that she highlights some issues that you don’t often see portrayed, such as dealing with chronic migraines and the fatigue of domestic labour, I think she was a little too ambitious. I felt like she tried to cram a lot into this book and it made it all seem a bit surface level. For example, I don’t think we really ever went in depth to Amy’s mental health issues or the shortfalls in Joy and Stan’s marriage. There’s a lot to dig into, but Moriarty spreads herself too thin to do any of these issues justice.

But even though she couldn’t quite tackle everything, this book was still too long. I felt like she didn’t do the issues justice and yet she still somehow spent too much time waffling on each of the characters. I felt like there was so much thrown in that just wasn’t needed. This is a mystery novel at its core, but the pacing gets caught up in so much background information on the large cast of characters that I felt the story never really picked up any momentum. I thought Savannah was a really interesting character and I wanted to know more about her and her past, but we get so much info about each of the boring Delaney siblings that I just lost interest and when we finally do get some insight into Savannah’s psyche, it’s just a bit too late.

Because sadly I just didn’t find any of the Delaney’s compelling. Joy was by far the most interesting to me, but I had almost no interest in Stan or any of the siblings. I just didn’t care about their problems. They’re a pretty well-to-do middle class white family and it was honestly just boring. I didn’t care about their tennis drama, I was unsure why I should care about Harry, and all of it just kept distracting me from the only parts I was interested in – Savannah and what happened to Joy.

Now I want to talk about the ending though, because that was fascinating. Again, I felt the pacing was a bit off. The book seems to come to a conclusion which I found fairly unsatisfying, but I was mystified to see I still had an hour left on my audiobook after this revelation. There is a second, shocking ending which is the part I found fascinating and would have loved to have seen developed a bit more. But unfortunately it comes a little too late in the story and made me question what was the point in including it at all? It is surprising, but I felt there’s so much more Moriarty could have done with it that would have made for a much more compelling book overall. 

So in conclusion – the book was fine, but I wish it was 100 pages shorter and explored a bit of a different angle. The family dynamics were interesting, but in the long run, forgettable.