Tag: thriller

His & Hers

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Alice Feeney
Genres: Mystery, Thriller
Pub. Date: Jul. 2020 (read Jan. 2021)

Alice Feeney’s debut, Sometimes I Lie, was a big hit with my book club when it came out. So I was excited to read His & Hers as our book club pick for February. I don’t think it’s as strong as Sometimes I Lie, but it is a quick, edge-of-your-seat thriller that I devoured in just a few hours.

I don’t want to get too much into the synopsis because it’s always better to go into these kind of books blind, but as the name suggests, the narrative bounces between two central characters, divorced couple Jack and Anna. Jack is a detective and Anna a news reporter. When a woman is murdered in the small English village of Blackdown, both Jack and Anna find themselves covering the story, but they are both also secretly connected to the victim.

Like I said, this is a quick paced thriller that takes you on a winding path. If you’re looking for a quick read that you don’t have to think about too much, this is it. The writing is good in that we really have no idea where the story is going. The author constantly toys with your train of thought, giving you some answer throughout, but always more questions. Overall it was a fun read, but there were a few things I didn’t like about it.

Before I get into the spoiler part of my review, I’ll just say that I thought the story had quite a few plotholes and while the author does always keep you guessing, I didn’t love the writing style. I found the writing a bit disjointed and confusing at times. I think that it was intentional not to give too much away, but I often felt like I just had no information. It’s hard to describe, but I felt like the fun of guessing who did it was removed from the story because the order of information was intentionally confusing I didn’t even bother.

I also found the content disturbing – I know murder mysteries are bound to be a bit disturbing, so it’s not a critique, just a note that it made me uncomfortable and that some people might like a trigger warning for rape. I also hate the use of children as a plot device in murder mysteries. Lots of mysteries center around children and trauma and that is fine, in a way this book does, but the author also leaves several children orphaned and generally I just thought it unnecessary. I felt more like they were used to make the reader feel bad rather than for any important plot reason.

Finally, this is a criticism of the title of the book more than anything. But “His & Hers” implies to me an exploration of two different sides of the same story. Yes this story had two protagonists, but to me it was really no different than any other dually narrated story. I didn’t think the book really explored his and her perspectives of an event. It really was just a simple shared narrative. A minor criticism as it doesn’t affect the enjoyment of the story, but hey, I’m a reader, I care about word choice.

Anyways, those are my critiques. Overall it was a standard 3 star mystery thriller. I liked it, but didn’t love it.

Okay now for the spoiler part of my review. I found quite a few plot holes and I want to document it while it’s still fresh in my mind because it’s bound to come up at my book club discussion!

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Plot holes:
– Why did Anna go into Zoe’s house on the day of her murder? The end confirmed she didn’t do it, so what was she doing?
– Why did the killer tip Anna off after they murdered Helen Wang? I assumed originally it was to throw suspicion on her, but wouldn’t the killer want to avoid any suspicion on Anna?
– Why was Priya always talking to Anna’s mom? The author alludes that we should be concerned about this – I figured originally it was because of her mom’s dementia and the body in the backyard. But in light of the final revelation, I’m not sure why we should be concerned about this. Do we think Priya suspects the real killer?
– Not a plot hole, but overall I just thought both Priya and Richard were weak red herrings. Catherine was the obvious suspect, so I did like the little plot twist with Cat Jones.
– Why was Jack absolved of all suspicion? They make reference to the discovery of Catherine’s diaries, but they wouldn’t have found any murder plans within them… I know Priya witnessed Cat attack Anna’s mom as well, but again, not proof she was the murderer. Her children had been kidnapped, surely hysteria would be expected, or did the police not figure this out. They would have had to know now that both the kids parents were dead.

One by One

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Ruth Ware
Genres: Mystery, Thriller
Pub. Date: Sep. 2020 (read Sep. 2020 on Audible)

If you know me at all, you know I’m a huge Ruth Ware fan. The best phrase I can think of to describe her books, and I say it all the time, is ‘compulsively readable’. It seems like this book has just been getting mediocre reviews, but for the most part, I actually really liked it. 

I think one of the reasons I really liked this was setting. One by One is set on a french ski resort up in the alps. There’s a number of chalets located at the top of one of the gondolas and on this particular week, the chalet has been rented out by the employees of the company Snoop. Snoop is a popular social media app that can be used to listen to music and snoop on what other people, from friends to celebrities, are listening to at the same time. However, like any tech start-up company, there’s a lot of drama going on behind the scenes. 

The chalet is full of the Snoop staff and two employees when an avalanche hits, snowing them in and cutting everyone off from escape. Tensions mount and when several people start to show up dead, the whole chalet descends into chaos. Who can you trust when you’re snowed in with a killer?
The narration alternates back at forth between two of the individuals snowed in at the chalet and it has the old school closed door mystery vibe. Something about being snowed in and knowing the killer is among you is just enthralling. Plus I did get into all of the Snoop company politics and drama and I thought it added to the story. 

I flew through the book in just 2 days, but I have the same criticism I have with most of Ware’s book – the book climax is just too early. For some reason she always reveals the killer at like the 75% mark of the book and devotes the last part of the book to the “thrill” I suppose. But it never really works for me. Of course you need some kind of thrill to accompany your big reveal, but Ware always drags it on too long. Plus I was a little bit disappointed with who the killer turned out to be, but I didn’t guess it until close to the end, so I guess I can’t complain too much.

Overall I still really enjoyed this book. I’d give the setting an A. It’s not my favourite Ruth Ware (I think that may be Turn of the Key), but I definitely enjoyed the reading experience.

The Silent Patient

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Rating: ⭐⭐.5
Author: Alex Michaelides
Genres: Mystery, Thriller
Pub. date: Feb. 2019 (read Mar. 2020 on Audible)

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I can’t deny that the ending was pretty good and the story was compelling for the last hour (I listened to this one). but the rest of the book was just so damn boring!!!

The Silent Patient tells the story of Alicia Berenson and her therapist, Theo Faber. Alicia was found years earlier in her home having shot her husband in the head 5 times. But after the event she completely clams up and refuses to speak, being admitted to a psychiatric hospital called The Grove. Theo is a psychotherapist and is intrigued by Alicia’s story and believes he can help her. He gets hired on at the Grove and begins looking into Alicia’s past, trying to get her to speak.

What surprises me most after finishing this book is how everyone calls it a page turner and says they couldn’t put it down. Until the big twist, I honestly thought this book was so dull. I really didn’t like Theo and found his repeated attempts to get Alicia to speak super boring. There’s a bunch of red herrings along the way, but I didn’t find any of them particularly compelling either.

At the same time that Theo is investigating Alicia’s past, we get snippets from her diary that she wrote prior to the murder of her husband. In the audiobook, her diary is narrated by a female voice actor, while the rest of the book is narrated by a male voice actor for Theo. I do have to acknowledge that the audiobook may have played a role in my lack of enjoyment of this book. The audio sample was of the female voice actor, who I actually really liked, but it turned out that 70-80% of the book is actually narrated by Theo, and I really didn’t like his voice actor. Although that might be the point because in the audiobook Theo comes across as really pretentious and patronizing. Not sure if others got the same tone from reading the book.

Anyways, despite liking Alicia’s voice actor, I still had a lot of problems with the diary, namely that NO ONE WRITES LIKE THIS IS A DIARY. Alicia includes full dialogue in her diary, which to me was a huge oversight on behalf of the author. I found the story in Alicia’s diary compelling, but it just wasn’t the right medium to tell it if you’re not going to commit to the idea that your character actually wrote it as a private memoir. Diaries are written for the writer and this diary was clearly written for an audience. It just felt like sloppy writing to me.

Moving on, I thought the twist was pretty good, but not totally shocking. I kind of saw it coming, I just wasn’t really sure the logistics of how the author was going to make it work. It’s one of those things where I felt like I knew what the end result was going to be, I just didn’t know how I would get there. I’ll give the author some credit though because I definitely did miss the signs.

I think I’m going to rate to rate this one 2.5 stars. I get the attraction, but I was definitely disappointed with it and was anxious to just finish so that I could move on to something more enjoyable. Maybe I would have had a different experience with this book had I read the paperback, but I just really didn’t like Theo and I felt the story was lacking in intrigue.

Verity

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Colleen Hoover
Genres: Thriller, Mystery, Romance
Pub. date: Dec. 2018 (read Nov. 2019)

Every year I see the new Colleen Hoover book and say, “nah, I don’t think I’m gonna read her new book this year.” Then every year she gets nominated in the Goodreads Choice Awards and I decide to read it anyways.

I heard all kinds of reviews about how f-ed up this book is, which are all totally true. Verity is filled with plot twists, suspense, and a really creepy atmosphere, but the biggest question the book leaves me with is this: who the hell classed this book as a romance?!!!

Hoover is known for her romances, which to be honest I don’t really love, but in the last few years she’s been branching out from her normal material in favour of some more thought provoking storylines and social commentary. But romance has still always been central to her stories, so I was surprised when I started reading this one and found myself smack dab in the middle of a mystery thriller! I like a good mystery thriller, but I find them a bit repetitive after a while. Not Verity though – it gripped me from the very start and held my attention to the last page. Hoover still weaves some romance into the story (which I wasn’t that big a fan of), but I was able to move past it because the rest of the writing was great!

I’ve said this before, but Hoover is one of the best first chapter writers I’ve ever encountered. Starting a new book often feels like a bit of a chore because it takes a while to sink into the writing and the narrative, but once I made the decision to read Verity, I was really excited because I knew Hoover would deliver on a compelling beginning. But it wasn’t just the first chapter that was gripping. I read the whole thing in less than 24 hours and pretty much never put it down except to go to work. Say what you want about her romances, but Hoover is a compelling writer.

So what is Verity about might you ask? I skipped reading the synopsis on this one and honestly, I’d advise you to do the same. If you want a mind-bendy, slightly disturbing book with a killer twist, read no further and pick it up. If you need a bit more to go on, Verity is about ghost writer Lowen Ashleigh. She’s asked to author the 3 remaining books in an immensely popular thriller series because the original author, Verity Crawford, is no longer able to do so. To search for material on the rest of the series, she visits the author’s house to go through her office and strikes up a friendship with Verity’s husband, Jeremy. While there, she discovers a disturbing manuscript that makes her question everything she’s been told about Verity.

The setting reminded me a little of Ruth Ware’s, The Turn of the Key, while the plot and storytelling reminded me a lot of Alice Feeney’s, Sometimes I Lie. Lowen discovers a number of disturbing revelations about Verity’s past as creepy things start happening in the house that make her question her sanity. There’s a few random plot lines that don’t really seem to go anywhere, but they still add to the overall atmosphere of the book.

I’ve also said before that I’m not a big fan of the men Hoover writes as the love interests. This was the first Hoover book I read that focused less on the romance than the other aspects of the story though, so it was a welcome change. Emily May sums of my feelings about Hoover’s love interests well in her review where she notes, “I think I enjoy Hoover’s fucked-up books so much because I usually find her regular romances kinda fucked up. I like her books so much more when she’s writing about trauma and morally-questionable characters than when she’s trying to sell me a douche as a love interest.” Which brings me back to my original question – who decided to market this book as a romance? Everything about this book is “mystery/thriller” and someone needs to get this out of the romance genre so that more people pick it up.

Anyways, to sum it up, I really enjoyed it. The themes don’t have the same significance as some of her previous work, but it was still really fun to read and gripped me the entire time I was reading it.

Recursion

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Blake Crouch
Genres: Science fiction, Thriller
Pub. date: Jun. 2019 (read Oct. 2019)

Okay, I need to get my thoughts down about this book before I start to forget them! Recursion was my book club’s pick for October and I was pretty excited to read it because we also read Dark Matter together a few years ago and all really liked it. I really hadn’t wanted to read Dark Matter, but I ended up loving it, so I was cautiously optimistic about Recursion.

I am going to have to give the edge to Dark Matter, but Recursion takes you along the same wild ride as Dark Matter does. Crouch writes this really interesting blend of sci-fi and thriller, which I think works really well. His plotlines are totally f-ed up, but embody everything that makes for a great I-cant-put-this-book-down read. They have lots of mind-bending science and crazy plot twists, but also maintain a nice balance of emotional depth and characterization. It’s easy to get caught up in the science, but Crouch always grounds his characters through their relationships and it makes for a much more compelling read.

I think it’s best to go into Dark Matter and Recursion blind, but if you want a small synopsis, Recursion basically looks at memory functions – how we remember (or don’t remember) things and how those memories impact our personal well being and understanding of time. What would happen if we could record and map our memories? Would it help people who suffer from diseases like Alzheimer’s, or does it have the potential to completely warp our sense of time and space.

I did really like this book – it has a strong start, it’s very engaging, and it’s definitely hard to put down. But I ultimately decided to give it 3 stars instead of 4 because I struggled with the last third of the plot, which I found numbingly repetitive, and I thought the ending had some major plot holes.

But that’s all I’ll say about that for now. For the rest of this review, I’m going to have to get into some spoilers. I have a lot of thoughts about the ending and I’m hoping that other readers (or my book club) might be able to clear up some of my questions, but if you haven’t read the book and are planning to, definitely tap out of this review now. Major spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned!

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So here’s where I struggled with this book. I thought it had great pacing during the first half, but the more messed up everything got with the chair, the less interested I got. The world ending time loop at the end was a nightmare and it just went on forever. It gave me anxiety while also being super long and boring. You could tell Helena was taking the total wrong approach to ending the time loop and with every reset I was counting how much older she was getting and just kept finding it less and less believable that she would be able to live the same life over so many times without losing her mind. By my count she was like 282 years old when she finally died!! As someone who has not even yet reached the age of 33 (the length of the time loop), I found it hard to fathom reliving your life for that long. I thought it was realistic that she finally just passed away from sheer mental exhaustion, but it was a little annoying to have Barry then come in less than a year later and solve everything. Helena was the hero of this story for me and it was really annoying to watch stupid Barry take all her glory.

Fellow readers, I need your help in understanding the ending, because to my mind it has some serious flaws. Here’s all my issues:

1. How did Barry just go back to a dead memory? Going to a dead memory killed the original test subject (forget his name), so why was Barry able to do it? I feel like this should have been explained.

2. On that note, when the first guy died from going to a dead memory he had this wonderful experience where he went to heaven (or whatever you want to call it), which was enough to make him kill himself later, how come no one else had this experience in their many deaths?

3. Barry basically solved the time loop by going back to the original timeline and stopping Helena from dying, which is what started Slade’s obsession with the chair, but I don’t see how this was any different than Helena going back to the age of 16? She was always returning to that time because it was still part of her original timeline, but the fake memories would always still catch up with everyone later. Wouldn’t the fake memories still catch up with everyone in Barry’s original timeline?

4. Or does the memories not catching up have to do with the fact that Barry is springing off of a dead timeline? I don’t really get why that would matter though, I guess the fake memories from the other timelines haven’t been created when you launch off a dead timeline, but it still begs the question, how did Barry return to a dead timeline?

5. What happened to Helena’s memories from her original timeline – the one where she worked for the R&D company? Slade apparently kills her for the first time in 2018, but I don’t remember her ever gaining those memories?

I think that mostly sums it up. But like I said, it was kind of disappointing to see Barry solve the problem, especially when Slade tells us that Helena originally figured it out and then he reset her memories (which also doesn’t make sense, she would have got those memories back n’est pas?) Or did she not get the memories back because Slade went back to a dead timeline? That would make sense actually, maybe that is the answer to why she never remembers Slade killing her either? I guess I will go with the answer that previous memories don’t catch up with you in a dead timeline, which would explain a lot of my confusion and questions 3-5, but still raises the question of how you travel to a dead timeline?

Anyways, this helped me sort through my thoughts, but still doesn’t change my rating. Crazy action doesn’t always make your story compelling and I just didn’t find the last third of this book compelling. But I’d love to hear everyone else’s thoughts on the ending and all the plot twists! Am I right about the dead memories thing? Do you have the answer to any of my other questions? Would love to know what everyone else thought!