Mystery & Suspense Archives | Page 60 of 119 | BookPage

by Bruce Tierney

If there is a mystery premise more original than Zoran Drvenkar’s Sorry—sorry, I cannot bring it to mind. Four German 20-something borderline losers come up with an idea for a business venture: If you have done somebody wrong, and you are too timid, too busy or too removed from the situation to effectively apologize, you can hire their agency to do it for you. The name of the agency: Sorry. They will charge you an exorbitant fee, and they will make amends on your behalf. Their clients include businesses, the lovelorn and, most recently, a brutal killer who nailed his victim to a wall with long spikes through her hands and forehead, leaving the mess for the Sorry personnel to clean up. The killer has done his homework: He knows all of the skeletons in the Sorry closets, and he is quite confident that he can manipulate the staff into doing his bidding—repeatedly. Sorry changes perspective from chapter to chapter, giving the reader unusual first-person insight into the characters and their motivations, with a wild card outsider perspective unrevealed until the very end. Dark, demented, radical and grotesquely humorous, Sorry upends every convention of modern fiction craft, and brilliantly. Indeed, Sorry might well be the Mystery of the Year!

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

NO ORDINARY MURDER

Review by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

Glasgow Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, last seen in Still Midnight (2010), returns in Denise Mina’s latest police procedural thriller, The End of the Wasp Season. Heavily pregnant with twins, Morrow is basically counting down the days until her maternity leave. She is looking forward to not having to deal with her dim-bulb boss on a day-to-day basis, not having to endure the petty bickering of her underlings and not having to think about anything unrelated to the two growing presences in her belly. Then Sarah Erroll is murdered, and Morrow’s world careens off in directions she could not have begun to imagine. No ordinary murder, this one is unusually savage: The woman’s face has basically been obliterated, stomped past recognition by not one, but two pairs of matched sneakers, identical but for the sizes. To make matters worse, the shoes broadly match those worn by the children of Morrow’s girlhood friend, a good-time girl fallen on hard times. Complicating the story even further is the suicide of a wealthy businessman—which may be connected to Sarah’s death. Mina excels at describing the minutiae of police work, inexorably leading to the solution of the crime, as well as the convoluted but exceptionally believable interpersonal dealings of the cops and criminals alike. Read one Mina novel, and you’ll be back for more.

Thomas Enger, already a legend in his native Norway, seems destined for similar acclaim on American shores. His debut novel, Burned, features disfigured investigative reporter Henning Juul, just now returning to work after the fire that destroyed his apartment and his good looks, and took the life of his young son. Juul doesn’t have to wait long to find himself back in the thick of things: It falls to him to look into the murder of a young woman who was buried to her neck in an Oslo public park, then stoned to death. It has the look of a Middle Eastern Sharia punishment, and indeed, the girl’s boyfriend is a Pakistani native; at first blush, he appears to be a very good fit for the murder. Or is he just a good fit for a frame? Enger forces his readers to confront their own (often well-hidden) prejudices, all the while delivering a gripping narrative that begs comparison to Stieg Larsson. A capital-B Bonus: This book is $15—possibly the best $15 you’ll spend on a mystery this year! By the way, you heard it here first: Enger is also a talented composer, with several movie themes to his credit; his tunes are evocative of Philip Glass or Amethystium. Check out his website at thomasenger.net and have a listen.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Thrills and chills from Europe

Review by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

Arnaldur Indridason, the Icelandic author best known for his popular series featuring Reykjavik’s Inspector Erlendur, returns with a stand-alone thriller, Operation Napoleon. This tale of murder and intrigue has roots in wartime Berlin, half a continent (and half a century) away from the Icelandic glacier where the main plot will commence. The backstory, explained in a few introductory pages, is this: In 1945, a German bomber hastily repainted with American markings crashes in a snowstorm. Oddly, there are both German and American soldiers aboard. The glacier swallows up all traces, and there the story remains—frozen in time—for 50-some years. Credit global warming for bringing the airplane once again to the surface, thus stirring up the ashes of perhaps the biggest scandal in history, a secret that could potentially launch World War III. Leaning decidedly toward the thriller side of the thriller/mystery continuum, Operation Napoleon will nonetheless engage suspense devotees who, I guarantee, will be surprised and moved by the final twist.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

The Witch Elm

Review by Mari Carlson

by Mari Carlson

With cunning psychological prowess, Tana French’s first standalone crime novel after six Dublin Murder Squad mysteries plumbs the recesses of our darkest thoughts.

In Dublin, on an almost-Halloween evening, Toby Hennessy, his girlfriend and his cousins are hanging out at Ivy House, Uncle Hugo’s grand abode, asking each other, “What’s the worst thing you ever did?” The game is a way of tiptoeing around how each of them may be connected to the discovery of a skull in the wych elm tree in the Ivy House garden.

The macabre discovery is not the only recent misfortune in the Hennessy family. Uncle Hugo has a brain tumor, and Toby nearly dies when he’s attacked in his flat, possibly in connection to a scandal at the art gallery where he works. The plot surrounding the skull comes into focus through Toby’s murky lens of pain, frustration and the medications required after this tragic combination of events. Toby has always been lucky, a handsome charmer who can talk his way out of scrapes and befriend just about anyone. But who is he if his luck has run out?

French rips open the chasm between Toby’s before and after, viscerally describing his fear as “dark, misshapen, taloned, hanging somewhere above and behind me waiting for its next moment to drop onto my back and dig in deep.” Add to Toby’s troubles his worried girlfriend and sensitive, conniving cousins, and it becomes apparent that The Witch Elm is about more than the crime behind the skull; it is about what happens when a great upheaval cracks open life’s shell and reveals one’s true potential.

With this thorough search into the criminal mind, French reaffirms her place as one of our finest crime novelists. Her characters become as familiar as family yet as unpredictable as strangers, creating a chilling sense that everything could shift at any time.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With cunning psychological prowess, Tana French’s first standalone crime novel after six Dublin Murder Squad mysteries plumbs the recesses of our darkest thoughts.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller Debut Fiction

Who is in my house?

Review by Annie Peters

by Annie Peters

In Our House, Fiona Lawson returns home from a long weekend, only to discover movers unloading a van full of another family’s belongings into her tony Trinity Avenue home. Stranger still, her belongings and those of her two sons have vanished, and this new family insists they own the house, although Fiona never put it on the market. From this unsettling scenario, British author Louise Candlish proceeds to masterfully spool out the complicated series of events that led Fiona and Bram, her estranged husband with whom she shares the home in a “bird’s nest” co-parenting arrangement, to reach this shocking moment.

Candlish tells a large part of the story through a podcast called “The Victim,” which Fiona narrates, and through a Word document written by Bram, both in retrospect. The podcast and Word document give the reader the opportunity to hear Fiona’s and Bram’s differing perceptions of the events as they unfold. This narrative structure also allows the reader to feel the full weight of the characters’ emotions, from Fiona’s initial utter perplexity to Bram’s almost fatalistic resignation, and to discover the deep-rooted origins of their relationship’s complexities. Allowing the reader to plumb these depths gives the plot real plausibility. What seems outlandishly far-fetched at first slowly becomes uncomfortably conceivable and makes this novel nearly impossible to put aside.

Candlish is the author of 12 novels, and she makes her U.S. publishing debut with Our House, a frightening journey that will leave readers wondering if this could happen to them. The novel is a clear demonstration of Candlish’s considerable skill as a writer, and is sure to garner a new throng of fans here in the States.

Thriller

Thriller

Mother, come home

Review by G. Robert Frazier

by G. Robert Frazier

Nine-year-old boys can have active imaginations. Left alone, without a mother or father and in the care of a doting but well-meaning housekeeper, that imagination can easily reach extremes, from incredible fantasy to irrational terror. Such is the case for the impressionable Samuel Clay, who yearns for his mother constantly and can recite the exact number of days she has been gone to the United States, in Stephen Giles’ intensely gripping thriller, The Boy at the Keyhole.

Only the occasional handwritten postcard stamped from America provides evidence that Samuel’s mother is alive and well. But the randomness of her communiqués—which Samuel tracks on a map using pushpins and yarn to denote each city his mother is in—baffles him to no end. The fact that his housekeeper, Ruth, keeps the postcards locked away in his mother’s room further confounds him. Despite Ruth’s assurances that his mother will return to their English estate once she has completed her business overseas, Samuel grows more and more distrustful of her. When his young schoolmate, Joseph, suggests Ruth may be up to something far more nefarious—that she may have killed Samuel’s mother and buried her in the basement—Samuel’s fear and desperation plunge to new depths. Ruth’s stern manner toward him, coupled with their dwindling finances, ramps up his suspicions that she had his mother killed to avoid being fired. Convinced that Ruth is lying to him, Samuel boldly sneaks into his mother’s room to steal one of the letters and makes a stunning discovery. Samuel ultimately confronts Ruth in a frantic, pulse-pounding conclusion.

Giles, who is the author of the popular Ivy Pocket children’s series of books, has written a slick psychological thriller. His debut adult novel is sure to fire up readers’ own imaginations.

Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller

A daughter uncovers a modern-day spy story

Review by G. Robert Frazier

by G. Robert Frazier

Red, White, Blue, the new novel from screenwriter Lea Carpenter, is an intriguing, albeit challenging, read. Intriguing in that it revolves around a woman’s exploration into her father’s life—and death—as a CIA operative. Challenging in its narrative structure, which briskly alternates between two points of view over a series of short, nonlinear chapters. But for lovers of spy novels, it’s more than worth the read.

Carpenter carefully details the life of CIA operative Noel, from his training and his exploits within the agency to his ultimate death in an avalanche in the Swiss Alps. His daughter, Anna, who has always believed her father to be a New York banker, learns of his secretive profession by way of an encounter with an unnamed associate, who provides her with a series of recordings and videos about the man she only thought she knew.

As Anna reflects on her relationship with her father, she becomes immersed in the inner workings of the government agency and her father’s role in it. Readers learn along with Anna about the CIA’s secret training facility, the Farm, where future agents learn lessons in espionage. Subsequent sections detail interrogation techniques by polygraphers. And all of it slowly builds to a grander puzzle.

For Anna, coming to grips with her father’s past and his activities is emotional and moving, while at the same time intense and mysterious. The snapshot-like style of the novel takes some getting used to, and readers would be advised to read as much of the book in one or two sittings. Long pauses away from the novel may only serve to kill momentum and possibly sow confusion. Carpenter, who wrote the screenplay for this summer’s action-thriller Mile 22 about the CIA’s Special Activities Division, is well-versed in the shadowy world of espionage as well as adept at crafting an emotional page-turner.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Go Behind the Book with Lea Carpenter.

Thriller, YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA Thriller

A surefire crossover hit

Review by Sarah Welch

by Sarah Welch

BookPage Teen Top Pick, September 2018

When Sadie was 6 years old, her sister Mattie’s arrival provided her life with purpose. So when Mattie is found dead 13 years later, Sadie is destroyed—and determined to bring her sister’s killer to justice, no matter the cost. Sadie’s car is soon found abandoned, and her surrogate grandmother, having given up on the authorities, begs investigative radio reporter West McCray to look into her granddaughter’s case. While West is reluctant to get involved with Sadie’s story (“Girls go missing all the time,” he says), he soon becomes obsessed with finding the 19-year-old and wants to help bring her home before it’s too late.

In the highly anticipated Sadie, Courtney Summers delivers a hard-hitting look at the depth of a sister’s love. Summers confronts drug abuse, abandonment and child sexual abuse head-on as she tells the dark story of Sadie’s desperate attempt to avenge her sister and West’s desperate attempt to find her.

Summers’ narrative alternates between Sadie’s first-person perspective of her journey and the script of West’s “Serial”-like podcast as he traces her steps, and both are riveting. Summers’ sharp prose—filled with raw emotion, gritty detail and almost-tangible suspense—will break readers’ hearts over and over for Sadie and just about everyone she encounters on her mission.

Sadie is a gripping, visceral thriller that is at once difficult to fathom and impossible to put down.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller Debut Fiction

Baby Teeth

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

It seems that more and more books, films and TV shows feature relationships between mothers and children who despise each other and seek each other’s slow death. In Zoje Stage’s debut novel, you can’t blame put-upon Suzette Jensen for wanting to be free from her monstrous daughter, Hanna. Indeed, by page five you’re praying for the little horror to eat it in the worst way possible.

What’s less clear is why Hanna hates her mother so much. What could Suzette have possibly done to Hanna, 7 years old when our tale opens, to fill her with such psychotic rage? On top of this, Hanna’s dad, Alex, is so love-blinded that he refuses to see how utterly atrocious Hanna is.

Soon enough, it becomes clear there is no answer, for Stage’s real subject is the conundrum of evil itself. There’s simply no reason for loving, gentle, organic veggie-eating, granola-crunching progressive parents who live in an eco-friendly house to produce something like Hanna. For these two benighted bobos to wonder where they went wrong as parents is as ridiculous as Cesar Millan wondering why he can’t bring the werewolves in Tolkien’s Silmarillion to heel. It’s sad and frustrating to watch the Jensens rush from pillar to post, trying to get other good-hearted folk to help their daughter, when it’s clear there is no hope.

Yet what else can they do with this child whose one and only goal is to kill her mother? What can the reader do? Hanna’s chapters conjure a sickened incredulousness in the reader. Hanna is not so much a character as an abyss; her mind is so warped and inhuman that you even fear for her big, cuddly Swedish bear of a dad. Because of this, her parents’ ultimate solution can be only temporary, as are all “victories” over evil. Don’t be surprised if there’s a sequel to Baby Teeth before long.

Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller

A haunting tale of revenge

Review by G. Robert Frazier

by G. Robert Frazier

The plot of David Joy’s third novel, The Line That Held Us, is simple: A man accidentally kills another man and tries to cover it up with the help of a friend, while the murdered man’s brother seeks vengeance on them. The complexity of the novel comes in Joy’s evocative language, his unforgettable characters and how he weaves themes of family, friendship and justice throughout this darkly engrossing Southern crime noir.

Blood is spilled and revenge is inevitable in David Joy’s darkly engrossing third novel.

The novel’s bleak chain of events evokes memories of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo, in which one ill-advised decision leads to another, and each new lie spirals out of control. Joy presents Darl Moody, a stereotypical Southern-by-the-grace-of-God country boy, whose hunting expedition in the backwoods of North Carolina goes awry when he shoots and kills Carol Brewer, another local yokel who was scavenging the forest for ginseng. Realizing what he’s done and not wanting to risk facing the law, Darl enlists the aid of lifelong best friend Calvin Hooper to secretly bury Carol’s body.

After Carol’s brother, Dwayne, discovers his brother is missing, it’s only a matter of time before he uncovers the truth. Of course, Dwayne has his own sense of justice—one that doesn’t involve the police—and neither Darl nor Calvin can escape his wrath. Calvin, meanwhile, wrestles with his sense of loyalty to Darl and his guilty conscience.

The law ultimately gets into the fray, but far too late to keep the impending violence at bay and the body count from stacking up.

Joy has been heralded for his ability to craft a powerful sense of place in his previous novels (Where All Light Tends to Go and The Weight of This World). He does so again in The Line That Held Us, bringing the Appalachian region and lifestyle to life. But it is his unforgettable characters and their moral dilemmas that will stay with you in the end.

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Mystery, YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA Mystery

Dark descent

Review by Sharon Verbeten

by Sharon Verbeten

Tim Wynne-Jones’ intense new book, The Ruinous Sweep, opens with a car crash, in which teenager Donovan Turner is tossed from a vehicle in the middle of nowhere. Then the narration fast-forwards to a hospital, where a near unconscious Donovan receives treatment following the hit-and-run and his girlfriend, Bee, holds watch and tries to decipher his urgent mumbles.

Shortly after Donovan’s car accident, police inform Bee that her boyfriend is also suspected of murdering his alcoholic father, whose badly beaten body was found lying next to Donovan’s baseball bat. The story’s timeline then begins to alternate between Donovan’s accident and the mystery of his father’s murder, which Bee sets out to investigate. Wynne-Jones introduces a bevy of dark characters and chilling scenarios designed to lead readers to piece together the two puzzles, but while the eerie paths may thrill some, the winding narrative may prove confusing at points.

The Ruinous Sweep is a trip into an underworld filled with drugs, murder and dysfunctional families. Fans of thrillers will find plenty of suspense in this story with vague echoes of Dante’s Inferno. The plot requires a fair amount of heavy lifting and focus, but fans of Wynne-Jones’ previous books and his talent for fabulism may find it worthwhile.

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Thriller, YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA Thriller

Those who are left behind

Review by Anita Lock

by Anita Lock

Kelley Armstrong’s latest YA novel is a gripping, plausible thriller influenced by real school tragedies, but with a twist.

A mass shooting at a high school leaves four dead and 10 injured. Three years later, 16-year-old Skye Gilchrist reluctantly returns to the school that has haunted her dreams ever since. Skye’s brother was one of the shooters, and she shudders when she sees her one-time best friend Jesse Mandal walking down the hall—his brother was one of the victims. Armstrong’s dual narratives highlight two intelligent teens, desperately attempting to pick up the pieces of their broken lives.

After reconciling due to a shared class, the pair begin to search for the truth about the dreaded day that changed their lives forever. Their efforts soon uncover cryptic texts and videos, leading to a mysterious fire and a break-in at Skye’s apartment. Armstrong’s crisp writing is replete with enough foreshadowing, cliffhangers and red herrings to keep readers hooked to the very end.

A fast-paced and unnerving novel, Aftermath is a top-of-the-line read with nothing less than silver-screen potential.

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kelley Armstrong’s latest YA novel is a gripping, plausible thriller influenced by real school tragedies, but with a twist.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction

Still Lives

Review by Thane Tierney

by Thane Tierney

It’s hard to know where an artist’s persona ends and her art begins, and this has never been truer than in the case of the mysteriously disappeared Kim Lord, the central figure in Maria Hummel’s spellbinding new novel, Still Lives. It’s also somewhat true of Hummel herself: The award-winning poet (her collection House and Fire won the APR/Honickman Prize in 2013 for best first book) worked at the perpetually cash-strapped Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and her novel’s protagonist, Maggie Richter, finds herself in a similar job at a similarly underfunded museum.

When Lord goes missing on the biggest night of her life—an A-list museum opening featuring her photographs, in which she portrays famous murder victims—speculation runs wild. Is it a publicity stunt? Or are more serious forces at foot? When Maggie’s ex-boyfriend (now Lord’s lover) falls under suspicion, Maggie’s journalistic instincts kick in, taking her places the cops can’t go and unwittingly putting her life in peril.

No doubt comparisons to Raymond Chandler’s best work will rain down upon Still Lives, dotted as it is with trenchant observations of LA and the human condition. Like Chandler, Hummel is capable of limning out a ripping yarn replete with high fashion, high finance and high society. These are the mean streets through which our heroine travels, though slightly removed from the glitter and the nastiness. And not unlike another master of the mystery, Erle Stanley Gardner, Hummel includes an intellectually satisfying Perry Mason moment that also provides an interesting twist.

It would be damning with faint praise to call Still Lives a contender for best beach read of the year—like calling Pablo Picasso a really good painter—but Still Lives is both that and so much more.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and is a member in good standing at several American and international museums.

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Comparisons to Raymond Chandler’s best work will rain down upon Still Lives, dotted as it is with trenchant observations of LA and the human condition.