Some novelists run the risk of overstaying their welcome, perhaps overwriting due to indulgence in a particular character or scenario. Roddy Doyle (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha) never feels like one of those writers. His stories, from short fiction to novels, are tightly wound coils of energy, humor and insight, waiting to spring on us. Smile is another stellar example of Doyle’s brand of dense, kinetic storytelling. In just over 200 pages, Doyle manages to tell us something startling, funny and strange about the nature of human tragedy and pain.

Smile follows Victor, a recently separated writer living on his own for the first time in years. Victor spends his evenings having a pint at the local pub, until this quiet ritual is interrupted by Fitzpatrick, an obnoxious and seemingly inescapable man who claims they were schoolmates. Victor can’t remember Fitzpatrick, but he can remember his Catholic school days, and suddenly the trauma of what happened there begins trickling back into his mind. As Doyle jumps between past and present, Victor’s life spools out before us, building to a startling realization that shakes him to his core.

Doyle has a particular talent for humor and dialogue, but he also has the rare quality of being able to balance an economy of language with a dense sense of perception. Not a word is wasted here, and there aren’t many to waste. This is a gift, and it’s one Doyle harnesses with particular power in Smile. This drives the book at an almost fever pitch, practically daring you to turn each page and see what kind of incisive character wisdom he’s about to impart next. By the end, even if you think you know what’s coming, you will be dumbstruck by the storytelling prowess at work. Smile is a brief, brilliant, frenzied reading experience that only Roddy Doyle could deliver.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What is life inside a mental institution? Some literature and film paint institutional life as a soothing break from reality. The hospitals are often located in remote areas with rambling gardens, places where patients can take a break from the stressors and triggers of daily life.

Maybe there’s some truth to that. But Sam James can’t relate; she’s a psychologist at Typhlos, an institution in the middle of Manhattan. Her life outside the institution’s walls is often as gray as life inside. Although James is willing to take on the most difficult patients, she’s less eager to confront her own problems. Among those: alcohol and a controlling boyfriend.

When Sam is assigned Richard, with whom other therapists haven’t been able to connect, she’s sure she’s up for the challenge. But Richard refuses to answer even the most basic intake questions, setting Sam on her heels. As she attempts to understand him, she’s forced to take a look at herself and her habits as well. You could say it’s an example of the blind leading the blind.

Debut novelist A.F. Brady has stuck to the old adage “write what you know,” as her experience as a psychotherapist in Manhattan clearly informs The Blind. The result is a twisting, fast-paced tale that may leave readers, like Sam, examining what they know of themselves and mental illness.

Collaborative novels can be tricky propositions, even for writers as accomplished as the father-son duo of Stephen and Owen King. Each author’s stylistic and thematic concerns can stick out in jarring ways, creating a mashup far less seamless than either author perhaps would like. Sleeping Beauties is not one of those novels. In the grand tradition of team-ups like Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens and Stephen King’s own The Talisman (with Peter Straub), it is a triumph of two voices blending wonderfully to take us into a dark and all-too-real dream.

All the women in the Appalachian town of Dooling (and around the world) are falling asleep and refusing to wake up. Once sleep takes them, their bodies are covered by a mysterious, fluffy coating, and if they are disturbed, they awaken as homicidal maniacs. This development naturally sows chaos, inciting riots across the nation and sending men into a frenzy. In Dooling, though, there’s something different: Evie, an enigmatic woman with strange abilities, seems unaffected by the sleeping sickness. Some men think she’s a monster, others a savior, but whatever side they take in a world without women, Dooling is transformed into a powder keg.

Sleeping Beauties traffics in some very potent themes, from the obvious question of what an all-male society would devolve into to less obvious concerns like the politics of a women’s prison and the evolution of sexuality during the aging process. None of these issues, though, are dealt with cheaply or crudely. The book wields the best attributes of each author—Stephen’s ability to ratchet up tension, Owen’s wit and their joint gifts for character detail—with a deftness that makes it feel like the work of a single hybrid imagination. In the authors’ hands, the themes and characters of Sleeping Beauties become powerful fictional case studies, holding the mirror up to our own powder keg of a society in unforgettable and often unnerving ways.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Part of the fun of reading a book like Ali Land’s Good Me Bad Me is the anticipation of what’s to come. You know from the get-go that you’re going to be in for a few shocks—you just aren’t sure how you’ll get there. Fortunately, Land delivers on all accounts.

The concept provides an instant hook: The 15-year-old daughter of a serial killer turns in her mother and, while waiting to testify, worries if she too is bad and will become a killer. You might think Annie, who is later renamed Milly by her foster family in order to protect her identity, would breathe easier after escaping her mother’s reign of terror. But her nightmare is just beginning.

In addition to the psychological ramifications of having lived with a serial murderer, Milly must adjust to life with a new family and new school environment. Neither is much of a comfort. Her foster family has its own dysfunctional relationships—an uneasy marriage and a spoiled 15-year-old daughter of their own, Phoebe—while school presents more than its share of challenges. Her foster dad, who doubles as her therapist, seems more interested in making notes for his book about Milly. And instead of embracing Milly with sympathy and care, Phoebe sees her as a rival for her parents’ attention and immediately subjects her to bullying and ridicule in front of their classmates.

As the title of the book implies, it’s only a matter of time before Milly’s darker tendencies get the better of her. Getting there is just half the fun.

A former child and adolescent mental health nurse, Land expertly captures the angst and trauma of teenage adolescence through Milly’s compelling narrative voice. The result is a starkly realized and haunting thriller.

The Child Finder, Rene Denfeld’s second novel and her most personal to date, is a harrowing story about a young girl living in captivity and the one woman who could possibly find her and bring her home. Naomi Cottle, the titular heroine, has a knack for locating missing children. She’s found 30 of them—but not all of them alive.

Her latest case brings her to the chilling remoteness of Oregon’s mountainous Skookum National Forest, where three years earlier, Madison Culver went missing at the age of 5 while looking for a Christmas tree with her family. Previous search-and-rescue attempts have all failed, largely due to the vast terrain and ice-cold temperatures. But Naomi is not one to give up, and as her investigation proceeds, she believes that Madison’s disappearance can only be the result of an abduction.

Naomi’s personal journey from foster child to adulthood parallels her search for Madison. As Naomi’s fears and sources of determination come to light, the narrative also dips into Madison’s mind, allowing readers to experience her terrifying ordeal at the hands of her captor, known only as Mr. B. Both narratives are expertly intertwined into a deeply moving story of survival and hope.

Denfeld writes in part from personal experience. Her stepfather was a sexual predator, and she has adopted three kids from foster care. She’s worked as a death penalty investigator and brings depth and understanding to the victims of such crimes as well as the perpetrators.

The Child Finder is a chillingly good read that will stay with you long after you close the book.

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kate Hamer’s piercingly sad, engrossing novel is a modern fairy tale.

It’s a familiar premise: An orphan finds out that the perfectly dreadful people who raised her aren’t her biological parents and so embarks on a search to find her real ones. Per usual in such a tale, the questing orphan has something special about her. In the latest novel from the author of The Girl in the Red Coat, the orphan is a British girl named Ruby with a port wine stain on her face and a talent that truly sets her apart—she sees dead people.

Ruby finds a surrogate family in the woods: three teenage siblings, not orphaned but abandoned by their hippie parents in a great pile of a house. There’s Tom, who loves her at first sight, flame-haired Elizabeth and tetchy Crispin. One of the kids has a secret, the nature of which is such that when it’s revealed, readers may go back to the earlier chapters to look for clues. While Ruby lives with her new family, they make do, milking goats and shooting wild rabbits for supper. And bit by bit, she learns the sad tale of her Mum and Dad, who were too young when she came along and not ready for her.

In The Doll Funeral, the relations of parents and children are not only difficult but impossible. There isn’t a single parent/child relationship that works. Ruby’s horrid adoptive parents were no more ready for her than her biological parents, who had lost a child too soon before they brought her into their lives. The siblings’ parents eventually stop sending money. Even Ruby’s ghostly companion, Shadow, was once a boy abandoned and left to die. Yet despite the grief all of this entails, Hamer’s novel reminds the reader that family does not necessarily mean blood, and love and connection are possible. For a girl like Ruby, they transcend death itself.

A worker finds tiny bones, the bones of an infant long buried, when excavating an East London backyard for a development project. Thus begins Fiona Barton’s second psychological thriller. After the success of Barton’s bestselling and finely wrought first book, The Widow, readers have high expectations for The Child, a story that once again features Kate Waters, a thorough and “old school” reporter who has a winsome way with people. In this novel Kate’s personality and background are more developed, though the mystery remains front and center.

Spurred by a small article mentioning the gruesome discovery of the baby’s bones, Waters decides to investigate. She wants to know who buried the baby and what kind of sordid, desperate circumstances would prompt such an action. Three other key female characters also see the article and Water’s subsequent reports detailing her investigation.

One of these women, Angela, gave birth to a child in 1970 who was kidnapped from her hospital room while Angela showered. The baby was never found, and Angela is convinced the recently unearthed child is her baby girl. She tells the police and Waters what she believes. While waiting for ultimate confirmation, the story undulates and ripples with frisson. Barton again uses multiple points of view shifting between Waters, Angela and two other women—a mother and daughter—to create a continuous story line.

The mother and daughter have a solid connection to East London, but seemingly not to Angela or the baby. With Water’s skillful, empathetic questioning, she begins to recreate the events of long ago, right down to a 1980s disco-themed reunion of the residents of the block where the worker found the remains. Barton’s stories ring with authenticity as she, like Waters, has 30 years of experience in journalism. Barton fulfills all expectations in this installment: The Child resoundly delivers.

"I couldn’t put it down!" It’s an old cliché, often used to describe a book that achieves an immediate and constant hold—so much so that a reader can consume it in close to one sitting—no matter what the hour or how many chores need to be done.

Lately, such addictive reads seem to be few and far between, with many simply trying to up the ante on gore or the twist surprise factor, and most merely end up leveling the playing field.

At last, though, here’s a book that fits the bill. I Found You is addictive, and it doesn’t insult your believability quotient.

British author Lisa Jewell has penned 13 previous novels, including the creepy The Girls in the Garden (2016). In I Found You, Jewell combines several ongoing plots; all three of the storylines she’s imagined here stand on their own with intriguing characters, while at the same time seductively weaving one cloth. These stories are set in motion at differing times and places, but sooner or later they converge in a funky English seaside town called Ridinghouse Bay.

A man sits on the beach in the pouring rain: staring out to sea; soaked to the skin; silent. A middle-aged single mother sees him as she gazes from her cottage window.

Near London, a young newlywed from Kiev discovers that her husband of three weeks has gone missing. Without any new friends or understanding of British culture, she must somehow set the wheels in motion in order to discover what’s happened.

In a decades-past flashback, two teens on holiday with their family encounter an older teen who raises their suspicions in a hair-raising fashion. The scene unfolds during a visit to the beach by a traveling vintage “steam fair” (a showcase of steam-powered vehicles and machinery) that provides an appropriately seedy feel to the proceedings.

Each of these finely drawn stories tends more to gloom than to creepiness, but Jewell’s skill is such that an overriding sense of menace seeps into every page, overriding the commonplace feel of the setting. The action reaches a climax at a once-lovely seaside mansion, now overgrown with neglect—its path leading to a rusty, padlocked door hiding lonely rooms and seaswept vistas.

Jewell knows how to urge the reader on, but not in a bludgeoning way. Occasionally, the action gets a little too ordered—and perhaps winds up a bit too neatly—but by that time, readers will have enjoyed just about every minute of this captivating read.

Paula Hawkins follows her debut smash, The Girl on the Train, with the twisty and compulsive Into the Water. Told through multiple viewpoints, the story immerses the reader in a complex web of suspense, suspicion and emotional turmoil as her characters wrestle with the recent drowning of a single mother and a teenage girl, their bodies found weeks apart at the bottom of a river known as the Drowning Pool. Both deaths are initially treated as suicides, but doubts and secrets abound, prompting speculation of another cause entirely.

Unlike The Girl on the Train, which alternated narratives from two main characters and, later in the book, a third, Into the Water features more than a dozen storytellers, leaving readers hard-pressed to keep them all straight without a set of flash cards. None of the voices is exactly eager to divulge everything they know, leaving readers to piece together the overarching truth from each chapter. But the deeper readers proceed, the easier it is to be swept away by the assorted voices and the secrets they conceal. Hawkins skillfully delves into the psyche of each character, extracting their feelings, fears and fallacies, slowly ramping up the psychological suspense as she goes.

That said, it’s difficult to discern whose story this actually is. One could argue that the lead character is Jules Abbott, sister of Nel Abbott, who dies at the outset of the book. But you could also argue that Nel’s daughter, Lena, is the novel’s main protagonist. Hawkins keeps you guessing, and in doing so loses some of the emotional impact of creating a single character to root for and sympathize with.

Into the Water is ultimately a story of families mired in secrets and uneasy relationships, haunted by the past and fearful of facing the truth in the present. The book builds slowly, requiring patience above all from readers but with the promise of a more compelling latter half of the book.

Dennis Lehane has a gift for discerning beautiful ruins amid the shattered lives of his characters. He has bewitched us with this cutting spell in novel after novel, from Gone, Baby, Gone to Shutter Island. With Since We Fell, he’s done it again, weaving a piercing thriller out of secrets, paranoia and what life can become when darkness is the only thing that stirs you anymore.

Rachel Childs grew up surrounded by the secrets of her mother, and so she grew obsessed with the truth. When that pursuit of truth led to a successful journalism career, an on-air panic attack tanked it, rendering her a virtual shut-in until she found a husband who could stabilize her life with love and seemingly supernatural understanding. Just as Rachel is beginning to find her footing again, a chance sighting on a Boston street shatters everything she thought she knew about her life, sending her into a web of secrets that even her powerful journalistic mind couldn’t prepare her for.

The right storyteller can forge trust with readers, a bond that allows the tale to go anywhere. Lehane wields that talent masterfully. His confident, precise prose makes you lean in until you want nothing more than to know his heroine completely, only to be surprised as the thriller trap snaps shut.

With Since We Fell, Lehane further cements his reputation as one of our finest crime writers, forging an unforgettable character and then driving her deep into page-turning thriller territory with the deft hand of an old master. This novel will please longtime Lehane fans and new readers alike, leaving them wanting more of his beautiful darkness.

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Elanor Dymott’s debut, Every Contact Leaves a Trace, was a sophisticated thriller about a man whose wife is murdered when visiting an old advisor at Oxford. In Silver and Salt, Dymott applies her elegant sense of the mysterious to the story of an ill-fated family as two daughters of a famous photographer try to come to terms with his death.

After the 2003 death of renowned British photographer Max Hollingbourne, his daughters convene at a villa in Greece, where they spent many summers as a family. Vinny is the older, more responsible sister, a translator of German drama and poetry and happily married. Three years younger and considerably more volatile, the mordantly unhappy and antisocial Ruthie arrives after the funeral with a list of grievances and demands. Already haunted by memories of an unhappy childhood, a glimpse of the little girl in the neighboring house further destabilizes Ruthie.

The novel interweaves past and present, much of it sad. Max first met his French wife, Sophie, at a photo shoot, and not long after, she gave up her career as an opera singer to be his wife and raise their daughters as he roamed the world, often leaving them alone for months. Even after Sophie began to show signs of mental illness, Max never stopped traveling, but called in his sister Beatrice to help, even asking her to live with the girls when Sophie became too ill to take care of them. When Ruthie tried to share her burgeoning interest in photography with Max, his reaction was often cruel and sometimes violent, leading to an estrangement between father and younger daughter that lasted until his death. Dymott uses a photographer’s ability to alter and manipulate images through the developing process as a metaphor for the tenuous grip Ruthie has on sanity, although there are times when the author’s poetic reach exceeds the novel’s action.

Silver and Salt is an achingly intimate look at grief, and Dymott’s descriptive gifts are amply found in her rich depictions of place from an English flower-filled meadow to the Greek olive groves surrounding the Hollingbourne villa.