There comes a point in many people’s lives when they wonder, what if I could start over? What if I could be someone else, free of the baggage and the travails that have accumulated until now? In Chris Pavone’s suspenseful new novel, Two Nights in Lisbon, recently married couple Ariel Price and John Wright have shirked their former identities for new lives unfettered by past encumbrances.
Or so they think.
Only Pavone knows their secrets, and he reveals them slowly and deliberately, expertly seeding the novel with intrigue and suspense, one page at a time.
While accompanying John on a business trip to Lisbon, Portugal, Ariel awakes to an empty bed. She immediately reports John’s absence to the police and, when they don’t appear to be overly concerned, the American embassy. The authorities have plenty of questions for which she only has vague answers, because John has his own secrets; decades of his life are unknown to her. Her panic intensifies as his absence lengthens, and then her worst fears are confirmed with the arrival of a ransom note. As Ariel learns more about John, and Pavone reveals more of Ariel’s secrets, the collision of both characters’ pasts and presents fuels the increasingly thrilling tension.
“We tell ourselves stories about each other, about ourselves too, our pasts. We construct our narratives,” Pavone writes. “Maybe she doesn’t know her husband at all.” Pavone himself had to reinvent his life in 2015, when he left a successful career as a book editor to move to Luxembourg with his wife. His Edgar and Anthony Award-winning debut The Expats explored this territory, and Two Nights in Lisbon proves that it’s still fertile ground, packed with stay-awake-all-night thrills for readers.
Chris Pavone's latest novel is packed with stay-awake-all-night thrills as it follows a recently married couple with no shortage of secrets.
To enjoy James Patterson and Dolly Parton’s Run, Rose, Run (10.5 hours) to the fullest, you must listen to the audiobook. Not only is it a necessary companion to Parton’s album of the same title (featuring songs inspired by the novel), but the cultural icon also voices one of the main characters, veteran country music star and bar owner Ruthanna Ryder.
With her unmistakably sweet Southern drawl (which she once cheekily described in Rolling Stone magazine as “a cross between Tiny Tim and a nanny goat”), Parton imparts wisdom and warnings alike through Ruthanna’s character. Up-and-coming singer-songwriter AnnieLee Keyes, expertly voiced by country pop singer Kelsea Ballerini, brings youthful exuberance and hopeful naivete to the story, providing a counterpoint to Ruthanna’s sage advice about navigating the music industry.
AnnieLee’s pursuit of country stardom in Nashville, from the dive bars on lower Broadway to the business-minded studio executives on Music Row, is a familiar story, but Parton’s involvement as author and performer elevates Run, Rose, Run a thousand times over. Additional characters come to life through the voices of Soneela Nankani, James Fouhey, Kevin T. Collins, Peter Ganim, Luis Moreno, Ronald Peet, Robert Petkoff, Ella Turenne and Emily Woo Zeller, creating an ensemble experience for book listeners to enjoy.
With narration from country stars Dolly Parton and Kelsea Ballerini, Run, Rose, Run is a must-listen ensemble audiobook.
Meg Williams, the magnetic central character of Julie Clark’s new novel, The Lies I Tell, is a highly intelligent woman with a gift for transforming social graces into social engineering. She’s always learning, adept at innovating on the fly. But unlike other “disruptors,” such as the tech bro founders of hot new startups, Meg is a con artist with 10 years of experience (and counting).
Despite that decidedly dodgy resume, Meg makes for a compelling protagonist as she attempts to right both personal and systemic wrongs, one awful man at a time. Her methods are strategic and well tested: She trawls social media to ascertain things like a target’s wealth, trusted friends or favorite coffee shop. Then she insinuates herself into their life in a way that seems casual but is absolutely calculated, playing whatever role is required to breach their boundaries and defenses.
As The Lies I Tell begins, Meg is back in California after many years away, and she has set her sights on Los Angeles politician Ron Ashton, who tricked Meg’s mother out of their family home some 15 years ago, a life-altering injustice Meg has long wanted to rectify.
In a call to her home in Santa Monica, California, Clark says her deep dive into the world of chicanery and subterfuge involved research on everything from business development to the California real estate market to the typical mindset of the successful grifter. “I learned about the psychology of it, the different types of cons and con artists throughout history,” she says.
Clark is familiar with con women prominent in the current zeitgeist, too, from the likes of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes to the imprisoned faux socialite Anna Delvey. But Clark says that The Lies I Tell‘s Meg is a very different type of person. “I didn’t want her to be working with a team of people; she needed to be isolated and on her own,” she says. “But I also wanted her to be likable. And I wanted her to not leave destruction and despair in her wake.”
“I love it when you can root for somebody who’s doing something wrong and still want them to succeed.”
Whether she’s writing about two women who make a spur-of-the-moment decision to swap identities in a busy airport (the plot of her 2020 New York Times bestseller, The Last Flight) or pitting Meg against her dauntless rival, journalist Kat Roberts, Clark nimbly avoids misogynistic stereotypes. “That’s just not what I do as a writer,” she says. “The women that I write, they’re strong, they’re savvy, they’re quick on their feet.”
Kat is convinced that Meg is the reason her life went terribly awry ten years ago, when Kat’s investigation into a predatory high school principal resulted in a deeply traumatic experience. Meg is the person who started Kat down that path, and once Kat realizes the con artist is back in California, she decides it’s time for a reckoning. She figures she’ll take a page from Meg’s playbook and gain her trust before making her pay for what she’s done.
Readers who admired the alternating points of view in The Last Flight will be happy to know that Clark returns to that structure in The Lies I Tell. Details of the pain and injustice that drive both women toward retribution—their origin stories, if you will—unspool across the pages, and both characters struggle to maintain their relentless sense of self-righteousness, even as they deceive others with relative ease.
The process of gradually realizing, scam by scam, layer by layer, what compels Meg to lie, cheat and steal is as captivating as the beguiling con artist herself, and Kat comes to a similar realization as she spends time in close proximity to the woman she thinks is the locus of all her miseries. “I want to climb inside Meg’s mind, inside her life, and piece it all together, dot by dot,” Kat muses. “Take something from her, the way she took everything from me.” But what Kat doesn’t anticipate is that they will end up becoming friends of a sort, establishing an easy (albeit lie-saturated) camaraderie. There is a delicious tension as they circle each other, probing for the truths that lie beneath each other’s facades, determined to get what they want before they’re found out or somebody skips town.
“At the beginning of the book,” Clark says, “Kat thinks she knows what she wants, which is to expose Meg, get her career back on track, be the writer she wanted to be when everything was pulled out from under her. But by the end of the book, she realizes she needs something different.”
It’s a theme the author often returns to in her work. “I talk a lot about an emotional third rail,” she says, “the way the characters grow and change as a result of trying to get what they want and what they need. And what they want and what they need are often not the same thing. I think that is the heart of every book I’ve written so far and probably will continue to be part of every book that I write.”
Clark gets a lot of practice identifying and exploring characters’ evolutions in her other job as a fifth grade teacher. “At the end of every book we read, my students have to answer the question, what is this book really about? What is it that the author wants you thinking about when you’re done?” she says. “I have to answer that same question with every book that I write. . . . With The Last Flight, it was about female empowerment, it was about trauma, it was about reclaiming your voice, it was about getting a second chance. And then with The Lies I Tell, it’s about justice, it’s about taking back what you think belongs to you.”
As Meg says in the book, “The difference between justice and revenge comes down to who’s telling the story,” and it’s important to Clark that readers feel some empathy for and identify with her central con woman. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t moments where you won’t trust what she’s saying or wonder what her motivation is—but at the same time, you’re still rooting for her,” she explains. “That’s what I wanted more than anything. I love it when you can root for somebody who’s doing something wrong and still want them to succeed.”
It’s particularly easy to root for Meg when she encounters sexism everywhere and doesn’t let her justifiable anger keep her from adroitly turning it to her advantage. Smugness and condescension from men, she realizes, can have its benefits. “She realizes that it’s actually really easy for her to [con people] because she’s a woman, because people don’t take women seriously,” Clark says.
While other characters may not take the novel’s leading ladies at their word, it’s important to Clark that readers do. “When I sat down to write [these] female characters . . . it just didn’t feel right to me to portray them as unreliable. I love the unreliable narrator as a reader! It’s super fun to figure out! But I’m not really inclined to perpetuate that stereotype for women, being a woman myself.”
Fortunately, Clark says, “people have been really receptive. I haven’t had a single reader say, ‘I wish you would’ve made them more unreliable.’ In fact, I get the opposite.” She adds, “I think people are hungry for that. I think they like to see characters they can count on. A character doesn’t always have to be 100% honest with the reader’we’re not 100% honest with people in our lives or even with ourselves’but the intention has to be good.”
Clark says that she feels an obligation to herself, her sons and her readers to portray women in an empowering and positive way. “We’re hardworking, sane, determined people who are not going to back down from a challenge. Those are the women that I know,” she says. “So that’s who you’re going to get when you pick up a book from me.”
The author of 2020's blockbuster thriller The Last Flight doesn't need unreliable narrators to keep fans frantically turning the pages of her follow-up novel.
The characters in Chris Pavone’s thrillers often find themselves trying to bury the past in an effort to begin anew. In his latest novel, Two Nights in Lisbon, Ariel Price thinks she has successfully left her old life behind. But after she wakes up in their Lisbon hotel room to find that her husband has vanished without a trace, she is confronted with all the secrets he was apparently keeping from her. We talked with Pavone about this ongoing theme, his approach to creating characters and his transformation from book editor to novelist.
What was the initial inspiration for this novel, and why did you choose Lisbon as the setting? A few years ago my family spent a handful of nights in Lisbon, in a sun-flooded suite facing a charming square, an absolutely beautiful place to start the day, and I thought: This is almost too perfect, something horrible should happen here. I love novels that seem at first like one type of story, then turn out to be something very different, and I developed a vision of this perfect-looking hotel room as the launching pad for characters who seem extremely lucky but aren’t; for a story that looks romantic then isn’t (but then ultimately is); for a narrative that looks like it’s about a missing man but is about something else entirely.
The plot of the book began to develop when the “Access Hollywood” tape revealed that Donald Trump seemed to have committed sexual assault regularly, as a sort of hobby. To me this wasn’t a question of politics. I simply could not understand what it was about these sex crimes that made it so easy for people to excuse them as so-called locker room talk, to dismiss them as partisan attacks. I despaired about what was so broken with our society, and what could be done about it.
“I thought: This is almost too perfect, something horrible should happen here.”
Anyone who reads one of your books knows that you keep chiseling away at your characters over the course of the story. Two Nights in Lisbon’s Ariel is particularly surprising. Did any of her secrets come as a shock to you? I needed to know all of Ariel’s skeletons from the get-go, because her secrets are the underlying framework of the whole story, and their reveals needed to be organized in a way that supported everything else without being coy or blatantly withholding. I think one of the greatest challenges of writing suspense fiction is to withhold in a way that’s not too obvious. If you’re flagrant, it erodes the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief and makes the whole thing feel contrived and the ultimate revelations unearned.
Ariel often thinks about status signifiers and the way she’s perceived by others. Do you think we worry too much about how people perceive us? I’m definitely not qualified to be prescriptive about how all of humanity should behave. But I do wish we could somehow reconsider how we value one another. We heap tremendous rewards on dubious achievements, not to mention things that aren’t achievements at all; being young, rich and beautiful is the opposite of an achievement, it’s just luck. It’s probably unavoidable for most people to envy good fortune, but should we admire it?
Our culture increasingly celebrates fame for its own sake, completely divorced from any talent or skill or contribution to anything, while at the same time encouraging women to pursue careers in being beautiful, creating a dangerous dynamic of objectification and self-objectification that to me looks both exhausting and terrifying. Just walking down the street, getting a coffee, browsing in a bookstore—you’re always about to be ogled, accosted, propositioned. And that’s not the worst of it. Not by a long shot.
If you scratch beneath the ticking clock thriller plot of Lisbon, these are some of the themes you’ll find. But you can also just tear through the pages to see what the hell happens. This isn’t homework.
At one point in the novel, Ariel says she and John don’t participate in social media because it’s ruining the world. Do you share her opinion? I think social media has made it way too easy—irresistible, for some people—to lie with impunity, to fabricate alternate realities, eroding the very idea of truth. One of the things that seems most broken about America now is that we all exist in hermetically sealed echo chambers, driven largely by social-media feedback loops that reinforce opinions we already have and keep out any evidence to the contrary. A lot of us now refuse to leave our comfort zones altogether, and there are fewer and fewer shared cultural touchstones, less and less agreement on the fundamental facts of the world.
I think every time someone posts a picture of themselves in a fake private jet, they’re contributing to this insidious erosion of truth, one that’s just as dangerous as a disinformation campaign by a hostile foreign power. We’re losing the capacity to distinguish between truth and lies and, even worse, the ability to care.
I don’t participate in social media very assiduously. I’m there mainly for videos of dogs, for photos of my friends’ adorable children and to keep in touch with people. I’m pretty sure that I won’t end up on my deathbed wishing I’d been more self-promotional on Instagram.
“The world doesn’t need more novels. I think what readers truly want are better novels.”
As a former book editor, do you find yourself editing your own drafts? What advice do you have for writers who struggle to prioritize production over perfection? I edit constantly. I edit every day while I’m writing a first draft; that’s how I start the writing day. After I eventually type “the end,” I spend more time editing and revising subsequent drafts than I did writing the first.
I don’t accept the idea that writers should prioritize production over perfection. The world doesn’t need more novels. I think what readers truly want are better novels. Or at least that’s what I want—not more choices but better choices. This isn’t journalism, and there’s no clock on it. The crucial thing is to write a great novel, not just to write a novel.
People like to throw around the advice that while you can edit a bad page, you can’t edit a blank page. Maybe so. But that philosophy only works if you do the necessary editing of the bad pages. It’s very hard to kill your darlings, especially for writers who don’t have a lot of experience with rigorous, ruthless editing.
With five books under your belt, would you say that your transition from editor to writer is complete, or are you still learning things? What’s something you wish you’d realized earlier on? I’ve now been a full-time writer for a decade and a half, and it still feels largely new to me. I’ve accepted that imposter syndrome might be permanent. It seems so unlikely that I’m allowed to earn my living by sitting around and writing made-up stories; sometimes it seems impossible that anyone could be this lucky.
I wished I’d realized earlier how much revising I’d do, on everything. For my first couple of books, all this work felt sometimes like failure. Why do I have to keep fixing this goddamned manuscript? I thought I was doing something wrong, and I hoped that next time I’d nail the novel on the first draft, or even second. But revisions are apparently a big part of how I work. I can’t see what’s missing from a manuscript and which aspects could be much better until I get to the end and look back. I no longer think of this as a problem that I need to fix; it’s the way this process works for me, and it’s a luxury that I’m thankful to indulge.
“I’ve accepted that imposter syndrome might be permanent.”
Ariel says she wants to be a person without fear. What are you afraid of, and have you conquered those fears? A novel is a very personal piece of creativity. It’s your voice, your worldview, your whole personality on the page, and publication is opening up that personality not only to reasonable professional criticism but also to deeply personal and sometimes irrational attacks, even the vitriolic hatred of strangers. (Thanks again, social media!) It’s a little bit like going to a giant party filled with everyone you’ve ever met, then having those people write reviews of you to be posted on the internet for everyone to see.
I used to be afraid of being hated, as both a real person in the real world and also as a writer of made-up stories. But I’ve accepted that there are many people out there with whom I disagree about nearly everything, so it makes sense that I’ll disagree with their judgment of my book, too, not to mention their judgment of me. I still don’t enjoy being hated, and I hope I never do. But I’m not afraid of it anymore.
What’s the next step in the evolution of Chris Pavone? Where do you go from here? My twins are about to graduate from high school and go off to college, ending this long stage when parenting has been the organizing principle of my life. This makes me both ecstatic and morose, every single day. I have no idea where I go from here.
Two Nights in Lisbon dives into challenging topics such as the erosion of truth and the ambient misogyny that haunts women's lives, but don't worry, "This isn't homework."
“Those were the good old days” is a phrase people love to say as they wax poetic about bygone eras. It’s understandable to feel nostalgic given our current chaotic landscape, but as The Lunar Housewife points out, it’s not necessarily merited. Caroline Woods’ historical thriller, set in the final days of the Korean War and the onset of the Cold War, spins a tale of big-city intrigue as it follows a promising young waitress-turned-writer and the increasingly disturbing secrets she uncovers. The result is an addictive binge of a read that’s equal parts intelligent introspection and nail-biting suspense.
It’s 1953, and Louise Leithauser has come a long way from Ossining, New York. The 25-year-old daughter of a housecleaner is now rubbing elbows with the likes of Truman Capote and Arthur Miller in New York City as a writer for the hip literary magazine Downtown. Louise is writing political pieces for Downtown (under a male pen name, but why look a gift horse in the mouth?), dating the magazine’s handsome co-founder, Joe Martin, and penning a sci-fi romance novel, The Lunar Housewife, in her spare time. She’s also certain her twin brother, Paul, who is missing in action in Korea, will come home any day now. But when Louise overhears a conversation between Joe and his colleague Harry regarding mysterious surveillance and their magazine’s dangerous connections, she begins to wonder if anything in her carefully constructed existence is really what it seems.
Coming off her critically acclaimed debut Fräulein M., Woods takes the reader into the tangled web of American-Soviet relations and the dark secrets underneath the New York literary scene’s sparkling surface. Even Katherine, the protagonist of Louise’s novel-in-progress, isn’t immune. A former World War II pilot who voluntarily defected from the States to go on a groundbreaking mission to the moon, Katherine starts to suspect all is not well on Earth or in space. Both Louise and Katherine live in a world that is run by men, but these smart, capable women are not going down without a fight.
The Lunar Housewife will have readers thinking long and hard about how good the “good old days” really were.
The Lunar Housewife is an addictive read that's equal parts intelligent introspection and nail-biting suspense.
Some people deserve to die. At least, that’s Ruby Simon’s mindset. The protagonist of Sascha Rothchild’s Blood Sugar isn’t your typical suspected murderer. She’s a Yale graduate and a successful psychologist in her home city of Miami, and she was happily married until her diabetic husband, Jason, passed away. Now Ruby is accused of Jason’s murder, with plenty of time to think back on her checkered history as she waits in a police station. What follows is a Promising Young Woman meets “Dexter” thriller that’s both highly suspenseful and strangely empowering.
Ruby’s always been a Type A personality, pulling top grades and volunteering with animal rescues even during her wild teen years of club-hopping, snorting cocaine and hooking up with older men. Every now and then, she’s brought it upon herself to correct the injustices she saw around her. When Ruby was 5, she made sure her older sister’s bully drowned beneath powerful ocean waves. In high school, she fought back against her friend’s father, whose hands would never wander again after that. But Ruby genuinely loved Jason, a gentle Georgia native she met at an antique shop—so why is she under suspicion for his untimely demise? Could it have something to do with Jason’s aptly named mother, Gertrude, who has never hidden her disapproval of their marriage?
Rothchild is both a memoirist and an Emmy-nominated screenwriter for shows such as “The Bold Type,” “The Baby-Sitters Club” and “GLOW.” Her debut thriller successfully executes all the elements of a crackling mystery: page-turning plot beats, snappy dialogue (especially between Ruby and Roman, her narcissistic college bestie-turned-defense attorney) and vividly drawn characters. Readers will root for Ruby’s acts of vigilante justice toward toxic male figures while also questioning her reliability as a narrator. For those who love a fascinating, complicated female lead with more than one ax to grind, Blood Sugar is an absolute must.
Promising Young Woman meets “Dexter” in this highly suspenseful and strangely empowering thriller from an Emmy-nominated screenwriter.
What does it mean to be known? For a group of women in the South American art world, that seemingly simple question leads to more questions. In María Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, unknown ladies abound—the nameless narrator, her enigmatic late boss and a long-gone painter—but only one ties them together: a master forger who may or may not still be alive, whom the narrator has vowed to track down. As Gainza follows her on her quest, she also offers a spare but vivid peek inside a female-dominated environment that’s both fascinatingly specific and deeply universal.
Thanks to family connections, the 25-year-old narrator lands a job in a prestigious Buenos Aires auction house and is immediately fascinated by her employer, Enriqueta Macedo. A nationally renowned expert in art authentication, Enriqueta runs the narrator ragged at work but also takes her to the spa on weekends. Enriqueta soon confides a major secret of her success: She sells certifications of authentication for artworks that she knows are forgeries. “Can a forgery not give as much pleasure as the original? . . . Isn’t the real scandal the market itself?” she asks the narrator in justification.
After finding Enriqueta dead of natural causes, the narrator’s grief-fueled breakdown inspires a covert mission. Donning Enriqueta’s black fur coat, the narrator checks into a hotel in hopes of locating Renée, a forger best known for her replications of the works of Mariette Lydis, a portraitist from the 1920s with her own colorful past. Enriqueta hadn’t seen Renée in over a decade, and as the narrator follows leads from Enriqueta’s and Renée’s ex-classmates and colleagues, she asks herself what she is really hoping to find, and why.
For these women, art is less occupation and more religion. Mariette, Renée, Enriqueta and the narrator have their own reasons for creating and selling art, as well as their own obstacles to fulfillment, but it’s the art itself that unites them. Through catalog descriptions, court transcripts and the narrator’s own introspective voice, acclaimed Argentine author Gainza, an art critic herself, deftly explores the quest for truth, both in brushstrokes and within oneself. Portrait of an Unknown Lady offers no easy answers but provides immense pleasure in the journey to find them.
This spare but vivid peek inside the South American art world is both fascinatingly specific and deeply universal.
Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li is an enticing and stimulating escape: a heist novel that follows a group of young Chinese Americans in their quest to return stolen pieces of art to China. With a caper at its center and rebellion in its heart, Li’s debut is like Ocean’s Eleven meets Olga Dies Dreaming, a diaspora story wrapped up in a thriller.
When art history student Will Chen witnesses the theft of precious Chinese artifacts from the Harvard museum, it upends his life. Instead of revealing everything he knows to the authorities, he grabs a priceless carving for himself, and one of the thieves hands him a business card. He’s soon enlisting his sister and friends as his crew and flying first class to Beijing to meet the visionary behind a scheme to reclaim art plundered by Western governments. Chinese billionaire Wang Yuling offers Will $50 million to liberate five sculptures from museums across Europe and America.
A cinematic heist thriller with a social conscience, Portrait of a Thief is immediately appealing. But as this vivid and precisely crafted novel goes on, readers will be fascinated with the characters and their relationships as well as impressed by Li’s multifaceted exploration of Chinese American identity. The close third-person narration centers one of five characters in each chapter: Will; his tightly wound but charismatic sister, Irene; Daniel, a longtime family friend; Lily, a mechanical engineer and occasional street racer; and Alex, a software engineer who dropped out of MIT after her parents’ rent doubled. In addition to unique skills, each character has a distinct personality, motivations and perspective on being a child of the Chinese diaspora.
Though they don’t overshadow Portrait of a Thief’s strengths, some weaknesses are also evident. The gang often contemplates their Chinese heritage, but the content of their contemplations rarely evolves, which can make these reflections feel repetitive. More importantly, for such smart people, their approach to the heist is a bit thick. Watching Ocean’s Eleven for tips is ironic and funny, but a Google Doc for planning? Fortunately, rooting for these underdogs is tremendous fun, and the novel has a great sense of humor. While debating whether to move forward, the would-be thieves break out the whiteboard and do a quick pros and cons analysis: “There were just three bullet points. Making history, it read. China gets its art back. A shit ton of money.”
Portrait of a Thief is an unlikely heist story made even richer through excellent writing, indelible characters and an engaging anti-colonialist message.
With a heist at its center and rebellion in its heart, Grace D. Li’s debut is like Ocean’s Eleven meets Olga Dies Dreaming.
Do we ever really know those close to us? Author Kieran Scott probes this question deeply in the sharp and stylish Wish You Were Gone. A bump in the night leads to the horrific discovery of a loved one’s body, and the secrets just keep spilling out as suburban wife and mom Emma Walsh tries to unravel the complex web of lies that made up her “perfect” life.
When a noise jolts Emma awake in the wee hours, she doesn’t expect to find her husband James’ car crashed into the garage—and James deceased inside it. Though Emma’s life appears ideal, with a beautiful house in a tony New Jersey suburb, a spouse who runs a successful sports PR firm in Manhattan and two beautiful teens in private school, only Emma and her kids know it’s all a facade. James had alcoholism and was prone to fits of rage, getting into a physical altercation with his own children mere hours before smashing his prized BMW. But is his demise more than a simple case of drunk driving? Meanwhile, one of Emma’s best pals, single mom Lizzie, is struggling with her finances, while Emma’s other close friend, successful lawyer Gray, is dealing with a suddenly scarily unpredictable spouse. Are their problems intertwined, tied up in James’ complicated legacy?
In her debut thriller, Scott, who has previously published romance and YA, displays a whole new talent for complex adult suspense. Though Wish You Were Gone is a quick read, it’s also thought provoking and relatable. Emma’s not the only one hiding things; everyone has secrets behind closed doors, whether it’s a pile of unpaid bills, trouble with a peer group or a partner struggling with unexpected mood swings and irrational actions. Through bite-size chapters from the perspectives of her teenage children and her two closest friends, we learn the personal issues they all fight to cover up until it’s almost too late.
Each of Scott’s characters is multifaceted and realistic, from inquisitive Emma to relentless, Type A Gray, to Emma’s children: Gifted athlete Hunter is traumatized by his final encounter with his dad, and artistic Kelsey longs to escape a school she doesn’t fit into and harbors her own guilt over her father’s last day. Though we don’t get her perspective, Lizzie’s youngest daughter, Willow, a proud outsider and gifted magician with a penchant for taking what doesn’t belong to her, shines as well.
Wish You Were Gone has a fascinating mystery at its center, but it’s ultimately a character-driven story featuring real people with real problems.
Wish You Were Gone has a fascinating mystery at its center, but it’s ultimately a character-driven story featuring real people with real problems.
Lena Gereghty had a rough go of it in medical school, where burnout and mounting debt drained her motivation. When her Aunt Clare, a renowned specialist in medieval botany, offered her an internship in Italy, Lena pounced on the chance to escape and heal. For two glorious years she felt purpose, joy and even a flickering of renewed passion for medicine.
Alas, those halcyon days suffer an abrupt end at the beginning of debut author Kit Mayquist’s Tripping Arcadia when floundering family finances draw Lena back to Boston. Her father was injured at and fired from work, and her parents desperately need her help. She’s primed to take the first position offered, despite a parade’s worth of red flags at the weirdest job interview ever—assistant to Dr. Prosenko, family physician for the powerful Verdeau family..
Lena soon realizes the Verdeau family secrets go far beyond rich people-eccentric into the realm of downright depraved. While she’s ostensibly meant to help the doctor tend to Jonathan, heir to patriarch Martin’s massive fortune, Lena is soon on duty for debauched parties at the family’s Berkshires mansion. The outfits are stunning, the food plentiful, the drugs slipped into attendees’ drinks so liberally that there’s a room just for treating overdoses.
Lena struggles with culture shock heavily tinged with disgust and frustration: Martin is often cruel yet never challenged; Jonathan is quite ill yet drinks heavily; and his sister, Audrey, is magnetically appealing yet aloof. But Lena’s well paid so she goes along, despite becoming increasingly horrified at what she learns about the Verdeaus.
As Lena plots poisonous revenge (who says internships aren’t useful?), Mayquist embraces the gothic genre with delicious glee, peeling back a shimmery overlay of glamour to expose the rot beneath. With Tripping Arcadia, he has crafted a tale that thrums with eat-the-rich vibes and the exhilarating prospect of a have-not prevailing over the have-everythings. Its reckoning with the state of work in a capitalist society will energize readers, and they’ll be rooting for the flawed yet captivating Lena through every creative twist and dark detail.
Kit Mayquist’s debut is a gothic thriller that thrums with eat-the-rich vibes and the exhilarating prospect of a have-not prevailing over the have-everythings.
ome books scream blockbuster movie, and Ridley Pearson’s latest is just such a screamer. The author of 17 novels may not be as the jacket copy claims “the best thriller writer on the planet,” but if he isn’t, he’s got whoever is in first place looking over his shoulder.
In Parallel Lies, Pearson uses a classic hunter/hunted plot. The hunter is Peter Tyler, a disgraced former homicide cop trying to make a new life for himself by tracking down a railroad hobo who may be a serial killer. The hunted is former high school teacher Umberto Alvarez, who at first appears to be only a crazed railroad saboteur.
As the paths of the hunter and the hunted begin to cross, it becomes clear that Alvarez is more than just a revenge-obsessed lunatic out to destroy the railroad company he blames for the death of his wife and two children. Tyler comes oh-so-close to catching Alvarez early in the action, only to lose him. But Tyler stays close as the two play a cat and mouse game in which the object for both men is to find and expose the truth.
As in the best of such stories think of the movie version of The Fugitive the hunter begins to empathize with the hunted. Readers, too, will be torn by conflicting loyalties as they watch two likeable and honorable men approaching what seems to be a deadly confrontation.
The culmination of the plot brings the two men together on what may be a doomed supertrain. Will either of the two men survive? What is the secret that may have led to the death of Alvarez’s wife and children? What truly rivets the reader is that there is no way to accurately predict which twists and turns Pearson’s plot may take, or even who will survive the climax.
This is a “big bucket of popcorn” novel. It has building tension, likeable characters, a believable love story between Tyler and a female railroad security officer, resourceful bad guys, an absorbing behind-the-scenes exploration of the modern railroad industry and a truly explosive climax. Get a jump on your fellow moviegoers and read this thriller before it hits the big screen.
William Marden is a freelance writer who lives and works in Orange Park, Florida.
ome books scream blockbuster movie, and Ridley Pearson’s latest is just such a screamer. The author of 17 novels may not be as the jacket copy claims “the best thriller writer on the planet,” but if he isn’t, he’s got whoever is in first place looking over his shoulder. In Parallel Lies, Pearson uses a […]
tructured around four fatal falls, Icarus is a gripping new thriller from the writing team that turned out the 1999 hit, Gideon. With the flair of a Hitchcock tribute, its suspense grabs from the start, cranking up the tension as the action moves relentlessly forward.
Russell Andrews is actually a pen name for the duo of writer/editor Peter Andrew Gethers (author of The Cat Who Went to Paris and several other books) and mystery novelist David Russell Handler (who wrote the Stewart Hoag mysteries). Their styles blend to create an entertaining novel in which not everything is as it seems.
When a madman flings young Jack Keller’s mother to her death from a high-rise window, the event triggers Jack’s lifelong acrophobia. He works his way through college and meets Caroline, a young woman from a wealthy Southern family. They combine their skills to open Jack’s, a restaurant that launches an international chain of upscale steak joints.
Meanwhile, unable to have children of their own, Jack and Caroline take in Kid, a friend’s orphaned teenage son.
When Kid disappears near the end of his successful college football career, Jack and Caroline are heartbroken and retreat into their lucrative business.
Then, during the opening of a Charlottesville Jack’s, tragedy strikes in the form of a botched robbery attempt. Jack is nearly paralyzed in a fall, needing more than a year to recover from his injuries. Kid reappears just as mysteriously as he left, returning as a physical therapist with a Midas touch. During his workouts with Jack, Kid reveals coded details of the Team, the dozen or so sexy women he’s dating simultaneously, each referred to by a telling nickname: the Rookie, the Entertainer, the Destination, the Mortician and the Mistake. When a third fatal fall occurs, Jack is plunged knee-deep into trouble, convinced that one of Kid’s women is a murderer.
The plot careens in directions unexpected enough to throw off most readers (and we’ve intentionally concealed some of the more bizarre plot twists to save the surprise). If you like your vacation reading fast-paced and harrowing, Icarus will take you to new heights.
Bill Gagliani is the author of Shadowplays, an e-book collection of dark fiction.
tructured around four fatal falls, Icarus is a gripping new thriller from the writing team that turned out the 1999 hit, Gideon. With the flair of a Hitchcock tribute, its suspense grabs from the start, cranking up the tension as the action moves relentlessly forward. Russell Andrews is actually a pen name for the duo […]
I have been a fan of C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett mysteries since the outset of the series. The 22nd offering, Shadows Reel, narrows in on Pickett’s pal, outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski, as he hunts down the thieves who killed some of his prized raptors and stole the rest of them. Romanowski is a sidekick in the mold of Spenser’s Hawk or Elvis Cole’s Joe Pike: hardboiled, loyal to a fault and probably tougher than the nominal hero of the tale. That said, Romanowski’s quarry is easily as well trained as he, and younger and stronger to boot, which is a potentially lethal combination for the aging warrior. Meanwhile, a Nazi relic creates quite a buzz in the town of Saddlestring, Wyoming—especially after its owner, a crusty old fishing guide, gets murdered most gruesomely. It will not be the last relic-related murder, as the killer has instructions to let nothing stand in his way, and he takes these instructions very literally. A recurring theme in these books is Pickett’s struggle with his deep-seated “cowboy code” morality, which is juxtaposed against the often frustrating legalities of the situations he comes up against. This time out, that conflict will give Pickett’s conscience a world-class workout.
★ The Harbor
Katrine Engberg’s third mystery featuring Copenhagen cops Anette Werner and Jeppe Kørner perfectly balances a mysterious disappearance with the no less intriguing domestic concerns of its two investigators. At the start of The Harbor, Oscar Dreyer-Hoff, the teenage son of a wealthy family, has gone missing, perhaps kidnapped, and clues are thin on the ground. The family boat is missing, and Oscar’s backpack has turned up near the vessel’s harbor mooring. His girlfriend says she has no idea where he is and in general acts very unconcerned about the whole thing. Some time back, scandal rocked the Dreyer-Hoff family, triggering some threatening letters that must be reconsidered in light of Oscar’s disappearance. In the background, home life in the Werner and Kørner households has become less than optimal. Anette is considering an affair with a person of interest in the case, and Jeppe struggles to balance the demands of work and his new lover, whose children are none too happy about their mom’s beau. Engberg is a must read for fans of Nordic noir, and two more books starring Anette and Jeppe will soon be translated into English.
★ Girl in Ice
Erica Ferencik’s Girl in Ice is an excellent, thrilling mystery set against a quasi-science fiction backdrop.Linguist Valerie “Val” Chesterfield has accepted an unusual assignment: She’s traveling to Greenland to meet a girl rescued from an ice field who initially appeared to have frozen to death but has somehow survived. The girl speaks no known language, and Chesterfield is one of only a few scholars with sufficient knowledge of archaic Northern European languages to try and communicate with her. But there is a more pressing connection for Val: Her twin brother, Andy, died at the same Arctic outpost not so long ago, and try as she might, she cannot make any sense of his death. The novel veers into speculative territory as Wyatt, the team leader, begins to entertain the idea that the girl is not a recent freezing victim but rather is from another epoch entirely, having been cryogenically preserved using technology lost to the ages. With its fascinating science and compelling characters (one or more of whom may be a murderer), Girl in Ice demands to be read in one sitting.
★ The Berlin Exchange
It’s rare for an espionage novel’s protagonist to be a traitor, but author Joseph Kanon quite successfully breaks that unwritten rule in his 10th novel, The Berlin Exchange. As a physicist on the controversial Manhattan Project, the U.S. military program that introduced the world to atomic warfare, Martin Keller was privy to top-secret design and implementation information. Motivated by dubious idealism, Keller shared some intelligence with the opposing team and received a lengthy sentence when his subterfuge was found out. Fast forward to 1963: A prisoner exchange has been arranged, and Keller finds himself set free in East Berlin. It is a freedom that is fraught with terror from the get-go. As he passes the checkpoint, he narrowly escapes being killed by a sniper, and it will take all the resources at his disposal to stay one step ahead of whoever is trying to kill him in this chilly, elegant and consistently excellent espionage thriller.
It’s a great month for mysteries: All four of the books in our Whodunit column received a starred review!
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
