As we head into the holiday season, Daisy Darker reminds us that some families should forgo the traditional reunions. In fact, some families should never have been formed at all. The Darkers have not gathered at Seaglass, their mansion by the Cornish coast, for ages, but this is a milestone year – Nana is turning…
Stay Awake is as flat as a wooden board when it comes to style and presentation. It does effectively evoke sympathy for its hapless heroine, but its monomaniacal plot and dry storytelling do it a disservice. Liv Reese is in the middle of a nightmare. Waking up abruptly in the back of a taxi, she…
The Heights is a tall, slender apartment building among warehouses in London. Its roof terrace is so discreet, you wouldn’t know it existed if you weren’t standing at the window of the flat directly opposite. But you are. And that’s when you see a man up there—a man you’d recognize anywhere. He may be older…
The Overnight Guest is an unexpected, twisty delight divided by multiple narrators and multiple PoVs that still manages to work. It’s gruesome and involving and horrifying and wonderfully intriguing. Wylie Lark doesn’t expect to become the central figure in a real-life mystery when she locks herself away in a remote house in Burden, Iowa to…
All I Want opens with a wild moment of horror as a heavily pregnant woman disturbs the local community talent show with her screaming, right in the middle of a woman’s performance of Wouldn’t it Be Lurvely? from My Fair Lady. That scream carries throughout the book, but it never manages to be quite as…
We’ve all played the game but few of us have used as high stakes as are utilized in Alice Feeney’s new domestic thriller Rock Paper Scissors. Told in alternating points of view, this locked room mystery will keep you guessing to the very end. Amelia and Adam Wright are all wrong for each other. They…
The Collective walks a fine line between its genuinely creepy plot and the credulity of its characters. It’s chilling and mostly avoids predictability, but a last-minute plot twist and the heroine’s inability to do a bit of deep thinking before trying to figure out how the proverbial sausage is made makes the ending a strained…
The Push treads territory that’s familiar and ancient in the thriller market. Are some of us born evil?, it asks. Are some kids made to murder? Does the stain of generational trauma doom us all to failure? Depending on your point of view – and how much you like movies like The Bad Seed and…
Taylor Adams’ 2020 release No Exit was easily one of my favorite thrillers of last year, so when I found out he had a new book release for 2021, I jumped at the chance to review it. Hairpin Bridge has the same mesmerizing mix of non-stop action and high stakes drama that No Exit had…
We have a lot of sayings about time – life can turn on a dime, life can change in an instant, time heals all wounds, time flies – which all point to the fact that time plays an important role in the human experience. In Survive the Night a young film student learns that six…
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