Mysteries have always had their share of older protagonists, but Too Old for This introduces us to a unique – and deadly – variant of the irascible elder. The knock on her door is completely unexpected. Lottie Jones doesn’t have visitors. She plays bingo on Thursday nights and goes to church on Sunday morning. She…
The best thing about Black Sheep is that it is funny. Mordantly so, knowingly so, and that’s part of what makes it so great. It’s also genuinely suspenseful, but it’s the way that it makes you care about its cranky heroine that makes it interesting. Twenty-three year old Vesper Wright escaped her bizarre family years…
North of Nowhere is a taut thriller that peters out in its last quarter but remains tense enough to earn a recommendation. Its characters are compelling and its action intriguing enough to keep the audience enthralled. Sixteen-year-old Kristin and ten-year-old Ryan McIntire-Reed have been hiding from their brutal crime family – headed by their father,…
Killers of a Certain Age is a hilarious romp through the adventures of menopausal hitwomen, but while I loved the action the book fell a bit short on depth. Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie are an all-female hit squad for the Museum, and have worked together for the past forty years. The Museum is…
Last fall, trapped at home and dreaming of flying far away—anywhere!—I picked up Hostage. I thoroughly enjoyed Mackintosh’s previous books, especially her first two, and was hopeful this too would be diverting. Two days later, having alienated everyone I encountered—I did not want to be disturbed about anything that wasn’t definitively urgent—I put down this…
Mysteries set in small Southern towns specialize in stripping away the idyllic image of sunshine-laden streets filled with scenes of saccharine sweetness, and showing the dark, eerie underbelly of betrayal and murder that lie beneath. We Are All the Same in the Dark is an excellent example of this sub-genre. One night changed their lives….
Chris Bohjalian explores the delicate nature of human survival in his latest novel The Red Lotus. A tale of antibiotic resistant contagions, epidemics and the horrors of biological weapons, this book will have you cheering exterminators as the greatest heroes of our time. They work in the same building but it takes a shooting for…
Completely addictive, riveting, and engaging, The Sun Down Motel is the latest supernatural thriller from Simone St. James. A dual timeline tale of two women thirty-five years apart looking for answers to a series of disappearances, it contains the eerie, haunted tone I expect from this author’s work together with an excellent, engrossing mystery which…
I love books about secret societies, so I was beyond excited to get my hands on a copy of Katie Lowe’s début novel The Furies. It takes place at an elite New England boarding school, and chronicles one girl’s quest to be accepted by the other students. Unfortunately, the execution of the story did not…
Every Stolen Breath is a tense, taut thriller about life, death and justice. Inspired by the Flash Mob violence in Chicago in 2011, this eerie whodunit examines just how far we’ll go in memory of the ones we love. She’s the least likely sleuth in the world. Suffering from both debilitating asthma and PTSD from…
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