Suspense from Boston-Area Thriller Author Hank Phillippi Ryan, HER PERFECT LIFE

 

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“Ryan once again shows her flair for spinning, from a life similar to her own, a set of intense and spiraling threats, with more than one devilish intent behind the scenes, and only the narrowest chance for a safe resolution.”

A stand-alone from Hank Phillippi Ryan is a frank invitation into suspense, a thriller from the start. Her Perfect Life pushes this premise from the first page, with the unexplained and now long-ago disappearance of Cassie, beloved older sister to Lily Atwood, a TV news star.

Framing Lily as an investigative reporter is a clever wave from the author’s own career, where she has earned some 37 EMMY awards. But the novel twists the ambiance from the start, as Lily’s most intimate teammate is her producer Greer, and Greer’s first-person admissions of jealousy and manipulation set the tension ramping.

Greer’s not a serious threat to Lily as the book opens—her own career depends too intimately on feeding the star machine that makes Lily widely recognized and adored. (There’s a strong whiff of Martha Stewart here.) But Lily has isolated the disappearance of her sister, as a family secret not easily noticed. And when Greer gets a chance to take power and control through discovering Lily’s vulnerability, the fight’s on. Only Lily doesn’t realize it yet, and her seven-year-old daughter Rowen is likely to be the first one wounded in the battle.

The book twists rapidly among the characters, showcasing several points of view. Lily’s first clue of something wrong is when Greer appears to vanish, and a detective storms the production office, demanding answers: “Did she tell you where she was going? What her plans were for last night? Who she was with?”

Although Lily catches the flaws in the questions—“This guy was off, totally off. He didn’t act like a cop, even an incompetent cop”—she sets her own reservations aside and begins a cascade of poor decisions that put herself and her child at increasing risk.

And that’s the flaw of the story: If Lily’s smart, she’s performing entirely out of character. If she’s as naive and foolish as her choices suggest, then how can she transform within the space of a day or two, to make the save?

If you enjoy banging your head against the wall while protagonists create dreadful situations through folly, and trade good sense for high suspense, then Her Perfect Life will fit the bill. Ryan twists an intricate set of motives and actions, gives the reader a fair chance at guessing the true culprit(s), and keeps the pace dramatic and well weighted with consequences. Life in the public eye? Costs of social media? Exposure on Instagram? Ryan once again shows her flair for spinning, from a life similar to her own, a set of intense and spiraling threats, with more than one devilish intent behind the scenes, and only the narrowest chance for a safe resolution.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Chilling and Twisty: New Thriller from Erin Kelly, HE SAID/SHE SAID

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“The twists in what “love” means and how people create their own strange moral universes are classic Kelly, and reminiscent of Barbara Vine at her spookiest.”

 

Minotaur’s reprint of Erin Kelly’s 2018 thriller makes this British page-turner available on the American side of “the pond” and demonstrates once again that Kelly is a true master of psychological suspense and chilling twists. As the author has said of herself, “My job is to imagine a strange situation and ask the question that will make it stranger still.”

 

In 2015, the charming young couple Kit and Laura live in London, expecting twins. He’s still going to travel, in order to witness a solar eclipse, the theme of his life so far—but he’s planned it carefully and made sure Laura will have support and protection while he’s gone. It’s not just the somewhat risky twin pregnancy that worried him: More than 15 years ago, when the two met at a summertime eclipse festival, Laura had witnessed a crime, and the trauma still haunts them both. The victim, clearly terribly disturbed, has stalked and hunted them to such an extent that they now live as close to “off the grid” as urban people can manage: no social media, assumed names, and more.

 

But will the very frightening “Beth” be able to identify them, now that Laura’s photo has shown up briefly on a media site, and Kit is predictably headed to the eclipse event? She knows about his lifelong passion—will she track him down?

 

Kelly frames this thriller around the phases of a solar eclipse, mimicking in plot what the sun’s disappearance does: an edge of overlap, a sparkling ring allowed for a bit, then total darkness, and the slow journey back to normal. For Laura in particular, this involves recapitulating the trial in which she’d taken part, the crime itself, the levels of threat.

 

With his voice alternating to tell another side, Kit reveals how threatened he feels by upcoming fatherhood and being potentially eclipsed himself by the babies on the way. Kelly’s use of first-person narratives means the of 15 years earlier are presented repeatedly. Kit fingers a knife, contemplating how far he’d go to protect his wife: “Would I tell Laura? Could I tell Laura? Could she live with me? Even knowing I only acted for her, would she still love me?”

 

But there’s an alternate set of facts hidden in the shadows, and only the small question of self-doubt from Kelly’s characters will begin to reveal what’s been transformed by time and lies.

 

The twists in what “love” means and how people create their own strange moral universes are classic Kelly, and reminiscent of Barbara Vine at her spookiest. Strands of deceit creep out of the narratives like ectoplasm in a séance, curling into the air and bringing lies back to life. There are few innocents in He Said/She Said—other than those twins on the way. Good luck spotting the others, before the house of cards comes tumbling down in blood and manipulation.

 

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Remarkable New Alaskan Crime Fiction from John Straley, SO FAR AND GOOD

It's been far from ordinary all along -- that is, John Straley's Alaskan crime fiction series featuring Cecil Younger, a not-quite-lawyer who at this point has served four years so far in the Lemon Creek Correctional Center. That means he has roughly three more to go. And for a man who's worked in a form of law enforcement in the past, prison is a threatening environment. Even though he's there for murder.

Things could be worse. Cecil killed to protect his daughter, Blossom. Some prisoners sympathize. But a lot more are after him for various reasons, including money. He admits in his pencil-on-yellow-pad narrative, "Friend write me letters wanting to know how I survive in jail. I don't know why they don't come right out and ask me if I have come someone's bitch, which is what they both do and don't want to know."

With his next statement, "The fact is, I have become someone's bitch," Cecil's story breaks ways from conventional crime novel trails of the past, even of Straley's past (and he's never shied away from the depressing brutality of some Alaskan lives before this). Cecil's trying terribly hard to walk a line between "loving" a brutal gangster enough to get protected, and at the same time not getting raped.

Straley's a plain, direct storyteller who lays out both action and emotion without any fuss. So we get this from Cecil Younger, in his struggle to explain:

Until I came to prison, I enjoyed the privilege of being white and old. I'm almost sixty now, and I've been told by more-experienced convicts that I have "worried eyes" that make me an easy mark. I had been an investigator for the Public Defender Agency, which made me unpopular to a large portion of the population and a popular object of ridicule for some of the weakest minds inside the walls.

Remarkably, Fourth Street -- a drug dealer and pimp from the Lower 48 who's settled into the region, and now into the prison -- wants something that only Cecil seems likely to provide:

"I have a parole hearing coming up in twenty-four months. There are four white women sitting on the parole board. I want you to teach me how to speak respectfully to these bitches."

That leads into marvelous scenes of Cecil trying to teach both poetry and polite language to a very rough and powerful man. And trying to stay away from both Fourth Street's amorous hands, and Street's massive and emotional jealous lover. For a while, Cecil holds the tricky balance.

But it all collapses when his daughter's best friend, a girl nicknamed George, manages to get her own parents tagged as notorious kidnappers, Cecil's daughter Blossom plunges into both action and risk, and suddenly Cecil wants and needs more from Fourth Street. And it's going to cost him. Big.

The riotous mixture of misunderstandings, negotiations, escapes, and frankly amorous pressures and actions makes SO FAR AND GOOD a page-turner from the start. Moving this book onto the shelves of "classics" and "read this one again!" are the neatly nailed emotions and bargains struck throughout. Prepare to gasp in surprise, alternating with gasps of dismay and revelations of what love and kindness can make people do, versus those who've got neither. Oh yes, money matters, too.

No need to read Straley's other Cecil Younger Investigations before this one, as it's hands-down the best yet. But when the winter's getting under your skin and you want to remind yourself that it could be worse in, say, Alaska ... scoop up the other seven and have your own literary festival. No handguns allowed.

Just released by Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

When "True Crime" Goes Fictional: TRUE CRIME STORY from Joseph Knox

 

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“Knox knows how to spin a great thriller, and in True Crime Story he reveals a new way to entangle the threads while ramping up risk and even a touch of horror.”

This startling stand-alone from British thriller writer Joseph Knox cuts new ground in both crime fiction and literary craft. The current passion for “true crime” investigations, whether on television (abundant shows and re-runs) or in books, has honed new reader skills: an insistence that every clue and voice be examined from multiple viewpoints, and a tolerance for ambiguity, as long as some villain, somewhere, gets fingered along the way.

In a fascinating twist to a college disappearance story, Knox offers close to 400 pages of interviews, personal insights, investigation details, even witness assessments, on the case of Zoe Nolan, age 19, a student at the University of Manchester and resident in a tower of student housing with some very peculiar construction. It looks like everything was working right in her life—success as a music major, popular with other students, even finding a serious boyfriend during her first term on campus.

The only thing that didn’t go the way she wanted, it seems, is that her twin sister Kimberley, got housed with her and two other girls. The sisters had meant to go into college separately. That didn’t happen.

And slowly, one message at a time, one crazy clue at a time, the rest of the problems emerge in True Crime Story, with Knox playing a role inside the book, and another investigator, Evelyn Mitchell, luring Knox into the wicked and increasingly twisted revelations.

Viewpoints include that of “brown boy in Manchester” Jai Mahmood, who compares Zoe’s life to an “epic HBO crime drama” and insists that what people say about Zoe is more about themselves: “Everyone who looked at her saw something different. Some of them saw what they wanted to, some of them saw their worst nightmare.” He fingers her twin, Kim, as an angry rival. Knox’s construction puts Kim’s response on the same page: “I am defined by losing Zoe, absolutely. I just think it’s more accurate to say I was always defined by her, even before she went missing.”

The sense of experimental fiction can make reading this thriller a bit perilous, like a modern-day Canterbury Tales or Ulysses being laid onto the pages. But Knox is clever, and each time there’s a moment when you might want to put the book down, he has another cliff-hanger emerge, another denial of someone’s earlier stance or evidence, another peril.

In a creepy way, it begins to look as though Zoe actually deserved something wrong happening. Or else maybe her twin did, and they got confused? Hold that thought, because it will come back to bite you, as many details in this unexpected mystery will do. Jai Mahmood, bitter from his own losses, nails it again: “Maybe Kim would have always found a reason to back away from taking that big chance in life. … Maybe we all could have been somebody, but I doubt it.”

A kidnapping, more twin confusion, more threats—Knox knows how to spin a great thriller, and in True Crime Story he reveals a new way to entangle the threads while ramping up risk and even a touch of horror. For most readers, this won’t be fun or entertaining reading. But it will be compelling, even revelatory. And utterly memorable, as a brave new form of drama for the pages.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.  

New Cuban Mystery from Teresa Dovalpage, DEATH UNDER THE PERSEIDS

There's something very worrying about a free lunch: It could be provided with a dangerous ulterior motive. 

That's what Cuban-born Mercedes Spivey and her American professor husband ignore for far too long, when the couple receives a free pair of cruise tickets to the Spanish-speaking island that each one needs to revisit, for a different reason. Sweepstake winning? Accidental lottery reward? Who knows -- but the timing is so perfect that they don't question it, and jump onto a cruise boat, ready to enjoy the ride.

Within the first minutes on the cruise on the Narwhal, Mercedes spots someone from her own past ... and then perhaps a glimpse of a second person. It's a creepy coincidence, right? A chance to make things better with people she'd cut in the past? 

Teresa Dovalpage's previous Cuban mysteries are much sweeter than DEATH UNDER THE PERSEIDS, because this time we know right from the start — since Mercedes is sharing her viewpoint all along — that this "pretty woman" with her older husband has a lot to feel guilty about, and a lot left unresolved, as she's climbed her way, one affair at a time, to some sort of Floridian middle class. Soon it looks like she's surrounded by others with mixed motives. (Maybe the only truly nice person is her aging grandmother who still does the laundry by hand in the back yard of her Havana home.)

Mercedes begs us, as readers and witnesses, to believe there is one saint in her life: Lorenzo, whom she loved and left, and who then died in a fire. (Fire and blades and other threats abound!) Meanwhile, if she's the chief sinner here, are all the threats deserved? Does she still have the ability to dodge and weave, and come out ahead? Even as she disembarks in Havana, she's questioning her safety:

Two men approached the counter. One was a skinny, gray-bearded guy in a tie-dyed shirt who looked like a hippie—or at least my idea of what a hippie was. He went first. The other, who walked with a slight limp, carried a burgundy European Union passport. Our eyes met for a second, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I had seen him before. Maybe the other guy too. They both seemed sort of familiar. My throat closed and my heart pounded faster.

Dovalpage takes quite a risk herself, in presenting such an unpleasant protagonist, whose greed and self-centeredness are not really balanced by her endless chest-thumping guilt. Yet the net of threats and complications and the Cuban setting pull the story faster and faster, until it can't be set aside: The Perseids, the meteor shower that's taking place as revelations cascade, is that too somehow a message to Mercedes that her own crimes are known and she's about to lose at last?

DEATH UNDER THE PERSEIDS is much darker than Dovalpage's three earlier mysteries. Whether you collect it for the Cuban setting or for the ongoing suspense of how this maturing author will continue to develop, it's a must for the shelf. Kudos to Soho Crime (an imprint of Soho Press) for encouraging Dovalpage to move forward so fiercely.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.