Tag: thriller

Book review: Day One by Abigail Dean

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Day One by Abigail Dean is a story about the fallout from a shooting that takes place during the school play at Stonesmere primary located in a small coastal English town. Ava Ward was a teacher at Stonesmere for many years and while her class are performing, a helmeted man with a rifle started firing from the back of the room. Ava died trying to protect the pupils. Marty, Ava’s daughter, who says she was there on the day of the shooting is one of the point of view characters.

More red flags than a matador convention.

In the months following the incident conspiracy theories start to swirl. Trent Casey who knew the shooter and lived briefly in Stonesmere is involved in promoting the conspiracy theories. Trent is also a point of view character.

My memories trembled. I reassembled the room, just as it should have been. Gathered the children back to the stage. Put the chairs back in place. Dried the floor. Tucked phones back into pockets, handbags, palms. There I was, in the heart of the audience, with my mother’s hand in mine.

Both Marty and Trent are unreliable narrators, but gradually the truth about what occurred leading up to the shooting emerges and what really happened on that fateful day at the school unfolds. 

They had both been children, and when you were a child it was easy to mistake almost anything for love.

Day One contains multiple points of view, split narratives and non-linear timelines that keep the reader guessing as the truth unfurls through pared back prose. A tense, gripping, tragic mystery brimming with secrets and miscommunications. It’s an engaging ready, but not a story for sensitive souls. 

Book Review: The Hitwoman’s Guide To Reducing Household Debt by Mark Mupotsa-Russell

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The Hitwoman’s Guide To Reducing Household Debt by Mark Mupotsa-Russell is a dark, funny, violent and original suspense thriller. 

After leaving the defence forces, Olivia Hodges became a hit woman for hire in Spain, working for a ruthless syndicate. She fled that life to save her own and returned to Australia where she took up an ordinary suburban existence with a husband and two daughters in the leafy eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

I think I’m missing a piece inside. Something crucially human. I’m not sure when I lost it – Spain probably – but I can feel the hole it left behind, like a pulled tooth.

When a group of young men turned bank robbers accidentally kill one of her children while fleeing the scene of a crime, Olivia wants revenge. Her challenge is that she thinks the incident is karmic revenge for her own past crimes. She needs to get payback without accruing any further karmic debt that could put her remaining family members at risk.

I was never the movie ideal of a hitwoman. My kills were uncinematic. No poisoned darts at the opera, single-handedly defeating the Yakuza or honey-potting the Russian ambassador. I speak one and a half languages, at best, and the highest political contract I ever got was president of the local bocce club.

Olivia goes to great lengths to set up situations where the men she is after get themselves killed. At the same time she is trying to mislead the police to give herself time to wreak revenge before they solve the crime of her daughters death.

In my experience every cult starts with Let’s build utopia! And Speak directly to God! But pretty soon it’s Did we mention enlightenment can only be inhaled from the Supreme Leader’s penis?

The Hitwoman’s Guide To Reducing Household Debt is a wild ride of action interspersed with suburban tragedy and plenty of tension. It’s also about personal morality, families and grief.

Book review: Seven Sisters by Katherine Kovacic

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Beware the vengeful sisters! Katherine Kovacic’s novel Seven Sisters is a crime thriller about women who take the law into their own hands, doing what some fantasise about, but few act on.

Naomi is referred to a support group by her therapist to help her with her grief after the murder of her sister. She joins six other women at the Pleiades, and despite thinking they couldn’t possibly have anything in common, she bonds with them over their shared trauma and rage.

In Seven Sisters misogyny becomes misandry when the women of the therapeutic support group on Sydney’s northern beaches make a plan with their therapist to take the law into their own hands and dish out some karma.

These men don’t change. The police try – well some of them do – but again and again the system lets the women down. Someone has to take care of the problem. Why not us?’

Meanwhile, Detective Fiona Ulbrick, a seasoned on-the-ball cop with an interest in domestic violence cases gets suspicious when perps she has cases on start turning up dead.

It is a conflicting tale to read about a group of delusional women traumatised by domestic abuse and the failure of the justice system to apply appropriate punishment. If you like fast paced revenge thrillers, this vigilante story is for you. The ending will leave you wondering.

Book review: Thorn In My Side by C.J. Skuse

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I did that thing I wouldn’t normally do…I dove right into the middle of a series. I have never ready C.J. Skuse before, but found their darkly humorous thriller, Thorn In My Side, uncomfortably hilarious and enthralling. And best of all, it didn’t matter that I have not read the first three books.

Rhiannon Lewis is a serial killer trying to live a quiet life. She had to change her identity (now known as Ophelia) and move to San Diego to escape the law in England. She left her daughter behind in England and has one clandestine phone call per month with her sister for updates on her daughters wellbeing.

The old Penny D has been a boon for a serial killer in hiding. Stay-at-home orders. Forced distancing. No meaningless conversations on dog walks. Face masks. Little did I know when I had facial reconstruction surgery that I’d pen the next year and a half behind a fucking mask but there you go.

Ophelia lives with her South American fiancee Raf who has a talent for taming her fiery temper, and she hasn’t killed anyone for more than 800 days (yes, she’s counting). Everyday she still thinks about killing and writes a list of the type of people she would target.

Her restraint eventually fails when her soon-to-be sister in-law calls her for help with her abusive ex. Before long she finds herself with more bodies on her hands, but after all, like Dexter, she only kills bad people. Meanwhile, Rhiannon struggles with the fact that her man, who she adores, and his family do not truly know her (not even her real name) and she want’s to be seen. But how do you tell your sweetheart that you are a serial killer?

One old fart’s petunias won’t grow, he digs a bit too deep to check for tree roots and hits a femur. And suddenly my name is everywhere again. There are debates about me on morning TV. Sales of Rhiannon T-shirts spike again. Overly woke TikTokkers with no discernible qualifications perform monologues telling ‘the kids’ not to obsess about murderers and to always choose kindness.

The story ends on a cliffhanger…

I enjoyed reading a thriller told from the point of view of a villain who manages to make the reader sympathetic to such incredibly anti-social behaviour, to the point where you can see the value in the service she is providing…bwahaha!

Book review: Unforgiven by Sarah Barrie

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Going dark this week. Unforgiven is about a child victim turned vigilante and is not for the faint hearted, but if you enjoy gritty thrillers, this could be for you.

Lexi works part time as an escort, and part time as a hacker pursuing and trapping paedophiles she finds on the dark web to help her sister Bailee who works in child protection. Lexi is tough, street wise and drinks a lot of whiskey.

Things take an unexpected turn when Lexi, after breaking into his house, witnesses the murder of a man she has been tracking. She then agrees to help the guys wife (neither of them did it) dispose of his body, so they don’t get blamed.

On the edge of oblivion, images drift through the fog of my mind and hold, refusing to let go. Last night. The very dreamy Jonathan Davies of the chiselled features, stunning baby blues and long, dark lashes. A tall, muscular powerhouse, precision toned and sculpted to be appreciated. So commanding, so sure of himself. The images form into a memory and I groan in resignation.

‘Shit’. I have to get up. His body is still in the boot.

Detective Rachael Langley knew Lexi from her childhood. Langley was responsible for putting Lexis abuser, the Spider, behind bars. The two women cross paths again when someone claiming to be the real Spider emerges, and the pressure is on to catch him.

There are some great characters in this novel, I particularly liked Dawny, Lexis older neighbour who has a shady past, but a good heart. The two become firm friends over a deep freezer.

Unforgiven is a tightly plotted, fast paced, thriller set on the NSW Central Coast. The narrative alternates between Lexi and Rachael’s points of view, and whilst it isn’t an easy read due to the content matter – Barrie covers some confronting topics – there is not gratuitous violence or gory detail.

Review: The Complete Ripley Radio Mysteries by Patricia Highsmith

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A couple of weeks ago I went to see the documentary Loving Highsmith about American author Patricia Highsmith. The content for the doco was drawn from her unpublished diaries and notebooks, and the personal accounts of her lovers, friends and family.

But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative.

Strangers on a Train

Highsmith was best known for her psychological thrillers (Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley) and for being part of the Modernist movement. Most of her novels were adapted to the big screen, notably with little need to be changed for the screen.

The partly autobiographical The Price of Salt written in the 1950s and published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan was also adapted for film in 2015 as Carol. Due to the social morals of the time, Highsmith led a double life, hiding her love affairs with women from the public and her family, but reflecting on them in her personal writings. Carol was the first lesbian story with a happy ending published in the USA.

Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh.

Carol

The documentary was fascinating and led me to seek out the audio series, Ripley Radio Mysteries that dramatises her five Ripley novels. The character of Ripley was inspired by a man Highsmith saw from a hotel room in Italy after she moved to Europe. Ripley is not a nice man, though he only kills when absolutely necessary (I mean who doesn’t?). Highsmith wrote him empathetically so as a reader I both liked and loathed him – it’s creepy.

He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence.

The Talented Mr Ripley

Protagonist Tom Ripley is materialistic, though not in the usual way. He has an unstable sense of identity and possessions give him a feeling of safety and stability. It is this that leads him to his first kill. He befriended Dickie but felt uncertain about their relationship and killing reduced his friend to a collection of possession of clothes, rings and cash – much more predictable.

The series is tense, atmospheric and twisted. Perfect for a thriller!

Book review: The Beresford by Will Carver

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Leave your comfort zone. Will Carver has a dark imagination in which creepy thrills and body counts are dialled to the max. The Beresford is a standalone thriller published in 2021. Bizarre, gripping and grotesque but drawn in smooth prose that will keep both the pages and your stomach turning.

The Beresford was old. It was grand. It evolved with the people who inhabited its rooms and apartments. It was dark and elephantine and it breathed with its people. Paint peeled and there were cracks in places. It was bricks and mortar and plaster and wood. And it was alive.

The ageless Mrs May runs a boarding house in a grand old building. She rarely leaves the premises. The rooms are large and the rent cheap and there are a steady stream of inhabitants. Mrs May passes her days drinking cold black coffee and wine, tending her garden and doing her prayers.

What is that one thing you would give up your soul for?

Tenants come with dreams of a new life, then go, sometimes at an alarming rate, and usually in pieces. Sixty seconds after one dies, a new tenant arrives, and so the cycle continues, a bit like Groundhog Day with gore.

The Beresford was a halfway house for the disenchanted and disenfranchised, whose focus was to become. To be. To discover and make their impact. The inhabitants were not necessarily the outsiders, but were certainly the ones found on the periphery. The wallflowers at society’s ball. They were outside. They floated on the periphery.

Dark and twisted with black humour and skilled plotting drawn in short snappy chapters. The story is intermingled with Carver’s existential ruminations about life, death, humanity, religion, and more that send the reader off on introspective reflections on 21st century life.

We all go a little mad sometimes.

As with Carver’s other novels I have reviewed on this blog – Good Samaritans, Nothing Important Happened Here Today and Hinton Hollow Death Trip, The Beresford will enthralled and disgust you, it will also make you think.

Book Review: The Hideout by Camilla Grebe

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The Hideout by Swedish noir and crime fiction writer Camilla Grebe is an intense, twisted and gripping story about crime, religion, parenting and death.

Manfred Olson young daughter is in a coma after a fall. When he is called in to investigate the death of a young man whose body washes up on a beach, his attention is divided between his job and wanting to be at his daughters bedside. When a second body is found wrapped in sheets and chains, his search intensifies.

It’s only afterwards that all the trivialities of a life grow, develop teeth and chase you through the night.

Eighteen year old Samual has to leave town in a hurry after getting caught up with a brutal drug ring when a deal goes wrong. He runs to a sleepy coastal town and finds a job working for Rachel as a live in care assistant to her disabled son Jonas. As Samual’s attraction for Rachel grows, his safety becomes more precarious.

It took me exactly ten days to fuck up my life.

This Scandanavian thriller is slow moving and atmospheric. The two separate plot lines of Manfred and Samual gradually converge with lots of red herrings to keep the reader on their toes and make you squirm.

Book Review: Dark Light By Jodi Taylor

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This is one weird book – I mean that in a good way. Elizabeth Cage is a mostly ordinary widowed housewife who likes a quiet life. Her primary problem is that she can see colours, which means she can read others emotions by the colour aura that swirls around them. We discover through her backstory that her special power is of interest to a man who had her locked up in an asylum so he could study and exploit her, until another inmate helped her escape.

Dark Light opens with Elizabeth running away and trying to cover her tracks by jumping random buses, then disembarking only to do it again on another bus until she decides to stop in the town of Greyston out of pure exhaustion from being on the move all the time. That’s when things really start to get wacky. Greyston is a small English village of women with a medieval tradition that involves kidnapping a man to be king for a year, getting him to impregnate the towns women then sacrificing him to the stone gods on New Year’s Eve. Elizabeth is recused from almost becoming one of the towns women by the man she was running away from.

It soon becomes evident Elizabeth has other special powers as she slips between the cracks of this world and other bizarre, chaotic, parallel universes inhabited by creatures from your childhood nightmares. In these other spheres bad things happen, dramatic rescues take place and Elizabeth is subjected to all kinds of quirky twists and turns, all the while wishing she could just sit quietly at home in a warm bath with a cup of tea.

All the way through this supernatural thriller, I was surprised at how it drew me in. When I had to put it down to go and attend to my ordinary life, I couldn’t wait to get back between it’s strangely engrossing pages. I have never read any of Jodi Taylor’s writing before and it wasn’t until I finished Dark Light that I realised it was the second book in a series – luckily it turned out that didn’t matter particularly, other than being disappointed I hadn’t started at the beginning with White Silence. I am certain I will be reading more of Taylor for another dose of peculiar, spooky fun in the future.