The Uninvited

April 22, 2013 Leave a Comment

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Title: The Uninvited

Author: Liz Jensen. She is the author of several novels, including War Crimes for the Home, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Genre: Thriller, Mystery

Readers: Lawyer Cait, stay at home mom Colleen B., event planner Kathy,  copy editor Lori and victim advocate MJ.

Summary: A seven-year-old girl puts a nail gun to her grandmother’s neck and fires. An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong. Across the world, children are killing their families. Is violence contagious? As chilling murders by children grip the country, anthropologist Hesketh Lock has his own mystery to solve: a bizarre scandal in the Taiwan timber industry.

Hesketh has never been good at relationships: Asperger’s Syndrome has seen to that. But he does have a talent for spotting behavioral patterns and an outsider’s fascination with group dynamics. Nothing obvious connects Hesketh’s Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behavior of his beloved stepson, Freddy. But when Hesketh’s Taiwan contact dies shockingly and more acts of sabotage and child violence sweep the globe, he is forced to acknowledge possibilities that defy the rational principles on which he has staked his life, his career, and, most devastatingly of all, his role as a father. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Mystery, Thriller, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

The Engagement

March 4, 2013 Leave a Comment

Title: The Engagement

Author: Chloe Hooper. Author of one previous novel,  A Child’s Book of True Crime,  which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and a work of crime nonfiction, The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island. She lives in Australia.

Genre: Thriller, Literary Fiction

Readers: Accountant Gina aka Slappy, lawyer Cait, stay at home mom A Military Mommy and policy wonk BakingSuit.

Summary: Liese Campbell has an engagement for the weekend: to stay with Alexander Colquhoun, the handsome, well-mannered heir of an Australian pastoral dynasty, at his country seat some hours from Melbourne. Liese is English. She’s come to Australia to work at her uncle’s real-estate business and pay off her debts. Alexander has been looking for a place in the city. The luxury apartments Liese shows him have become sets for a relationship that satisfies their fantasies—and her financial problems. Both players understand the rules. Or so she thinks.

Across the ancient landscape they drive at dusk to his grand decaying mansion. Here Liese senses a change in Alexander and realizes that a different game has begun.

Chloe Hooper’s riveting and provocative new novel is a psychological thriller for the modern age, an exploration of the snares of money and love and the dark side of erotic imagination. A trap has been set, but how and why? And for whom?

Read If You Enjoy: Books that throw you off kilter, erotic fiction that isn’t Erotica.

Don’t Read If You Dislike: Books with a cold tone, books that keep you at an emotional distance.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Literary Fiction, Thriller, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

The Burn Palace

February 11, 2013 1 Comment

Title: The Burn Palace

Author: Stephen Dobyns, author of several previous psychological mysteries, including The Church of Dead Girls.

Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Horror, Literary Fiction

Readers: Retiree Nancy, stay-at-home mom Krysta, and teachers madriscoll and Ninian.

Summary: At two-thirty in the morning at the local hospital in the small town of Brewster, Rhode Island, Alice Alessio — also known as Nurse Spandex — is given the surprise of her life. Coming back from a secret tryst with a doctor, she peeks in to check on the newborn baby she was supposed to be watching, and finds a huge, writhing red-and-yellow snake in the bassinet instead. So begins the series of strange and disturbing events that start to plague this sleepy little community and confound the police. Woody Potter, the detective on the case, simply can’t put it all together — what is the thread that ties a missing baby, a dead insurance investigator, and a local Wiccan sect together? Why do all roads seem to lead to the town yoga center (known to all as the You-You)? And what exactly is going on with Carl Krause, the local man who works at the funeral home, who has taken to growling at his neighbors?

An epic, twisted portrait of small-town America, The Burn Palace captivates with dozens of richly rendered multidimensional characters and a plot that keeps you guessing all the way to the end. It is the literary equivalent of Richard Russo crossed with Stephen King.

Should You Read It?: Our readers all enjoyed this thrill ride filled with eerie atmosphere. But as Krysta notes, this may not be for the faint of heart. A fun read for literature lovers who don’t normally read genre fiction. A strong choice for genre-lovers, too.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Horror, Literary Fiction, Mystery, Thriller Tagged With: , , ,

Accelerated

November 19, 2012 Leave a Comment

Book: Accelerated

Author: Bronwen Hruska. She spent years as a journalist and is now the publisher at Soho Press. This is her first novel.

Genre: Thiller, Commercial Fiction

Reviewers: Editor Kristina, teacher madriscoll, higher ed administrator Renee and stay-at-home moms Krysta and Sarah L.

Publisher Summary:

Every afternoon Sean Benning picks up his son, Toby, on the marble steps that lead into the prestigious Bradley School. Everything at Bradley is accelerated: 3rd graders read at the 6th grade level, they have labs and facilities to rival most universities, and the chess champions are the bullies. A single dad and struggling artist, Sean sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the power-soccer-mom cliques and ladies-who-lunch that congregate on the steps every afternoon. But at least Toby is thriving and getting the best education money can buy. Or is he?

When Sean starts getting pressure from the school to put Toby on medication for ADD, something smells fishy, and it isn’t the caviar that was served at last week’s PTA meeting. Toby’s “issues” in school seem, to Sean, to be nothing more than normal behavior for an eight-year-old boy. But maybe Sean just isn’t seeing things clearly, which has been harder and harder to do since Toby’s new teacher, Jess, started at Bradley. And the school has Toby’s best interests at heart, right? But what happens when the pressure to not just keep up, but to exceed, takes hold? When things take a tragic turn, Sean realizes that the price of this accelerated life is higher than he could have ever imagined.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Commercial Fiction, Thriller Tagged With: , , , ,

Blood Line

November 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Book: Blood Line: An Anna Travis Novel

Author: Lynda LaPlante, author of the Prime Suspect novels

Genre: Mystery, Thriller

Reviewers:  Prosecutor Rochelle, editor Kristina, project manager Andrea, day care teacher EMarie and attorney Elizabeth H.

Publisher Summary:

Still reeling from the death of her fiancé, Detective Anna Travis has thrown herself into her new role as the chief inspector for London’s murder squad. When Scotland Yard’s missing persons bureau is unable to locate the son of a court employee, the superintendent—James Langton, Anna’s former lover turned sometimes friend—urges her to take on the suspicious assignment.

But is this new investigation purely a missing persons case—or a full-blown murder inquiry? An ominous pool of blood with no locatable victim leads Anna on a desperate hunt for a man who has disappeared without a trace. With no body, and increasing pressure to make an arrest, Anna becomes obsessed with the smallest details of the case. Now, one man has vanished, a killer may be loose on the streets, and, as Langton looks on, Anna Travis may be losing control of the investigation—and of herself.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Mystery, Thriller Tagged With: , , , ,
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