Tag Archives: thriller

#BookReview ‘Pretty Baby’ by @MaryKubica #mystery #suspense

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Don’t be fooled by the cover photograph, this is not a thriller about trains. Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica is a psychological tale of parenting, grief, abuse, and husbands and wives who stop communicating and stop interacting. At times I had to take a gulp and accept some situations which seemed unrealistic to me, it was either that or put the book down. Mary KubicaHeidi and Chris live with their daughter Zoe in Chicago. One freezing wintery day, running for a train, Heidi spots a homeless girl with a baby. She hesitates, wondering whether to say something, and then the girl is gone. Wishing she had helped, Heidi looks out for the girl the next day… and takes her home. Zoe sees it as an invasion of her space, Chris worries about who the girl – Willow, with baby Ruby – really is, and whether she poses a threat to his family and property. Both are right to be worried.
At times I grew impatient with Heidi for indulging herself and impatient for Chris to show some intuition and see what was really going on. Unfortunately Chris is a bit of a stereotype, the hard-working banker husband who spends more time at work than home, fending off the glamorous co-worker. Zoe’s thoughts we do not hear. For me, Willow is the most interesting character and I would have liked to read more about her relationship with Matthew. Concentrating more on Willow’s story, rather than Heidi’s would make this a completely different book.
Unfairly, I think, the publisher compares Pretty Baby to Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins [in other words, to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, giants of their genre]. But they are page-turners whereas the pace of this story is slower, allowing the various threads to unfold. What kept me turning the page? What is Willow hiding? When will Chris or Zoe speak out? How far will Heidi go to help a stranger and why is she risking everything?
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Read my reviews of two other novels by Mary Kubica:-
DON’T YOU CRY
THE GOOD GIRL

If you like this, try novels:-
‘The Girl on the Train’ by Paula Hawkins
‘Gone Girl’ by Gillian Flynn
‘Stolen Child’ by Laura Elliot

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview PRETTY BABY by @MaryKubica via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1T5

#BookReview ‘The Farm’ by @tomrobsmith #thriller #mystery

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The Farm by Tom Rob Smith is the best thriller I’ve read this year, one of those ‘who do I believe?’ scenarios. It’s an ordinary day for Daniel until his mobile rings. It’s his father. “Your mother’s sick… She’s not well… She’s been imagining things.” His mother is in hospital, he says, she’s been committed. As Daniel prepares to fly to Sweden where his parents live, his father calls again; his mother is missing. Tom Rob SmithHis mobile rings again, it is his mother. She says his father is lying. Who to believe?
And so starts The Farm, a book which questions the parent/sibling relationship, lies told within the family, and how far a family can be stretched before it breaks. It is a story of a Swedish woman and her English husband retiring to a farm in rural Sweden, looking for a new start, an active retirement, anticipating being part of a close-knit community.
Tilde arrives in London and tells Daniel that his father is lying. She is not ill, she is in danger, she has discovered crimes, lies, irregularities. At all times she carries an old leather satchel which she says is full of evidence.
Who to believe?
Life on the farm is not as they hoped. Tilde says they have no money, the neighbours are brusque and cold, and the behaviour of her husband Chris has changed. Tilde becomes concerned for the adopted daughter of a neighbour, Håkan, a powerful man both physically and locally in the community, who becomes a new friend for Chris. Crimes have been committed, Tilde says. The community is keeping secrets, and she feels threatened. Her husband seems to be conspiring with Håkan. Tilde is afraid.
Chris tells Daniel that his mother has suffered a psychotic episode, that her behaviour has changed, that she may turn violent. That she is imagining things.
Daniel does not know who to believe. His reaction to his mother and father’s stories are coloured by the fact that he too has lied to them, by withholding from them the truth of his sexuality and his current relationship.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

If you like this, try:-
‘The Accident’ by Chris Pavone
‘Slow Horses’ by Mick Herron #1SloughHouse
‘I Refuse’ by Per Petterson

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE FARM by @tomrobsmith via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1IR

#BookReview ‘The Girls’ by @lisajewelluk #thriller

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It’s a long time since I read a Lisa Jewell novel. I loved her first, Ralph’s Party, which still sits on my bookshelf along with four of her other books. I gave up reading somewhere about Vince and Joy, turned off by the pink chick lit branding and feeling that I had grown-up beyond the subject matter. Lisa JewellThen I heard that The Girls was ‘something different,’ and it is. Satisfying dark, mysterious, unspoken danger lurks above the heads of the girls – Grace and Pip. The setting is outwardly comforting: a communal garden surrounded by houses and apartments, where residents mingle and have barbecues together, where children roam safe from roads and strangers. But are they safe? And what is the threat?
The two girls and their mother move to an empty apartment after the family home is burnt down by their father. He is now in psychiatric care, they lost all their belongings and walk cautiously into this cliquey community where everyone seems to know everyone else. Grace and Pip unknowingly trample onto secrets and the dynamics of teenage relationships, their mother Clare stumbles around the edge of tangled adult relationships, struggling to be there for her daughters while dealing with the betrayal of her husband. And at the centre of daily life is the garden, the hub of the wheel around which this community turns.
Then one hot summer’s day, Grace’s 13th birthday, it all comes to a head.
I finished this in two sittings, reading late into the night. A satisfying family thriller with hints of the truth and plenty of dodgy things to be suspicious about.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

And here are my review of two other thrillers by Lisa Jewell:-
I FOUND YOU
THEN SHE WAS GONE

If you like this, try:-
‘The Museum of Broken Promises’ by Elizabeth Buchan
‘Wolf Winter’’ by Cecilia Ekback
‘Five Days of Fog’ by Anna Freeman

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE GIRLS by @lisajewelluk via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Fm

#BookReview ‘The Bone Church’ by @vicdougherty #war #WW2

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The Bone Church was a difficult story to get into for me, which surprised me. The premise by Victoria Dougherty seems so good – Czechoslovakia, wartime, fugitive lovers, a faked religious icon, and a plot to assassinate Josef Goebbels – the promise of which kept me reading. But I found the time shifts, the point of view shifts, and the way the action changed from paragraph to paragraph quite confusing. Assuming this was a formatting issue with my Kindle copy, I kept reading. Victoria DoughertyThe story starts in Rome in 1956 in the Vatican City with a Cardinal and a man called Felix. Then we see Magdalena and her son Ales in Czechoslovakia, a man arrives and takes away her son. Then the action switched to 1943, as Felix and Magdalena are on the run in Prague. He is a famous hockey player, a celebrity, she is a Jew. By this point, the story should have gripped me but I’m afraid it didn’t, I hadn’t read enough about the two characters to care. I think my basic problem is the way the story was told, not the actual story itself; the writing is rich with description and the author certainly knows her history. Halfway through, things started to make a little more sense though at times the plot seemed unnecessarily complicated.
The best bit? An assassination scene, involving a birthday cake, a gun, and Josef Goebbels.

If you like this, try:-
‘Life After Life’ by Kate Atkinson
‘The Little Red Chairs’ by Edna O’Brien
‘Dominion’ by CJ Sansom

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE BONE CHURCH by @vicdougherty http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Bl via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Disclaimer’ by Renee Knight #crime #thriller

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Catherine moves house and finds a novel which she can’t remember buying. But this is no ordinary book. It pretends to be fiction, but Catherine recognises herself as one of the characters and the story discloses a secret. “A secret she has told no-one, not even her husband and son – two people who think they know her better than anyone else.” So, Disclaimer by Renee Knight includes a novel-within-a-novel. Renee KnightThis novel explores how one secret, hidden and almost forgotten, can re-emerge 20 years later to do damage. But it is also a warning about the danger of making assumptions without all the facts. The reader makes assumptions, Catherine’s husband makes assumptions, and the writer of the novel makes assumptions.
Nothing is what it seems, in the tradition of good thrillers, and this book will make you believe first one version of the truth, and then another. Which is the real one? Is Catherine a good mother, or a bad mother?
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

If you like this, try:-
‘The Returned’ by Jason Mott
‘Girl Runner’ by Carrie Snyder
‘The Lightning Tree’ by Emily Woof

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview DISCLAIMER by Renee Knight http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1wI via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Wolf Winter’ by Cecilia Ekback #thriller

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This book had me gripped from page one.  It is difficult to categorize: thriller, yes; beautifully-written, yes; sexually-charged, yes; ghosts and spirits, yes. Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekback is a chilling Nordic thriller set in a bleak winter landscape deep in snow, the mutilated body of a man is found by two young girls and the ramifications reverberate throughout the winter months. Cecilia EkbackThis disparate community of families, residents and itinerant Lapps, feel threatened by something on their mountain, Blackåsen. It is a hard life for newcomer Maija and her two daughters Frederika and Dorotea. Maija’s husband leaves them for the winter to get a job on the coast, and so Maija deals with the unnamed threat in her own way, a way which some locals see as suspicious, perhaps even witchery.
The mountain is there on every page, the wind, the snow, the cold. The Swedish expression ‘wolf winter’ means two things: an unusually bitter and long winter, and the darkest time in a person’s life. Both apply to this novel. Excellent. This is Ekback’s debut novel and I look forward to the second.

If you like this, try:-
‘Burial Rites’ by Hannah Kent
‘The Killing Lessons’ by Saul Black
‘I Refuse’ by Per Petterson

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview WOLF WINTER by Cecilia Ekback via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Af

#BookReview ‘The Girl on the Train’ by Paula Hawkins #mystery #suspense

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This book has been hyped much in the pre-publicity and I can understand why. After a slowish start, I finished it at a sprint and rarely put it down. The girl on the train in The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins, is a voyeur, she watches people in their houses. On her morning commute, her train regularly stops at a red light and she looks at a house and ponders the perfect life of the people who live there. She is fantasising, you think, and then you realise she isn’t. She knows the people. Or does she? Paula HawkinsYou never know where you are with Rachel’s account of what happens, she is the ultimate unreliable narrator. The problem is she is a drunk, a falling-over, hungover woman who swigs alcohol on the train and suffers memory blackouts. At no point do you know whether to believe her version of the truth. She says, “I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it.”
In contrast to Rachel, there is Megan, the woman who lives in the house by the railway. She seems a more reliable source of information, or is she? She is unhappy too and we are uncertain why. Dissatisfied – with her marriage, her life? – she goes to see a counsellor. She hints about ‘betrayals’.
For the first half of the book I got the two women slightly confused, not their current life but their back stories. Then a third female voice is added, Anna. Anna was clear to me from the beginning, and her viewpoint adds clarity to the wider picture.
This is a thriller about men, as seen by women; about relationships, as seen by women; about truth and lies, and our ability to recognise one from the other.
A great debut.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Girls’ by Lisa Jewell
‘Foxlowe’ by Eleanor Wasserberg
‘All the Birds, Singing’ by Evie Wyld

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN by Paula Hawkins http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1rA via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Corners of the Globe’ by Robert Goddard #WW2 #thriller

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The Corners of the Globe is a very fast-moving sequel by Robert Goddard, second in his Wide World series. There’s a Scotland to London train chase complete with spies, a captured German warship, murder, kidnapping, secret codes and jumping on and off trains which would rival The 39 Steps [which Goddard playfully has one of his characters read in the restaurant car of one of the trains]. Robert GoddardGreat War flying hero James Maxted is in London, convinced that the death of his father [in the first book] is not as simple as it appeared. His investigations take him further into danger, into the dark and deadly preview of the Second World War. You really do need to read book one first [see the link below for my review] although there is a little exposition at the beginning in the form of a Secret Service report, but to be honest it functions more as a recap for the reader who has read the first book than as an introduction for a newcomer.
I failed to guess the ending of the first book, did I guess the ending of this one correctly? No.

Read my reviews of Goddard’s other books:-
THE WAYS OF THE WORLD #1 THE WIDE WORLD TRILOGY
THE ENDS OF THE EARTH #3 THE WIDE WORLD TRILOGY
PANIC ROOM
THE FINE ART OF INVISIBLE DETECTION #1UMIKOWADA
THIS IS THE NIGHT THEY COME FOR YOU #1SUPERINTENDENTTALEB

If you like this, try:-
‘Corpus’ by Rory Clements
‘The Second Midnight’ by Andrew Taylor
‘Noonday’ by Pat Barker

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE CORNERS OF THE GLOBE by Robert Goddard via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-19H

#BookReview ‘The Ways of the World’ by Robert Goddard #WW2 #thriller

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I’ve been a fan of Robert Goddard since reading his first novel Past Caring in 1986. He is a hard-working author producing regular novels, and I admit I got out of the habit of buying them. Until I picked up The Corners of the Globe which I quickly realised was part two of a series. So to book one, The Ways of the World. I wasn’t disappointed. Not for nothing is Robert Goddard called ‘the king of the triple-cross.’ Robert GoddardThe setting is post-Great War, pre-World War Two. Max, aka James Maxted, goes to Paris to investigate the strange circumstances of his father’s death. He stumbles into a melee of Government secrets, inter-war political wrangling, love affairs and assassinations. I warmed to Max straight away and just as quickly disliked his brother. It is a time of high politics, politicians are jostling to make their mark, and there is already a sense that war may come again.
Suffice to say, that by the end of book 1, various ends are left untied, new questions posed, and I was left wanting to read more. So after finishing this, I quickly started reading The Corners of the Globe again.

Read my reviews of Goddard’s other books:-
THE CORNERS OF THE GLOBE #2WIDEWORLD
THE ENDS OF THE EARTH #3WIDEWORLD
PANIC ROOM
THE FINE ART OF INVISIBLE DETECTION
THIS IS THE NIGHT THEY COME FOR YOU

If you like this, try:-
‘A Hero in France’ by Alan Furst
‘The Aftermath’ by Rhidian Brook
‘Dominion’ by CJ Sansom

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE WAYS OF THE WORLD by Robert Goddard http://wp.me/p5gEM4-19t via @SandraDanby 

#BookReview ‘Gone Girl’ by Gillian Flynn #thriller

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I feel like the last person to read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. I don’t know why I didn’t read it earlier, I like clever thrillers, but somehow I just didn’t get around to it. I was partly put off by the range of reviews of Amazon, I must admit, from 5 stars to 2 stars. It is definitely a Marmite book: love it or hate it. But then the publicity for the film started and I always like to read the book before I see the film, so… I got it from the library. Gillian FlynnGone Girl is about the fracturing of a five-year old marriage. We get both points of view: Nick the husband, Amy the wife. Basically one day, Amy disappears. There are signs of a struggle in the house. Nick goes predictably quickly from being lost husband to prime suspect. I have to admit. I did not like Amy from page one of her diary, her language is so OTT and flowery. “I am fat with love! Husky with ardor! Morbidly obese with devotion! A happy, busy bumblebee of marital enthusiasm.” Ugh. Neither was I overly keen on Nick, I guess overall I found it overwritten and both characters seemed self-indulgent.
It’s impossible to review this book without spoilers, so I will stop there. Suffice to say, I raced through it, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it enough to read more by the same author.
Gone Girl practically spawned a new genre: twisty marriage thrillers. To understand the genre, you have to start with this book. I bet Gillian Flynn didn’t know what she was starting.

If you like this, try:-
‘Wolf Winter’ by Cecilia Ekback
‘Stolen Child’ by Laura Elliot
‘Wolf’ by Mo Hayder

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn http://wp.me/p5gEM4-Yp via @SandraDanby