Tag Archives: thriller

#BookReview ‘The Girls’ by Lisa Jewell @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.

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 Lisa Jewell @lisajewelluk via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Fm

#BookReview ‘The Bone Church’ by Victoria Dougherty @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

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#BookReview THE BONE CHURCH by Victoria Dougherty @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?

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

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#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 #1WIDEWORLD  
THE ENDS OF THE EARTH #3WIDEWORLD  
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 #1TOMWILDE
‘The Second Midnight’ by Andrew Taylor
‘Noonday’ by Pat Barker #3LIFECLASS

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#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 Goddard The 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 #1UMIKOWADA
THIS IS THE NIGHT THEY COME FOR YOU #1SUPERINTENDENTTALEB

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 share a link:
#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

#BookReview ‘The Accident’ by CL Taylor @callytaylor #thriller

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The Accident by CL Taylor is the story of an abusive relationship, an accident and a mental breakdown. The action takes place in 1990-1992 and the present day. The tension winds up in both strands so you don’t want to put down the book. I found myself picking up my Kindle every spare five minutes, just to read a few more pages. There is a sense of expectant horror: ‘surely that’s not going to happen,’ ‘surely she’s not going to do this, or that.’ CL TaylorCharlotte, the fifteen year old daughter of Sue and Brian Jackson, is in a coma. Apparently she stepped off the pavement in front of a bus. As Sue and Brian sit by their daughter’s hospital bed, they disagree about what happened. Brian thinks it’s an accident, Sue worries Charlotte had some sort of problem she couldn’t discuss with her parents. And so begins the re-telling of Sue’s dark past, about the demons she struggles with, and the determination she has to fight the past interfering with her present life. The unravelling of the truth puts pressure on the Jacksons’ marriage and Sue’s sanity. The two parents deal with the tragedy in their own way and Sue, emotionally vulnerable, starts to imagine all sorts of scenarios.
From the first page, the pace is fast. “Coma. There’s something innocuous about the word, soothing almost in the way it conjures up the image of a dreamless sleep. Only Charlotte doesn’t look as though she’s sleeping to me.” It is every parent’s nightmare: an accident, a coma. But Sue must unravel the mystery without any help from Charlotte.

Read my reviews of these other thrillers by CL Taylor:-
THE ESCAPE
THE LIE

If you like this, try:-
‘The Lamplighters’ by Emma Stonex
‘The Bone Church’ by Victoria Dougherty
‘Wolf Winter’ by Cecilia Ekback

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE ACCIDENT by CL Taylor @callytaylor http://wp.me/p5gEM4-Wj via @SandraDanby 

#BookReview ‘The Accident’ by Chris Pavone #thriller

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The Accident by Chris Pavone is a fast-moving thriller with so many questions. To start with, we have the Prologue about an unidentified man writing a book. This is his third draft of a manuscript called ‘The Accident.’ An excerpt from his m/s finishes: “…if what you are reading is a finished book, printed and bound and distributed into the world, I am, almost certainly, dead.” I was hooked. The Accident is Pavone’s second novel, his favourite thriller writer is John Le Carré and he certainly paces his storytelling the same way. Chris PavoneThe second person we meet is Isabel Reed, a New York literary agent. It is dawn and she has just finished reading a manuscript: ‘The Accident by Anonymous.’ She is astounded at the enormity of the story, the revelations and accusations. As well as being a page-turning thriller, this novel is also an insight of the publishing world in New York and how the connections of power function in the USA: media, publishing, Government, CIA, black-ops. Isabel was once a top literary agent, now she is desperate for the last big m/s. Is this it? She stands under the shower: “It all beats down on her, the shower stream and the manuscript and the boy and the past, and the old guilt plus the new guilt, and the new earth-shattering truths, and fear for her career and maybe, now, fear for her life.” There is a lot we don’t know about Isabel: how come she has this m/s; she thinks about a husband, where is he; she thinks about a child, Tommy, also absent. But the story moves so quickly, I put those questions aside and continued reading.
I admit that at the beginning, I lost track of who was where; so many characters are introduced with anonymous snapshots that I got a bit irritated. Which ‘he’ was this? But I stuck with it and the characters assumed names. The thing that kept me reading was the excerpts from the m/s – as Anonymous tells the story, bit-by-bit we learn more about the secret, the bombshell. So when the murders start to happen, I was expecting death. I was soon picking up my Kindle to grab two minutes reading on the run. Who is doing the killing? Who is the author? Is the m/s true, or revenge?

And here’s my review of another thriller by Chris Pavone:-
THE TRAVELERS

If you like this, try:-
‘Purity’ by Jonathan Franzen
‘A Hero in France’ by Alan Furst
‘Wolf’ by Mo Hayder

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