Mystery – Page 30 – My Good Reads

‘Gilt Hollow’ – Lorie Langdon

Gilt Hollow

Thanks to Blink and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this novel in advance of its publication (expected late September 2016) in exchange for an honest review.

The cover immediately draws you in and hints at the mystery that we are told surrounds the events that took place in Gilt Hollow some years previously. We are told that Willow has always maintained the innocence of her friend Ashton – sentenced to a period in juvenile detention for killing one of his peers – but when he is released she begins to wonder if she is mistaken.

Initially, the opening to the novel was slow. However, the setting of Gilt Hollow and the characters who inhabit it were strangely reminiscent of Twin Peaks. Everyone seemed to be hiding something, and the stench of corruption was hard to avoid. It made for a very intriguing puzzle, as Willow tried to determine exactly what happened on the night Daniel fell from the cliff.

Of course, things do not happen in a straightforward fashion. Where would the fun be in that? For those who like mystery with a hint of menace, I think you’ll be impressed.

‘All These Perfect Strangers’ – Aoife Clifford

All These Perfect Strangers

You don’t have to believe in ghosts for the dead to haunt you.

You don’t have to be a murderer to be guilty.

Within six months of Pen Sheppard starting university, three of her new friends are dead. Only Pen knows the reason why.

With a sell like that, it was always inevitable that I’d read this and I’m just grateful to NetGalley for sending me a digital copy in advance of publication in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

In this debut novel we meet Pen as she is heading to university to start a law degree. She is on a scholarship, and we know her background is quite different to that of many of her peers. University offers the perfect opportunity to start anew and reinvent yourself. This is important for Pen as we know she has a secret, one that she doesn’t want anyone to know. We don’t know what that secret is, but we’re told it involved murder.

Pen Sheppard is one of those narrators that you simply cannot trust. She manipulates the truth to suit whoever she is talking to, and there’s a definite sense that she is also lying to herself. Her voice is intimate, and draws us in before spitting us out at the moment it suits her to!

Clifford recreates the heady excitement of first year university life in detail, and we watch as Pen befriends a number of characters. Some become friends; others seem to fulfil a function in Pen’s story (though quite what this is doesn’t become clear until Pen chooses for it to).

Knowing from quite early on that Pen is recounting these events to her psychiatrist made me quite mistrusting of her. Learning that Pen has been questioned by the police as a 15 year old for her involvement in the shooting of a policeman, and that she got off though many in her hometown are still convinced of her guilt, means we are never entirely sure what truth we are being told.
This novel twists and turns, and I found myself gripped by the unfolding events.

As Pen’s friends are injured and killed I was second-guessing exactly what had happened. Just as I thought I’d made a link, Clifford had Pen drop in another detail that alters our interpretation of events yet again.

I loved the moment when Frank, her psychiatrist, talks of how convenient it is for Pen that she has ‘all these perfect strangers’ come into her life at just the right moment. The comment encapsulated Pen’s attitude to people, and her detachment.

This is a book that will stay with me, and I’m certain that on reading it again there will be details I’ll notice that will alter my response. Highly recommended.

‘Mayhem’ – Sarah Pinborough

After reading ’13 Minutes’ on a friend’s recommendation and enjoying it so much, I wanted to try other books by Pinborough. It’s at moments like this that I’m tremendously grateful for public libraries!

What has impressed me with Pinborough’s writing so far has been the versatility she demonstrates. Common to the novels I’ve read so far is great characterisation, and this is no exception.

It’s very unlikely that you won’t know something of Jack the Ripper and his awful crimes. This is, indeed, part of the focus of ‘Mayhem’, but it is so much more than that. At the same time as the police were being taunted by the infamous Ripper, there was another murderer on the loose. Dubbed the Thames Torso Murderer, his modus operandi was to butcher the victims’ bodies and leave parcels of dismembered limbs for the police to discover. However, the heads were never discovered.

While this lesser-known story would have been interesting in itself, Pinborough adds in a fascinating supernatural element.

Initially I found the shifting viewpoints a little hard to follow, but as it becomes clearer how the characters link this became less of an issue. The main character of Dr Thomas Bond was intriguing. Initially sceptical of the potential for something ‘other’, I found his story absorbing. Following him around the opium dens of London, and getting caught up with some rather unusual characters, it was never totally clear how much of what he described was real, and how much was the imaginings of a mind overweight with tiredness and increasingly addicted to opium. As events draw to their thrilling conclusion I found myself trying to read more slowly to draw the experience out a little longer.

I can’t wait to see how Pinborough carries this story on in ‘Murder’.

‘Everything I Don’t Remember’ – Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Winner of the 2015 August Prize, this novel by Khemiri is a definite puzzle. Lauded by booksellers/critics, when I received an ARC of this novel from NetGalley I was struck by the number of reviewers who commented on the style as being similar to a podcast called Serial. Thanks to Google I was able to glean some information about this podcast – and it sounds like something worth checking out – but I did wonder whether there would be something lost in translation.

Perhaps my initial hesitation coloured my reading, but I found it quite hard to settle into reading this. Told in a very fragmented way, it took me a long time to get a handle on the voices of the respective characters and to work out how they were related to Samuel.

We are told that Samuel has died in a car crash, and we do not know if it was an accident or suicide. An unnamed writer decides to interview Samuel’s friends and family members in order to try and find out more about who Samuel was and what happened to him.

Even after finishing the novel I felt I didn’t know much about Samuel. Frustratingly, we got no definitive answer to the question posed and I never felt that I gained a clear perspective of how the writer linked to the object of the investigation. While I can recognise its literary quality, it didn’t have quite the emotional pull for me that means I want to encourage everyone to read it.

‘Killing Game’ – Kirsty McKay

This should have been so much better…

The game of Killer is something that’s been played every year in Cate’s isolated boarding school. Only selected students are allowed to participate, and the ‘fun’ comes from trying to establish the identity of the killer. Nobody gets hurt, and it’s tolerated by the staff as something the students do.

This year is different. This year, students are actually injured/killed. Who is responsible?

Personally, I found the assembled group of players too large. We never get more than a surface glance at some of the characters, and those we get to know a little more about are seen through Cate’s eyes. Her own shortcomings/issues mean things that might have been obvious are overlooked.

There are some well-written moments – Emily’s ‘accident’ for example. However, once the real killings begin there is just so much going on that it all feels too much. We are bombarded with information and some of the red herrings planted are frustrating. The casual sexism inherent in this was totally unnecessary, and doesn’t force the readers – who are intended to be teenagers – to question certain attitudes and beliefs. My biggest gripe, however, was that for a group of teenagers that we are painstakingly told are very intelligent, they were actually pretty stupid! The big reveal was glaringly obvious, but I’d hoped I’d be proven wrong and something really spectacular would happen. It didn’t.

Not a game I’d be keen to recommend to people…

‘The Darkest Lie’ – Pintip Dunn

Six months prior to the opening of this story we are told that CeCe’s mother committed suicide after being accused of having sex with a student. CeCe has had to live with the taunts from the boy’s friends – and other students – ever since. She and her mother used to be close, and the betrayal CeCe feels as she and her father live with the fallout is evident.

This could have been a very different story; thankfully, the focus is not on what we’re told happened, but CeCe’s conviction that she trusts her mother would never have done such a thing. We follow CeCe as she tries to work out just who has secrets to hide, and just how her mother was involved.

Without revealing the intricacies of the plot, this quickly develops into a bit of a mud-slinging contest – any number of characters could have more to do with it than we realise. Eventually, something sticks but it’s always a good idea to listen to gut instinct at times.

This started out as quite an interesting idea. I admired the strength of character that CeCe showed, and it considered some difficult topics. Unfortunately, I couldn’t shake the feeling I had from the start, and all the attempts to lead us away from this felt like the grip on credibility was being heavily stretched at times.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

’13 Minutes’ – Sarah Pinborough

Sarah Pinborough is a new author to me, and on the basis of my response to this I think I will have to try and get my hands on some of her other novels. Quickly!

’13 Minutes’ starts with an arresting image of a teenage girl being dragged, unconscious, from the water. Despite being technically dead for thirteen minutes, Natasha survives. We then cut immediately to a number of different perspectives which alert us to the fact that there is more to Natasha’s accident than we at first thought.

Natasha is reminiscent of Regina in ‘Mean Girls’ or Alison in ‘Pretty Little Liars’. She is the girl who tells her small circle of friends what is in and what is not. Everyone wants to be her. Yet she is not liked, and under the surface she is not quite what everyone thinks she is.

Once Natasha has been rescued we follow a fairly small circle of characters as the police, and Natasha’s ex-best-friend Becca, try to work out who is responsible for what happened to Natasha. Pinborough gives us a range of perspectives, and the undercurrent of menace is crackling from the start. We think we’ve got it, and then a new detail is revealed and we’re back to the drawing board.

I really did not want to put this down once I’d started. This is a tale set in a murky world of half-truths and deception, that sucks you in. Fairly late on there is a startling revelation which, for me, felt a little disappointing. It worked, but I felt there should have been more to it. There was! Swiftly following on from this was another development that took this book from the simply good to the absolutely amazing.

A masterful piece of storytelling.

‘All The Missing Girls’ – Megan Miranda

Touted as another ‘Girl On The Train’ thriller, don’t let the comparisons sway you. Yes, this is a thriller and there are crimes involved, but this is not simply another attempt to jump on a plot-twist bandwagon.

In this novel, Miranda focuses on telling us the story of two girls who disappear – a decade apart – but once we’ve been introduced to the key players, we have a daring structural device to contend with. At the point in time that the second girl disappears, the story is then told backwards…it sounds odd, and does make for a little confusion initially, but it was a fascinating idea to take us back through the investigation from the present to the point in time at which it started.

I can imagine that for crime/thriller aficionados this structural technique could be a turn-off. Initially, the story is a little slow. The characters aren’t particularly likeable and their relationships are not clearly delineated. There is a very real sense of people hiding things, but it becomes clear why they are doing this as we read on.

The action takes place in and around Cooley Ridge, a fairly claustrophobic setting complete with mysterious woods. Nic, one of our main protagonists, returns home to help her ailing father and to try and tie up loose ends. She has not been back for a while and her return brings back memories of the time of the original disappearance, that of her best friend Corinne. Those who were under suspicion at the time – Nic’s brother, Daniel, her boyfriend, Tyler, and Corinne’s boyfriend, Jackson – are all still living in the town. With the disappearance of Annaleise Carter, the groups’ original alibi, it becomes clear that they all have something to hide.

Nic is determined to find out what happened to Annaleise and her investigation ensures that we slowly unravel some hidden secrets and desires. Not all the details are relevant to the modern investigation, but trying to piece together the details of the original disappearance was a great puzzle. Who actually committed the crimes does not, actually, seem to be at the fore of the writer’s concerns. She seems more interested in unpicking the level of culpability that a number of characters have, and exploring how they come to terms with their involvement.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advance copy of this novel. There’s a definite buzz about this and I can completely see why.

‘Our Endless Numbered Days’ – Claire Fuller

As an adult reader, when we are first introduced to Peggy looking at the picture of her father there is a definite sense of things not being quite right. I read in amazement and horror as Peggy recounted the build-up to her father taking her to live in a remote cabin in the woods. I couldn’t believe that nobody did anything to intervene, and I was also surprised at Peggy’s childish acceptance of her situation.

Her naive acceptance of her father’s claim that there has been a storm which has destroyed the rest of the world is so off-kilter that, from that point onwards, I was reading with a sense of waiting for the awful events that I imagined happening to unravel.

There was a lot in the description of Peggy’s daily life that reminded me of Emma Donoghue’s ‘Room’. It was claustrophobic, desperately unsettling and certainly not something that I envisaged would end well.

I did find the switches from the past to the present day a little disconcerting at times. The book also felt a lot stronger in the final section as we see things slowly build to their inevitable climax. Strangely, I felt that the more interesting story was the one that we can sense building up at the end of the novel when Peggy returns to her family home. A powerful read though, which unsettled me more after I had closed the pages for the final time.

‘The Shrunken Head (Curiosity House)’ – Lauren Oliver and H.C. Chester

I know people say not to judge a book by its cover, but the artwork is a major part of this novel and it adds another dimension to what is a well-written and exciting mystery. Perhaps this book is not for everyone, but I think it’s perfect for the 9-12 age range as it delivers on adventure, a great cast of characters and it isn’t patronising to the reader.

The blurb promises something a little different and, in my opinion, firmly delivers.

The story is set in Dumfrey’s Dime Museum of Freaks, Oddities and Wonders. It focuses on four extraordinary children – Thomas, Sam, Pippa and Max – whose abilities make them quite unique. Just how special these children are isn’t revealed until later.

Our mystery concerns a shrunken head, a rapidly increasing death count and the childrens’ determination to find out the identity of the killer.

There was a real sense of historical interest in this novel, and, while all the characters were interesting, it is the bond between the four children that stands out.

This first in the series sets up a number of strands that you are likely to be enchanted by. I can’t wait to see where the writers go with part two. The test of this book’s appeal for me will be whether my middle child – a rather fussy reader – will want to finish it. He’s already spotted the cover and read the blurb…the signs are good!