Mystery – Page 5 – My Good Reads

‘Wrong Place, Wrong Time’ – Gillian McAllister

Our story opens with Jen, a lawyer, waiting for her adult son to come home after a night out. I feared there might be an accident as we watch Jen observe her son get closer to home. Another figure approaches her son, and I thought we were about to witness an awful crime that Jen would have to relive as she deals with this moment. We did…but it wasn’t at all what I expected. Todd, Jen’s son, stabs and kills the man. Watching your son get hurt would be awful, but I can’t imagine how you’d feel watching him kill someone.

The next day, the strangest thing happens. Jen wakes, and it is the day before the crime. Nothing has happened, and she believes she is going mad. Each time she goes to sleep she seems to travel back in time. There has, Jen is certain, to be a reason for this. Can she learn anything that will help her stop this crime before it happens?

Wrong Place, Wrong Time was a skilfully constructed story. From start to finish it was fascinating to observe Jen’s experiences and to try to piece together anything that could have relevance to the crime that instigated this event. McAllister weaves a rich story, where nothing is quite as it seems. We watch Jen as she is forced to relive her life, reflecting on interactions and trying to work out what might hold the key to protecting her son.

As the story unfolded I found myself quite amazed by the concept. I loved the mercurial quality to the story, and found myself wholly unsettled by the ending.
I can’t wait for someone I know to pick this up and read it. A huge thank you to NetGalley for giving me the chance to read this in advance of publication.

‘Hollow Fires’ – Samira Ahmed

Due for release in early May, I’m grateful to NetGalley for giving me access to this prior to publication. From start to finish this had me hooked, and I think it is Ahmed’s most powerful book to date.

It’s easy to feel outrage at the kind of privilege shown throughout this book. It’s easy to feel angered by the behaviour of the two young adults who plan, carry out and almost get away with their murder of a younger teen. It’s easy to feel the fire of injustice that forces Safiya into action. But it’s also easy for many readers (and I probably count myself in this) to feel that anger and yet to not be further impacted by it. This is not part of my daily experience, and I fear that my ‘fire’ as I finished this book could be seen as ‘hollow’ if I don’t do anything with it. This is something I need to digest further.

The story of Hollow Fires itself is a compelling one. It begins when Jawad, son of Iraqi refugees, is arrested when his English teacher believes the home-made Halloween costume he proudly takes into school is a suicide bomb. The absurdity of this situation stands out…but even after being cleared of all charges, Jawad is persecuted. He becomes known by the moniker BombBoy and the growing sense of unease felt by students who are not white is deftly portrayed through the character of Safiya. When Jawad goes missing, there is an appeal but the police quickly write him off as a run-away.

Safiya has always wanted to be a journalist and she has an inquisitive nature that doesn’t allow her to blindly accept some of the things she’s told by those in authority. She is determined that people should not accept this version of events. Set against a growing backdrop of racially-motivated attacks, Safiya is convinced there is more to Jawad’s disappearance. When she finds his body wedged in a culvert in a little known part of the local park, Safiya knows that there’s more to this story than people are prepared to acknowledge. She takes it upon herself to try and get justice for Jawad, determined that those responsible will be held to account.

There are issues with the way Safiya interferes with an ongoing investigation. The way certain characters behaved didn’t always seem realistic, and there’s still a part of me that feels the outcome of this case would not, in reality, have gone quite as it’s presented here. However, these were not enough of a distraction to prevent me from feeling this is a book I would highly recommend.

‘I Kissed Shara Wheeler’ – Casey McQuiston

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me a glimpse of this before its release. While it didn’t have quite the emotional pull of the other McQuiston books I’d read, it drew together nicely.

Our focus is Chloe Green who’s in competition with Shara Wheeler, the Principal’s daughter, for valedictorian. Both girls are fiercely competitive and they have, for the past four years, danced a strange dance of one-upmanship. When the book opens, rumours abound as Shara has disappeared.

Determined that she will not be given the top spot by default, Chloe vows to find Shara and get her back to school in time for graduation.

The main thrust of the book focused on this rather odd scavenger hunt orchestrated by Shara who has left cryptic notes for three people, all of whom kissed Shara before she left. As we only learn about Shara through the veil of someone else’s view, I found it hard to work out quite what kind of character we were looking at. I also found the setting of the book – a strong Christian homophobic setting – really off-putting. People were pigeon-holed and made to feel wholly uncomfortable, nobody seemed to do anything about it, and it appeared to have been this way since Chloe’s mum endured coming out years earlier.

While the days before Shana appeared were instrumental in helping to develop the characters, it was once everyone was back in their rightful place that I felt things started to fall into place for me as a reader. Chloe opened her eyes a little and started to look beyond herself. It had a relatively happy ending, even though there was clearly a long way to go!

‘The Perfect Holiday’ – T.J. Emerson

The Perfect Holiday is a book that tries very hard to throw you off the scent. There are clues throughout that what we’re seeing isn’t the full picture, but by the time we got to the end I just recall feeling pleased that at least something was going to happen.

Julian and Olivia are holidaying in their beautiful villa. They are, on the surface, the ideal couple. Olivia has money, and Julian is the perfect gentleman who has become known for caring for his ex-wife for years. Her murder was a shock, but Julian had a cast-iron alibi and has since become the face of the charitable foundation set up in her name.

While on their regular foray into the little town nearby, the couple meet Gabriel. There is a story behind his presence, and it soon becomes clear that he is more closely linked to Julian than they might want to admit.

For much of the book the focus is on Julian sneaking around with Gabriel. There’s lots of talk of love and a desire to plan a future together. Unfortunately, for a relationship so skewed – and firmly placed on the foundations of their tangled past – it never quite gelled.

As the book continues we learn more about Julian and his past. Things appear to be heading firmly in one direction and I found myself waiting for the twist that seemed so inevitable. Sure enough it came, but by this time I just felt relieved that at last we were getting an escape.

Thanks to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this in advance of publication, and thanks to the publishers for including me on the Blog tour.

‘Hope to Die’ – Cara Hunter

A new Adam Fawley book is a cause for celebration, so I was rather surprised that he took something of a back seat in this very odd case.

We open with an anonymous 999 call. When the police investigate, they find an elderly couple and the body of a young man blasted in the face with a shotgun. The investigating officers are suspicious. Something isn’t ringing true in the elderly couple’s story about shooting a burglar in self-defence. But nothing prepares them for what their investigations reveal.

The victim is found to have a DNA match with a young woman currently in prison for the murder of her child.

From start to finish there was a sense of the truth eluding our detectives. The characters involved were slippery to say the least, and I was gripped from start to finish as we watched them trying to navigate their stories.

There were attempts to develop some of the other characters on the force, and I’m wondering where this will go next. Huge thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for giving me the chance to read this prior to publication.

‘Insomnia’ – Sarah Pinborough

Insomnia is, usually, linked to periods of high stress but its effects can be awful. For our main character Emma, a successful lawyer approaching her fortieth birthday, her inability to sleep after she wakes regularly at 1:18am hints at a potential problem. Though she doesn’t remember precise details, her family have been plagued by issues around sleep and she fears history repeating itself as she approaches the age her mother was incarcerated after trying to suffocate one of her children.

The family history is revealed bit by bit as we follow Emma through the days leading up to her fortieth birthday. The tension created by Pinborough is well-depicted and as we learn about the stresses in her life we start to question to what extent Emma might be responsible.

From start to finish I found myself caught up in this. In turns frustrated by Emma but also empathising with her, I couldn’t help but get bogged down in the extraneous details about her present life that seemed to muddy the waters as we try to work out just what is going on.

As with some of Pinborough’s more recent books there is a dependence on something unnatural, which might not adequately explain events for some readers. While I’m not wholly convinced by it, the actual revelation as to what was happening and the motive for it made sense. Extreme, and it definitely made me reassess some of the earlier interactions between the characters concerned, but this book was a tense depiction of someone being pushed to their limits.

Thanks to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this before publication.

‘The Agathas’ – Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson

Oh boy, are readers due a treat when this is released in May. Huge thanks to NetGalley for giving me the chance to read this before publication, and I’m hoping this isn’t the last we’ve heard of the Agathas.

Alice Ogilvie is a rich kid who has everything. She recently disappeared for five days, and nobody knows where she was in that time, but now she’s returned to school and is forced to have a tutor to make up her grades. Her tutor is Iris Adams, a girl who’s determined to leave Castle Cove as soon as she can for reasons she wants no one to know.

Before too long we see an unlikely friendship develop between our Agatha Christie-obsessed duo. Their unlikely friendship centres around their quest to find out exactly what happened to Alice’s ex-best friend when she disappeared after a Halloween party.

When Brooke’s body is discovered, the investigation becomes a little more serious. Those close to Brooke are implicated, and some aren’t but are definitely hiding something. Through some rather dubious means, Iris and Alice (and their own little Scooby gang) try to work out what happened.

From start to finish I found myself wholly immersed in these characters. Sassy, a little crazy, but definitely with their hearts in the right places, Iris and Alice are characters you can’t help but root for. The book has its fair share of darkness, and I’m really hoping that Glasgow and Lawson will treat us to further adventures from this group. From the sounds of it Castle Cove has more than its fair share of mysteries to be solved.

‘Such a Quiet Place’ – Megan Miranda

Such a Quiet Place begins a little too slowly for my liking, developing our understanding of events before picking up the pace and finally forcing our narrator to play their hand.

When Ruby returns to the quiet neighbourhood of Hollow’s Edge people are surprised. People suspect her motives. People wonder what she has to gain. This is because Ruby has just been released from prison after being wrongfully charged with the murder of two of her neighbours. She turns up at her old house, where her roommate Harper wonders just what she is going to do next.

From the opening we get a sense of Hollow’s Edge as the kind of community where, superficially, things are perfect but it only takes a little digging to realise that’s not the case at all.

A substantial part of the book establishes some of the key events of the past but also sets up our cast. When Ruby is found dead after a pool party, it doesn’t take long for the police to label it a homicide. So then we watch as characters’ behaviour changes. Who has most to lose? Who’s hiding what?

The truth is not quite the dramatic reveal that was implied. However, we see that people can do anything when they feel it will serve them well. I was rather surprised by Harper’s role in the key events, and did wonder why such a large cast had been brought in and not all developed fully.

‘Black Cake’ – Charmaine Wilkerson

Black Cake had me gripped at the start and, though I can understand why some feel as if rather too much was added into the pot by the end, it will definitely go down as one of my highlight reads of the year.

The book opens with estranged siblings Benny and Byron being called to attend a meeting with their mother’s lawyer to hear the recording bequeathed to them. Details are, initially, sparse but we learn that their mother had a secret. A secret that now she is dead can be shared.

The story she wants to share with them explains exactly who Eleanor Bennett was. They learn of their mother’s past living with her immigrant father, the ill-fated marriage with an older man her father was in debt to, her new life in Britain and her journey towards the life she grew into in California. While her story may be familiar in many ways for the time, it comes as a shock to her children.

I loved the structuring of this book and the gradual way we got to learn about the lives of all the characters involved. The characters are not without flaws, but their resilience and determination to try and do their best was something that I found appealing. I enjoyed reading about Eleanor’s experiences, and the love story between the key characters was well-depicted. As a number of reviews point out, there’s a shift towards the latter stages of the book to social commentary with a lot of issues being explored, but I think this reflected the rich tableau of characters and experiences we were introduced to. It certainly did nothing to diminish my enjoyment of the story laid before us.

‘The Hollows’ – Mark Edwards

Divorced dad takes teen daughter on annual holiday, and his choice of resort leaves something to be desired.

Though Hollow Falls is a beautiful area, it has a dark history. Nearly twenty years ago a couple were slaughtered in the woods and the Maine woodland seems to be harbouring secrets. Secrets that someone knows more about than they ought to.
Upon learning the unpleasant truth about their chosen holiday destination, Frankie and her father Tom are resolved to make the best of their choice.

Unfortunately the number of strange and unusual events rises…and it seems that the town remains a place to fear.

When we’re first introduced to the resort it felt rather generic in tone. There were unsettling descriptions of the environment and I fully expected one of our modern guests to get injured in some way. This likelihood is heightened when Frankie and Ryan (the boy from the cabin next to them) manage to offend two neighbourhood kids who have something of a reputation for causing trouble.

As the strange occurrences escalate in tone, there’s a shift in focus to the events in the area at the time of the original crime. These details created a much more unsettling feel, with it becoming increasingly obvious that more than one person in the present has details they want to keep hidden.

Before too long we’re caught up in a very unusual turn of events. The sense of danger grows, and it was increasingly obvious they were dealing with some seriously unhinged behaviour. By the time we got to the end we had answers, some of them rather different to those we expected, but the most terrifying element was the clear sense of threat being posed by our lone perpetrator as our story fades. I don’t know if there’ll be a continuation of the story, but just the hint of how it could develop has made me pleased I finished reading this during the day!

Thanks to NetGalley for giving me the chance to read this before publication.