Thriller – Page 25 – My Good Reads

‘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’.

‘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…

‘Dead Silent’ – Sharon Jones

The second in the series focusing on Poppy Sinclair, a teenage detective, but this worked for me as a stand-alone book.

Not having read the first in the series I don’t know if that offers us a little more background to Poppy and her situation – I imagine so. If that is the case, I imagine I would be more invested in what happens to her in this adventure.

Poppy thinks she’s heading off to Cambridge to see her father, and to support her boyfriend while he attends an interview. Stumbling across her father crouched over a dead body the morning after her arrival means her plans go somewhat awry. Poppy decides to investigate the murder – and the rapid succession of bodies that seem to follow hot on its heels – but has to deal with the possibility that her father might be involved.

There’s a lot of background information about Cambridge woven in, and our focus is on a rather stereotypical secret society and its members. The stock ‘privileged elite’ characters who are linked to the society are killed in increasingly gruesome ways, and it’s obvious that Poppy is in danger as the killer becomes more unhinged.

Throughout the reading of this I felt rather detached from the experience. I wasn’t encouraged to particularly feel anything for those that were murdered, and the climax seemed like an exaggerated dream scene. I’m sure there will be readers that will love this; I can see the good bits, but it left me rather unmoved.

‘Dear Amy’ – Helen Callaghan

Margot Lewis is the agony aunt for The Cambridge Examiner. Her advice column, Dear Amy, gets all kinds of letters – but none like the one she’s just received:

Dear Amy,
I don’t know where I am. I’ve been kidnapped and am being held prisoner by a strange man. I’m afraid he’ll kill me.
Please help me soon,
Bethan Avery

Bethan Avery has been missing for years. This is surely some cruel hoax. But, as more letters arrive, they contain information that was never made public. How is this happening? Answering this question will cost Margot everything . .

This has the premise of a great book. As soon as I saw this on NetGalley, I was keen to read it.

This book, for me, started with a bang. We witness the kidnapping of Katie Browne and then we are introduced to Margot. We see the arrival of the first letter, and once Margot takes it to the police a chain of events is set in place that really draws you in.

We work out that the cases, though years apart, are linked. The question is how. Margot seems to be the key, but she cannot say why.

Once we get halfway in, a rather implausible event takes place and, after this point, I felt things unravelled somewhat. A lot happens very quickly in the second half of the book; not all of it is prepared for, and some of it seems to contradict what has come beforehand. The issues surrounding the central characters of Katie, Bethan and Margot are resolved, but they seem to be less engaging.

Having started with a bang, this had a bit of a hiccup halfway through and ended on a rather sorry whimper for me.

‘The Girls’ – Lisa Jewell

The cover for this sums up perfectly the idea that a lot of the characters in this are trapped in some way. Though they may burn brightly, they are characters whose lives are claustrophobically linked.

Claire and her young daughters move to a new home, escaping the aftermath of a truly horrific episode in their lives. They move to a house in an area that makes much of its communal garden and friendly atmosphere. There the girls make friends with the local kids who, in a nod to Lord of The Flies, spend lots of their time unsupervised hanging out in the gardens. Adele, Leo and their three daughters are pivotal to the story.

Grace, the thirteen year old daughter of Claire, is found in the gardens late on the evening of her birthday. She is unconscious, and her clothes suggest some form of assault has taken place. The rest of the novel focuses on the attempts to discover what happened to Grace.

This was a clearly plotted story, with interesting characters, but it just didn’t quite have that spark for me. Unfortunately, too often I found myself wanting to skip ahead. Throughout the novel, Jewell dropped hints that suggested one character over another might have been involved. While it was fairly evident from quite early on who was actually responsible, I did find this interesting for highlighting just how little we actually know anyone.

’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.

‘Blood Of My Blood (Jasper Dent Trilogy 3)’ – Barry Lyga

The final part of the trilogy picks up where book two left off. We get to see what happens to our trio…although, at times, we might wish we didn’t.

I’ve read some reviews that criticise Lyga for just giving us more of the same here. I would have to disagree with those comments. Yes, there are some unpleasant details – and elements of the activity go beyond sadistic – but there didn’t seem to be quite the level of detail given simply to shock us. Here, if we’re being given graphic detail, it makes sense. This book focuses far more on the psychological elements again and I found this very difficult to put down.

Some readers criticise Lyga for boring us with Jasper’s fears that he’ll become his father’s son. With the revelations we get in this book I’d be more concerned if Jasper weren’t questioning his upbringing, mental state and ability to make socially acceptable decisions!

There are some great moments in this novel. Howie and Connie get to play pivotal roles, and though they are less involved than in previous books, they’ve got Jasper’s back and provide a semblance of much-needed normality for him.

I do think that, in reality, a lot of what transpires during the hunt would never happen. However, Lyga creates truly creepy characters and this was a chilling read.

I might discourage younger readers from picking this series up, for reasons that become obvious as we work our way through this. Overall, though the subject matter is deeply unpleasant it is a fascinating story, well-handled and resolved in such a way that we can sleep at night (albeit with the light on).

‘The Perfect Girl’ – Gilly Macmillan

I wanted to read this, in spite of the comments likening it to ‘Girl on a Train’ etc. Setting up such an expectation can sometimes backfire; thankfully, this time it didn’t.

The novel focuses on Zoe Maisey, a talented young musician with a genius intellect, and how actions from earlier in her life continue to haunt her.

Zoe and her mother have started a new life, far away from her past. Zoe has served her time for causing the deaths of three of her peers, but some things never go away. Knowing this about Zoe, and never being completely certain about the reliability of her evidence, means there’s an element of suspicion as we later see Zoe caught up in truly horrific events.

The story is told from constantly shifting viewpoints, and this makes it difficult to ever get a clear picture of what is happening until the author chooses to make her big reveal. There’s a lot to dislike about a number of characters, and although I understood why certain people acted as they did – and even felt some sympathy for them – the moral ambiguity is hard to take.

‘Game (Jasper Dent 2)’ – Barry Lyga

This, for me, was better than book one in the series. I liked the fact that we stick with Jazz and see how he copes with being the son of an infamous serial killer, but I think focusing on those close to him allowed more of an insight into Jazz’s psyche. At times, Connie and Howie do some stuff that I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind would consider, but they help us gain a more rounded impression of Jasper.

In this thrilling novel, we find out about a serial killer causing chaos on the streets of New York. I know it’s highly unlikely – but it’s possible to overlook this stretching of the truth – but Jazz gets asked by the FBI for his opinions on what has been taking place. What follows is pure heart-in-mouth territory. Not necessarily credible, but when you’re so keen to find out that crucial detail you can overlook quite a lot!

As we journey deeper into the mind of Billy Dent, there’s a dreadful sense of worlds colliding. We watch a dangerous game play out in front of us, and as Jasper and his friends get further drawn into it there is a horrible sense of the inevitable about what we are reading. The twists and turns in this kept me enthralled, and there are hints that the final part in the trilogy will get close to the bone.

The main thing that I found hard to take with this novel was the final revelation about Jazz’s family, and the uncertainty about the situations that our three young protagonists find themselves in at the close of the novel. If I’d been reading this as it was published, and had to wait for the final part, I think there would have been much teeth gnashing and wailing.