Tag Archives: murder

Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman

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shopping   If you remember Laura Lippman’s Sunburn, you will recognize the same venue – Baltimore – and a similar woman in crisis manipulating the suspense in her new novel – Lady in the Lake.  Lippman calls this a newspaper novel, using real sources for credibility, while imagining an attractive thirty-something woman’s climb to popular columnist, deftly using the bodies she finds along the way to further her career.

I can think of a number of actresses who might want to play the role of Madeline Schwarz; she’s attractive, smart, feisty, and sexy.  Once she decides to leave her comfortable twenty year marriage with Milton, nothing will stop her from pursuing her dream job of being a journalist.  After she and her friend discover the dead body of Tessie Fine, she finesses her correspondence with the accused murderer in jail to get a low-level position at the Star, Baltimore’s afternoon newspaper.  With this taste of success, she decides to pursue another death of a young girl, Cleo, found in a city park lake fountain and nicknamed the lady in the lake.  These two murders drive the plot, while Maddie’s struggles with herself and the system capture our attention.

Although Maddie is the main voice in the story, Lippman cleverly diverts to others who connect with her, giving short chapters to their voices: Maddie’s lover, the newsman who covers the police beat, a Baltimore Orioles baseball player after a game, the mother of the murder victim, a psychic, and others.  The most persistent voice is Cleo’s ghost, as she reacts to Maddie’s interviews with family and friends, and her message is consistent – stop prying.

Maddie appears needy and coldly ambitious. She manages to ruin a few lives as she uncovers the truth, and she pays for her mistakes in blood.  Lippman ties up the loose strings, answering all questions in the end, but not without a double twist I did not see coming.

Related Review:  Thrillers with Heat

The Suspect

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9781101990513  I have an App on my phone called Libby, my link to ebooks on my library system.  I often browse and intermittently find books, but sometimes Libby magically produces an ebook I’d forgotten I ordered.  Fiona Barton’s The Suspect caught my eye when it was first published in January.  By now, most of you have probably read it but no spoilers here just in case.

Every parent’s nightmare may be having their teen age girls go backpacking in Thailand on their own, and when the two young girls in Barton’s story, Alex and Rosie, suddenly disappear, their parents are notably frantic.  The story connects  the lives of the families with both a newspaper reporter, Kate Waters, whose son is also in Thailand working through a break from law school, and with the detective on the case.

Barton informs the reader about how the girls are coping by intermittently backtracking to them in Thailand.  The reader knows more than the parents but it isn’t long before all the characters serendipitously come together.  Comically, the police and reporters are sometime tripping over one another, but Kate Waters is Barton’s star investigative reporter, always a step ahead.

Murder is the focus, with the pursuit of the suspected killers.  The book is a fast read and a fun whodunit, with notable asides on social media, international law, and parental responsibility. The ending pulls the plot together, with a surprise smoking gun.

The Suspect is Barton’s third book in the Kate Water series which began with The Widow in 2016, but you don’t have to have read the first two to enjoy Kate’s detective skills.   Have you read it yet?

 

No Sleep Tonight with “Our House”

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328     I should have known better, reading a thriller at night with unreliable narrators and creepy insinuations of how cold and calculating people can be, but I finished Louis Candlish’s Our House at midnight, precluding restful sleep last night.  This new version of Gone Girl includes distracting comments from a twitter-like audience.

Coming back from a long weekend early, Fi finds someone moving into her posh London house.  All her furniture and belongings are gone, the new couple have proof of purchase, and her husband is missing.  This compelling premise then reverts to a he-said/she-said tale of marital infidelity, identify theft, hit and run car crash, and murder with a Greek chorus chiming in periodically.  Although the story is a page turner, many of the twists are hard to swallow.  

Fi and her handsome philandering husband, Bram, separate after she finds him in bed with another woman.  They decide to keep the house for the sake of the children, as well as the increasing equity in the neighborhood.  She stays in the house all week, while he sleeps at a small apartment nearby; on weekends they switch.  To add to the drama, he has lost his driver’s license but drives anyway.  He gets caught in a road rage incident while he is driving drunk and without a license, causing the death of a ten year old girl.

But there is more – the plot twists when a vile witness who helped cause the accident, Mike, decides to blackmail Bram.  Candlish continues to add surprises as the plot develops, and the ending gives everyone their just punishment in an unexpected climax.

I now need a soothing book to cleanse my poor mind from the taste of horrible people.  I found an NPR review of Anne Youngson’s Meet Me at the Museum, and will be reading it tonight – hoping for a more peaceful sleep.

SNAP

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71wtI34-tjL   A pregnant mother walks up a British highway to phone for help, leaving her three children in the broken down car; when the children follow her trail later they find a phone receiver dangling from the hook but their mother has disappeared.  With this opening Belinda Bauer’s SNAP slowly unravels into a compelling murder mystery with a thrilling twist.

As the eldest, eleven year old Jack is in charge of his two younger sisters; their father is too devastated to cope. When their father does not return one day from his run to the market to get milk, Jack turns to burglary to sustain the household and keep his younger siblings from being discovered and sent to foster homes.  Five year old Merry mows the front lawn to keep up appearances, while Joy hoards newspapers, clipping articles about her murdered mother.

Their lives are brave but pathetic. Known as the Goldilocks burglar because he naps in the rooms of children, Jack looks for books on vampires he can steal for Joy to read.  He delivers his stolen goods to the neighborhood fence, Louis, another unlikely criminal who proudly pushes his baby son around in a stroller.  With Louis’ connections, Jack can target only empty homes where the owners have gone on extended vacations, but one day he  enters a house where he finds not only a pregnant woman in her bed but also the knife he somehow knows killed his mother.

Bauer cleverly weaves her characters together, introducing each in a different context unlikely to arouse the reader’s suspicion, until they overlap.  Her red herrings become real clues to the murderer’s identity and motive, as Jack and police detectives Marvel and Reynolds make missteps as they close in on the suspect.  The subplots overlap and unravel quickly into a compelling tale filled with survival, manipulation, violence, and murder.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, SNAP has an unconventional but satisfying ending, and  Jack is now one of my favorite fictional characters. With so many possibilities for discussion,  I considered SNAP as a candidate for book club lists, but after some thought, I decided I would rather keep my own images of Jack, Marvel, and the Whiles in my head, without dissecting them.  Read it and let me know what you think..

Books To Binge Read

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When a book is so compelling, I need to finish it – fast – just to find out how all the pieces come together.  I find myself binge reading to the end – most of the time finishing in a day.  Here a few books I couldn’t put down:

The Book of Esse

medium  I did not expect to be captured by Meghan MacLean Weir’s story of the seventeen year old daughter of an on-air evangelical reality show in The Book of Esse, but the story was compelling and I finished it in a sitting.

Esse is pregnant, and her solution to her problem is to marry a handsome, poor, gay star of the baseball team at her high school.  Reluctantly, Roarke accepts the bribe to save his family’s business and get a free ride to Columbia University. Another victim of child abuse,  Liberty Hall, a journalist following the family, has her own skeletons from her past, but she is now helping Esse and possibly ghost-writing her story.   The father of the baby seems a mystery, but it’s easy to figure out it’s someone in Esse’s family, and eventually his identity is revealed.

Weir addresses the obsession with reality television, its effect on the participants as well as the viewers, and raises issue with those “perfect” evangelical role models, while capturing a connection between two self-possessed teenagers.

415mOnyEFsL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_  Give Me Your Hand

Megan Abbot’s new thriller – Give Me Your Hand – involves two brainy women competing for prestigious scientific accolades, with ambition and murder driving the plot.

Kit Owens and Diane Fleming meet as teenagers in Advanced Placement chemistry class. Both are brilliant and become close friends – until Diane shares a lethal secret with Kit which drives them apart.  Years later they meet again as researchers, competing to work for a prestigious scientist in a grant funded study of premenstrual dysphoric disorder.  The men scientists never have a chance as Abbott juggles green-eyed monsters with poisonous cravings.  Alternating between high school days (then) and post-doctoral research days (now), Abbott creates a suspenseful plot with a surprising twist on motivation at the end.

The Perfect Couple

9780316375269_p0_v3_s600x595  In her twenty-first novel set in the summer on Nantucket, Elin Hildebrand once again offers her signature view of love and life on the island, with descriptions of the opulent homes and glimpses into the lives of the wealthy. Of course, Hilderbrand adds romance and lots of fooling around, but for the first time in one of her Nantucket stories she adds a murder.

A wedding on Nantucket in July is the setting, with the maid of honor found dead on the morning of the wedding.  Clever red herrings keep the reader guessing whodunit until the very end.  Another book read in a sitting – just had to find out how the investigation would be resolved, and which couples would survive all the infidelity. A fun “beach” read, set at a New England beach – you can almost smell the salt air.