Tag Archives: suspense

The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

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Another delicious Gothic murder mystery by the author of The Woman in Cabin 10 and In A Dark Dark Wood, The Turn of the Key has Ruth Ware’s trademark twists and enough suspense to keep you reading through the night.  If you are familiar with Henry James’ Turn of the Screw (available for free from Project Gutenberg), you will know the similarity in the titles is no accident.

Both novels revolve around a caregiver of children – a governess in James’ 1890 story and a nanny in Ware’s.  Both involve ghosts – real or imagined – wreaking havoc on the surroundings, and both lead to the revelation of whether or not the caregiver is guilty of murder.  Both are scary.

Ware sets her story in an updated Victorian smart house with an automation system controlling lighting, climate, entertainment systems, and appliances and a sophisticated home security system, but she cleverly maintains the Gothic aura by keeping sections of the house, especially the creepy attic and the overgrown garden, in old-fashioned mode. Setting the story in the Scottish Highlands helps too.  Both James and Ware knew a threatening house must have a past, preferably with a murder or two to stir the possible malevolence instilled in its walls.  The death of a child figures prominently in both stories.

The protagonist in The Turn of the Key, the nanny, is writing a letter from prison to solicit the help of a well-known attorney.  As she tells her side of the story, the reader suspects she is an unreliable narrator, but Ware keeps the story off balance by creating circumstances showing she might be innocent.  The big reveal at the end of the story identifies the murder victim and the murderer – and it caught me by surprise.

Ruth Ware has been compared to Agatha Christie and Wilkie Collins (author of the Woman in White), but her modern Gothic tales amazingly update the eerie and mysterious, translating the thrills into today’s world.  A smart house with computer glitches can be scary.  She always delivers a good story with a surprise ending, and I can’t wait for her next one.

The Turn of the Key is due for publication in the United States on August 6th.

 

 

Summer Thrillers

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When the sun is hot, I like fast and furious stories I can read in a sitting. Here are a few:

The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena

If you are a fan of Paula Hawkins, Ruth Ware, or Gillian Flynn, Lapena’s thriller has the same riveting flair. The drama centers around the kidnapping of a baby left alone while the parents attend a dinner party next door. Lapena switches tracks often, teasing the reader with possible motives and perpetrators. I read the book in one sitting to confirm my suspicions, but the villain was a surprise.

The Dollhouse by Fiona Davis

With the famous New York Barbizon Hotel as the setting, Fiona Davis connects women pursuing careers as secretaries and models in the 1950’s to a twenty-first century journalist looking for a good story. When modern day Rose Lewin discovers the past of an elderly woman who has remained living in the hotel now converted into condominiums, she uncovers a possible murder and switched identities within the historic context of the hotel’s glamour. The story seems too long, but Davis offers historically correct content about the era and enough drama to sustain the reader’s curiosity. 

Now Reading: Sting by Sandra Brown

and Listening to: The Breakdown by B. A. Paris

The Many – Suspense on the Man Booker Longlist

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TheMany11       Throughout Wyl Menmuir’s short novel – The Many – Gothic undertones play on scenes full of dark and murky possibilities.  A sense of foreboding permeates the narrative, and Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall with an abandoned house on the coast helps to set the scene.

The narrative alternates between the two main characters: Ethan, a local fisherman, and Timothy, an outsider who is renovating the old house left empty by the death of Ethan’s friend Perran for ten years.  Each character is battling personal demons, and as it progresses the story evolves into a fable with strange symbolism.

Death and grief figure prominently – the death of Perran, leaving a hole in the fishing community  so large the inhabitants fight to preserve his memory yet refuse to talk about him to Timothy – even resenting Timothy’s attempts to restore his old house.  When Timothy’s struggle with the death of his infant son surfaces later, with obscure dream sequences and haunting memories, the story falls away and changes – just like the flooding sea overtakes the village in the end. Suddenly, the reader must rethink the meaning of everything – the dead fish killed by chemicals, the blockade of large ships circling and imprisoning the cove, the mysterious woman in the gray suit who patiently watches from afar.  Are they more than they seem?  What do they represent in Timothy’s mind?  What is their connection to his solitude and his haunted existence?

Timothy struggles with the question the villagers do not want to hear or answer – “Who is Perran?”  And, the unspoken question – Why did he die?  When the name of his dead son is revealed, the reader cannot help but wonder if the village and the broken house were all a reason for trying to explain the unexplainable.

The Many is a gripping story, but the questions it raises and leaves unanswered could provoke a lively discussion, and the reader may need to reread this short book several times before getting close to understanding all of its complexity.

Eileen – Man Booker Finalist

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9781594206627_p0_v1_s192x300   Be prepared to feel down and grudgy as you start to read  Ottessa Moshfegh’s Man Booker Prize finalist Eileen.  Although the sentences flow, the words create an uneasy sensation – at times, I wanted to put the book down to take a shower or vacuum the rug.  At the end of the first chapter, Eileen warns the reader:  “In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.  This is the story of how I disappeared.”  This hopeful promise motivated my reading through the misery

As she begins to tell her story, Eileen looks back before her life-changing incident fifty years earlier the week before Christmas 1964.  Each long chapter is titled with the day, starting with Friday and climaxing on Christmas Eve.

Having left college to return home to nurse her ailing mother, Eileen finds herself now stuck with her alcoholic father, a retired policeman.  Her caring for him is minimal, no cooking or cleaning involved; she buys his liquor and ties his shoes.  They live in squalor and a haze of perpetual drunkenness.  In her job as a secretary at a correctional facility for boys, she fantasizes about one of the guards and imagines her father dying, leaving her free to move on.

By Monday, her examination of self is interrupted by a newcomer to the prison staff, Rebecca Saint John, a recent Harvard graduate. Beautiful and cheery, she is the antithesis of Eileen, yet they make a connection.  Suddenly, the mood shifts. Eileen now has a friend – and her father’s gun.

“And I felt in a way that just by knowing her, I was graduating out of my misery. I was making some progress.”

Throughout the laborious build-up,  as she reveals her inner demons and dreams of escape, Moshfegh has Eileen intermittently interrupting her own story, commenting as her older self. The narrative moves slowly until the climax, then takes on the frantic suspenseful pace of a murder mystery.  On Christmas Eve, the story takes an eerie turn.   Something bad and unexpected is about to happen, and it does.

Eileen confirms she has survived, now living a quiet life in New York City, but to tell how would spoil the story.

I understood author Jean Zimmerman’s assessment of the novel for NPR as “funny awful.”  I might add other adjectives: weird, bizarre, dark  – with strange shades of Capote and Hitchcock – but I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.

 

 

Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman

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In memory of Pat Gorman,

who loved a good mystery.

Unknown

Laura Lippman weaves a complicated murder mystery in her latest suspenseful crime tale Wilde Lake. Set in Columbia, Maryland, one of the first planned communities of the seventies, with communal mailboxes, open space schools, and an all-inclusive philosophy, intended to eliminate racial, religious, and class segregation, the story flips through the community’s regression, going back and forth from it inception to the present day.  Not all goes as planned.

Having lived in the area for many years, the references to familiar landmarks were fun to revisit:  Hausner’s restaurant, the Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia Mall, and the scandal-driven Governor Marvin Mandel.  Wilde Lake is still there as is Lake Kittamaqundi.

Although crime is the focus of the book with two murders across thirty years intersecting across the lives of the characters, memory has a major influence on the outcome.  We remember what we think happened and see what we want to see.  Noone is immune, from Lu Brant, the first woman State’s Attorney to her father, the beloved retired State’s Attorney.  Lipman reminds us of the stories and myths created in each family, some to cover pain, others to compensate, but most just to pass on a better life to another generation.  The truth usually emerges, as it does in Lippman’s story.

Life goes on and those who die become beloved.

9780062083456_p0_v3_s192x300    A Short Summary of the Plot from Harper Collins:

“Luisa “Lu” Brant, the newly elected state’s attorney, is prosecuting a controversial case involving a disturbed drifter accused of beating a woman to death. Her intensive preparation for trial unexpectedly dredges up painful recollections of another crime—the night when her brother, AJ, saved his best friend at the cost of another man’s life. Only eighteen, AJ was cleared by a grand jury. Justice was done. Or was it? Did the events of 1980 happen as she remembers them? She was only a child then. What details didn’t she know?
As she plunges deeper into the past, Lu is forced to face a troubling reality. The legal system, the bedrock of her entire life, does not have all the answers. But what happens when she realizes that, for the first time, she doesn’t want to know the whole truth?”