I have never read a Harlan Coben book before. I keep confusing him with Dennis Lehane. Whenever I see anything about Harlan Coben, I always think “oh, yeah, he wrote Mystic River, I really want to read that. Wait. NO HE DIDN’T”. But I loved the French movie they made from his book Tell No-One and the plot for this sounded super intriguing so I thought what the heck. So the titular time period is how long lapses between Jake Sanders watching the love of his life Natalie Avery, marry […]
Troubling on so many levels
I’ve read Gillian Flynn’s body of work in reverse. I first became aware of her when everyone was reading Gone Girl, so I jumped on the bandwagon and tore through that novel like the suspenseful page-turner that it is. Next I read Dark Places, and in some ways I liked it even more, with its dark, In Cold Blood feel, though at times I felt like Flynn piled on the disfunction a bit too heavily. “How much more can this family go through?” I remember […]
Unreliable narrators for the win
I think I have written before about how when I was growing up, YA wasn’t really a big deal, and I honestly can’t recall reading books aimed specifically at my age group when I was fifteen. This is why I read lots of Stephen King and the like when I was growing up and probably accounts a lot for my warped world view. As much as I loathe Stephenie Meyer and every book she’s ever published, there’s no denying that Twilight finished what Harry Potter started and […]
This review is acceptable to the forces of Darkness
Target: Sergei Lukyanenko’s Last Watch. Translated by Andrew Bromfield (The Watches pentalogy #4) Profile: Modern Fantasy, Suspense, Urban Fantasy So, I spent a really unreasonable amount of time waiting for and then looking for the Harper paperback release of Last Watch. I waited so long that the fifth book in the series was published stateside and my copy actually started to gather dust on my shelf. Eventually I contacted Harper Collins which prompted a very curt autoreply informing me that they didn’t have the publication rights. Although the […]
I like driving in my car
Ah, Stephen King. He’s been my number one go-to author since I was in my early teens and read It and The Tommyknockers. I pretty much never looked back from that point on and while not every book he publishes is a slam dunk (Dreamcatcher is one of the most jawdroppingly terrible things, and I never even bothered to finish Lisey’s Story I was so bored and annoyed by it), when you’re as prolific as King is, that’s no real surprise. But I’d still much rather read an off target Stephen King […]
Women Can Be Scary Part 3: Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, is a classic that has been characterized as a romance and some sort of gothic chick lit. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rebecca is a dark and suspenseful novel, reminiscent of Jane Eyre, with an ending that involves violence and is far from happy. Like Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the reader might find him/herself rooting for a murderer and feeling distinctly uncomfortable about that. Rebecca is set in the 1930s mostly at a seaside […]