Turns of Fate by Anne Bishop
Anne Bishop is someone whose novels I consider highly readable and engaging but I also don’t recommend her too often for a few reasons. As I was reading this one, I was reminded of how much sexual abuse is a part of the worlds she writes. Now to be clear, the abusers always get punished and get what’s due to them but it’s a major component. There are also far more people who are decent and good, and do the right thing but violence against […]
Snow by John Banville
It’s impossible for me to review this novel without providing SPOILERS, so read at your own peril. Rural Ireland, 1957. Detective St. John Strafford (with an R) has been summoned to a country estate in the south-east of Ireland, where a Catholic priest has been found dead in the house of a Protestant land owner. The real kicker: the priest has been castrated. It’s December and the countryside is cloaked in a thick blanket of snow that chokes out sound and hides evidence. Under the […]
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
I don’t consider myself particularly well-read. I’ve never read Faulkner. Only read The Great Gatsby last year (or the year before, I don’t remember). I’ve read Hemingway once, and didn’t particularly like The Old Man and the Sea. I’ve never read Austen, or Waugh, or Virginia Woolf, or Pynchon, or countless other important literary figures. But I’ve long flirted with the idea of being comfortable with books enjoyed by well-educated people with posh British accents who casually insert French into everyday conversation. (For the record, […]
Genesis by Karin Slaughter
On a dark, quiet night in the Georgian countryside, just outside of Atlanta, an older couple drives in silence, both lost in thought, when suddenly a nude woman runs into their car. Her injuries are horrific and can’t be explained by the car crash alone. But what is she doing alone in the forest at night? And why isn’t she wearing any clothes? Genesis is the third book in Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent series. It’s also where she re-introduces characters from her Grant County series […]
Perfect Crime by Helen Fields
The Donor by Clare Mackintosh
Fractured by Karin Slaughter
The Perfect Crime (Helen Fields) *** Stephen Berry is having a rough night. Or a rough life, really; he cannot seem to get his bipolar disorder under control and his long-suffering girlfriend has left him. Desperate for some quiet, he intents to jump off a bridge, but a suicide counsellor who happens to be nearby intervenes. Stephen is quietly grateful, but then his body is found dead a few weeks later at the bottom of a tall tower. The cause of death seems like a […]
My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
TW: abuse, alcoholism, self-harm, suicide BINGO: COLD [a portion of the story takes place in the frozen Idaho winter; also there are some cold-blooded murders] Jade is obsessed with horror movies. Specifically she loves slashers. She knows everything there is to know about the movies, the plots, the directors, the film-making process, everything. It is her entire life and personality, to a fault. She doesn’t have much else to do in a small town in Proofrock, Idaho. She even weaves in her slasher obsession into her […]
