Tag: thriller books

Book Review, thriller

The Next Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪
Genre: Romance

The Last Mrs. Parrish is one of the first books that got me into thrillers and I will never hesitate to recommend it.

I wishhh the same could be said for the sequel, but it was a struggle to get through The Next Mrs. Parrish. This book picks up with Amber, Daphne, and incarcerated Jackson while also introducing Daisy Ann. Each character has their own motivations, but for me they didn’t seem like logical follow ups to the original story. It felt like an attempt to redo much of what book one did, which just seemed forced.

Daisy Ann was a random addition to the story and I didn’t know enough about her to really care what she was doing and how she was involved. As a result, I wasn’t really invested in her parts of the book and found them a bit hard to follow.

Much of my respect for the ways Amber and Daphne tried to out-manipulate one another in the first book was lost as they seemed to lose their exciting cattiness.

This book was so drawn out and completely fell flat for me.

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Book Review, Fiction, thriller

One by One by Freida McFadden ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪.5
Genre: Thriller

*Rolls eyes very hard.* I have never so quickly whipped through a book that I was not enjoying. I will never understand how McFadden’s books draw me in so deeply and quickly or what about her writing keeps me glued to it. For some reason, that was still the case even as I was consciously aware that this book felt extremely cliched.

Claire is headed to a weekend getaway with her husband and two other couples. When their car breaks down in the woods, they decide they’ll walk the rest of the way to their accommodations, it should only be a couple of miles. Instead of an easy walk though, the group finds themselves hopelessly lost and slowly people begin to die or disappear.

I felt like I was right there with the group walking in circles in the woods because this book took so long to get anywhere. I didn’t feel like there were any hints about the context of why this was happening to them, it was just the group increasingly getting scared and walking around more and Claire thinking she can reconcile with her husband as he does borderline nice things for her.

Usually, McFadden’s books have a crazy twist that I love and that gets me fired up rethinking the entire book. This one just felt flat. There are excerpts throughout the book from ‘anonymous’ that I knew were going to tie in, but when their identity was ultimately revealed it didn’t really make sense to me.

This was somehow still a thriller I read in just a couple days and wanted to find out the ending to, but would recommend any of McFadden’s other books above this one.

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Buy One by One at an indie bookstore near you
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Book Review, thriller

The Teacher by Frieda McFadden ~ Book Revie

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Thriller

This book is nottt going to be for everyone. It’s one of the more twisted McFadden books, focusing on the relationship between Addie, a high school student, and her English teacher, Nate. Nate makes Addie feel special at a time in her life when she’s at her lowest of lows and no other students want to spend time with her. As their relationship escalates, she quickly becomes obsessively jealous of Nate’s wife Eve, who herself feels trapped in a loveless marriage.

McFadden’s short, snappy chapters always make her books breeze by and this was no exception. Told from alternating perspectives, I loved getting to know the secrets each of the main characters was harboring. We know from the prologue that someone ends up digging a grave and although I guessed pretty early on who it was for, I couldn’t wait to see how we would get there.

In typical McFadden fashion, there was a big old twist at the end. At first I was shocked in the way only a truly twisty twist can do, but if I think about it too much it just…doesn’t make sense. It didn’t put me off the whole book, but it definitely could have been better thought out.

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Book Review, Fiction, thriller

The Heiress By Rachel Hawkins ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Thriller
Read if you liked: Daisy Darker

When Ruby McTavish died, she left her entire fortune and her estate, Ashby House, to her adopted son Camden, who turned down his inheritance and chose to lay low with his wife, Jules. Upon his uncle’s death though, the couple is summoned to Ashby house where the whole family is waiting to discuss the fortune and next steps.

The narration is split into three perspectives, that of Camden, Jules, and the late Ruby. Each voice is so distinct and their points of view and motivations completely different. Weaving them together made for such a layered story. Camden questions his adoption and Ruby’s motivation while Jules feels cautiously optimistic that her luck could change given Camden’s family wealth. Ruby’s voice was probably my favorite. She was sarcastic and witty and her story was startling and surprising at every turn.

There were so many twists in this book but each one made sense and added an exciting element to the story. I loved never knowing who the characters truly were and what was driving their motivations. The story goes as far back as Ruby’s childhood, when she was briefly kidnapped as a girl, and builds from their creating a rich backstory to the present action.

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Book Review, Fiction, thriller

The New Couple in 5B By Lisa Unger ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪
Genre: Thriller
Read if you liked: Lock Every Door

Rosie and Chad’s lives are forever changed when they inherit a luxury apartment in the esteemed Windermere in New York City from Chad’s late uncle. Initially, Rosie couldn’t be more thrilled at their change of circumstances, but as she learns more and more about the building’s dark past, she begins to suspect there’s something deeply disturbing still happening there.

There have been a lot of thrillers in recent years that focus on a creepy old building that seems to take on a life of its own. In my opinion, those other thrillers approach the premise a lot better than this one. The supernatural elements seemed very plot device-y and thrown in to try to do all the heavy lifting of making the Windermere seem spooky.

I had trouble connecting with the main characters, which made it difficult for me to get invested in their story. That said, the mystery surrounding their neighbors and the constant surveillance in the building intrigued me.

The story is told with alternating timelines and I was holding my breath to see how they tied together. The plotline set in the past is what kept me invested in unraveling the connections between past and present occurrences.

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Book Review, Fiction, thriller

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪.5
Genre: Thriller
Read if you liked: Final Girls

What a chilling read. Bright Young Women is a fictionalized retelling of Ted Bundy’s crimes told in alternating perspectives from two women, Pamela and Tina, who were close with his victims, as well as one of the victims herself, Ruth. It highlights the incompetence of law enforcement of catching and sentencing a serial killer and the vibrance and promise of the women whose lives he cut short.

Although this is largely a story following The Defendant’s crimes and sentencing, it delves deeply into Pamela, Tina, and Ruth’s lives, interests, desires and past trauma. Each one is richly detailed and it was so heartbreaking to see how their lives were altered forever by the actions of The Defendant.

Much of this book aims at highlighting the fact that The Defendant was not smart and attractive as media made out in the real case, he was actually quite dim and it was the lack of accountability in law enforcement that allowed him to continue murdering so many women.

I really appreciated that this was a true-crime style book that centered the victims and didn’t even name the perpetrator. It was a unique way to tell this story and one that I found powerful, although a bit slow for the first half.

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Book Review, Fiction, thriller

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai ~ Book Review

Morgan

Genre: Thriller
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪

When Bodie Kane is invited back to her high school boarding school to teach a course, it inevitably brings up memories of the murder of Thalia Keith, which took place her senior year there. As she encourages her students to create podcasts about the school as a major course assignment, Bodie finds herself drawn deeper and deeper into the past.

The format of this mystery was really intriguing, with Bodie intermittently addressing the various possible killers and outlining how and why they might have killed Thalia. Although sometimes this made it hard for me to keep track of what was actually happening, it was an unusual setup and I appreciated it.

There was enough drama and layers that I didn’t know who the killer was. That being said, the storyline felt repetitive for me and it was interspersed with narrative about Bodie’s personal life that felt ultimately unnecessary and just sort of slowed things down.

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Book Review, Fiction, thriller

None of this is True by Lisa Jewell ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Thriller
Similar to: Emma in the Night

Podcast books seem to really be picking up in recent years. Alix is a podcast host, highlighting the lives of different women. When she runs into Josie at a restaurant on both of their forty-fifth birthdays, Josie latches onto Alix, convincing her that she deserves to be the subject of a podcast.

The book bounces back and forth between present day narrative of the two women interacting, snippets of their recorded podcast, and updates from a documentary about them. It’s clear based on the documentary that something dark is coming for the two women and it made it hard for me to put this book down.

Josie is one of the most spine-tinglingly off-putting characters I’ve read. Clearly unreliable, her actions made me cringe throughout the entirety of the book and I wanted to shake Alix sometimes. The real story here is incredibly dark and twisted, so be warned.

Despite the snappy format, I found that the narrative dragged toward the middle. We kept getting story after story that we couldn’t trust and I was ready for things to be figured out long before they were. I also did not think the ending did justice to the rest of the story.

Solid, but not standout.

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Book Review, Fiction, thriller

Emma in the Night by Wendy Walker ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Thriller

Cass and her big sister Emma disappear one night, neither to be seen for three years. When Cass returns, she tells the police, to the best of her ability, about the island they were held by two strangers. The more Abby, the forensic psychiatrist on their case, hears, the less sure she is that she believes Cass’s story.

This is, above all, the story of a deeply dysfunctional family. It speaks to narcissism and the impact it can have on children. The way that Cass narrates her story makes it clear that she is spinning some sort of tale, but it is unclear why or which parts of it are true. The detailed description of her and Emma’s life being held captive kept me invested in the story and could not have prepared me for the ultimate unveiling of where Emma was.

I didn’t find Abby’s perspective as compelling as Cass’s – I felt like I needed more of her backstory, but she was an interesting point of view to include and added some context to Cass and Emma’s family dynamics.

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Book Review, thriller

The Senator’s Wife by Liv Constantine ~ Book Review

Morgan

Thriller
My Rating: 🍪

When Sloane and Whit tragically lose their spouses, they find themselves turning to each other for comfort. Although they’ve long been friends, they never expected to become romantically involved, but years later they are married. Sloane is struggling with Lupus and they decide to hire a home health aid, Athena, to help her out physically and with her work. Soon however, Sloane begins to question Athena’s true motives.

Okay, I loved previous books by Liv Constantine, but the writing style in this one KILLED me. There was so much telling rather than showing and certain characters’ supposed secrets or guilt were ‘hinted’ at so many times that it was painful to keep reading over and over again. This kind of insistence did not feel organic and made it nearly impossible for me to become immersed in the story. I also found all of the characters fairly shallow and unlikable and overall just could not get invested in their lives.

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