Tag Archives: mystery

Betrayal of Trust, by J.A. Jance *****

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betrayaloftrust Jance’s JP Beaumont detective series is one of my all-time favorites. Set (usually) in my own home town, it carries a gritty yet human, thoroughly believable flavor that I just can’t find anywhere else.

In this case, Beaumont is roped into a scandal unfolding at the governor’s mansion; it turns out he knows the governor. She was the girl who was too important to talk to him in high school, but now she wants his skill in discreetly looking into some things she’d rather not see on the front page.

It doesn’t work out that way.

This title has been re-released, and so I accidentally read this twice, but even once I had realized my error, I decided to plow through and finish it a second time. It wasn’t that I had no other books; but this series is on my very short list of things I don’t mind seeing a second time around.

Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys good detective fiction.

The Boyfriend, by Thomas Perry ****

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TheboyfriendThree and a half stars, rounded up.

I’ve been a fan of Thomas Perry’s for decades. In the past, he has written such adrenaline-coursing thrillers that I’ve actually had to put his novel down in order to calm down and breathe normally for a moment. And while The Boyfriend is an interesting story, it doesn’t measure up to the body of work I associate with this writer.

Here is the premise: we have two protagonists, a good guy and a bad guy. Our bad guy is a hit man and a serial killer. At first I really liked the author’s work here. It’s a twist I hadn’t seen before. The bad guy is hired by clients from Latin America who he hypothesizes are perhaps having him take out individuals who are also from Latin America, but who fly north to assist Washington D.C. in its attempt to take those cartels apart. He doesn’t really know, though. He was recruited by an American who also worked for them, and who became his partner. The partner was killed by one of the targets, and now our hit man, who takes a variety of names throughout the book, is a one-man killing squad. He makes a lot of money, but needs to stay below the radar and be impossible to track. The women he kills are escorts that he persuades to trust him. He behaves like the opposite of a typical john, nonthreatening, considerate, and gets them to invite him to live with them. Voila, free lodgings where the Feds won’t be looking for him. And each time he leaves, he kills his hostess in order to avoid leaving a witness behind, even though they have no idea he is a killer. The dead men he has assassinated cause a lot more flash and ruckus, so the death of a high-priced hooker doesn’t get much air time on the news or much attention from police.

I had a little trouble buying this scenario, but the author also draws out a story from the killer’s youth that shows that in shopping for an escort wherever he is staying, the man subconsciously looks for the same woman over and over again. They look alike. Again and again, he finds and kills this woman. Taken from that sort of perspective, I could buy the premise. But this part of the premise falls apart halfway through the novel with a one-sentence explanation that left me scratching my head. What the hell?

Our second protagonist, of course, is the guy who is tracking the killer. He Needs to Find Him Before He Can Kill Again. Jack Till is our good guy. Till is a private detective working for the parents of one of the escorts. They loved their daughter; they have money; they want their daughter’s killer found and brought to justice.

Till uses the internet to track where he believes the killer will go next. The clues he uses at first are believable, and the story line, if not gripping, is interesting. But I had real problems buying into the amount of wealth he was able to expend in order to not only travel all over hell and back, but in buying breathtakingly expensive gadgets to assist him:

“He drove into Boston and bought several items: a night vision scope, a sixty-power spotting scope, and a plug-in microphone that he could listen to by telephone.”

We don’t have a sense that Catherine Hamilton’s parents are members of that bottomless, one-percent, ruling rich. They give him 100k and tell him to let them know when he needs more, but for all we know, they could be looting their retirement accounts or double-mortgaging their home. It’s believable that grieving parents would do these things. But multiple plane tickets, hotels, and expenses like the ones in the quote above (not his only stop, not his only purchases) gave me pause.

In addition, I wondered at the blithe assumption that a store, even in a major metropolis such as Boston, would have these items sitting under glass ready to be sold. Wouldn’t some of these items have to be special-ordered? That’s expensive, very specialized stock. But I will admit I don’t know a lot about firearms or spying devices; it just felt like a stretch to me.

If you are concerned about spoilers, by the way, I have confined myself to the first twenty percent of the story. Most of it is not in this review.

But I am thinking back now to the series that hooked me and a lot of other readers, when Perry was a relatively new writer. This man wrote the Jane Whitefield novels, stories about a modern-day Seneca Indian woman who uses the skills of her culture to cover the trail of endangered individuals. The series was absolutely riveting, but the nature of her work also kept it from being a more or less permanent series. Each time she did her good deed, she was that much closer to being discovered and murdered. Perry had to close that series off and write some other things, and he came up with a number of other really strong novels, some of them on par with that beloved series. And because of his sterling track record as one of the best thriller writers out there, I came to this novel with higher-than-usual expectations.

The Boyfriend holds together really well in places, and is a little clunky in others. I was lucky enough to read a free copy, not as an ARC, but as a library book brought home for me by a thoughtful family member. As such, I enjoyed it, even though I was a trifle disappointed. But at the same time, I was glad I had been able to knock it off my Christmas wish list, because there are many things I would rather unwrap than this book.

My advice to you, reader, is similar. If you find this book lying on a table of 99 cent paperbacks, or if you can read it free from the library or borrow it from someone, give it a try. See what you think. If you are new to Perry’s work, you can read it free of the high expectations I brought with me when I read it.

But don’t toss the full jacket price on the counter unless you have a budget as generous as Jack Till’s.

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn ****

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gonegirlGone Girl is famous and has had numerous awards heaped on it, made its way to the top of best seller lists, and been lauded by reviewers far more widely read than I am. Rightly so. It’s one hell of a story, and just when I thought perhaps I saw what was happening, I would find that I had merely played into the writer’s clever trap, and that the roller coaster was about to go around a bend or through a tunnel entirely unexpectedly.

Since so many others have reviewed it before me, and since I did not read the book as an ARC, I’m going to approach it in a slightly different way than usual. I want to look at how this story reflects today’s society, because that part of it jumped out at me, grabbed me by the hair and told me that these are tense times, and they aren’t improving any, not right now. And how we deal with certain issues in fiction is perhaps not as well partitioned off from real life as we might prefer to believe.

The assumptions inherent in my definition of “society” are that we are looking at the English-speaking world, and my own experience is limited to North American English-speaking society. I can’t really speak for what lies elsewhere, since the media often distorts the real picture, and I haven’t gone anywhere.

Two things jumped out at me, and one of them is something that is popping up in literature all over the place now. It’s like playing whack-a-mole: there it is! Whoa, there’s another example! And another! And another! Here’s what I see in this book, and all over the place: the police can’t help you. Or they won’t. In many situations they are equal parts disinterested in exacting real justice, and perfectly happy to do what seems easiest and most likely to complete their task with the least exertion and unhappy attention from their superiors. And not only are you not going to get help from the cops, but that means it’s okay to just go take care of it, using whatever means you deem necessary. That’s point number one of two.

So when Amy gets gone from home in a small Missouri town, the local cops do a serviceable job and look at all the possibilities. They aren’t crooked or brutal as often happens in large cities, but they also lack imagination. Our male protagonist does not really trust them very long.

I don’t mean to belabor the point, but it does bear examining, this trend in contemporary fiction. During the 1950’s, 60’s, even the 1970’s, the police, when depicted in fiction and in film, were 99 percent of the time really decent and extremely clever. They put in extra hours of their own time, went sleepless, and let their personal lives deteriorate because Catching the Real Killer consumed them. But they succeeded, in the end, and the reader (or the viewer) fully expected that to happen. They did it all within the letter of the law, because that was what good guys did. It was fiction, of course, but we believed it.

These days I read story after story, from funny capers like the Stephanie Plum series, to any number of gritty urban tales (you can probably think of half a dozen without trying too hard, if you read a lot of crime thrillers and mysteries) in which someone else has to step in and take care of the job because the cops are not up to the task. These cops aren’t always bad guys; sometimes they are underfunded, understaffed, or just plain dumb as a box of rocks. But it is the vigilante (the word is seldom used; it’s not a nice word, but it’s accurate) who will ultimately solve the crime. Sometimes there are variations, like some of James Lee Burke’s more recent work, in which a rogue cop of sorts gets sick of the rule book and goes off on “vacation” time in order to do the things that cannot be done on the clock.

The oldest story in the book is the I-have-to-solve-the-crime-cause-I’ve-been-framed plot line, although a writer who is fresh and original can still sing that same old song and make it seem brand new, not unlike the-killer-has-got-my-loved-one as a vigilante motivator.

Here’s the part that I hate and try not to think about too often, but because I see it recurring so much right now, I feel as if I have to mention it: in well-written novels such as this one, I just love it when someone who is not a cop takes matters into his or her own hands and metes out justice. That’s not sarcasm. A good writer can sell it to me and make me enjoy it, and I will look for more of that writer’s work. Because I can tell myself it’s just fiction.

In real life, when some frustrated unemployed neighbor takes to stalking the local teens to try to catch them doing something illegal; when Stand Your Ground laws enable some insecure, bumbling ass to follow young Black men around till he’s had the satisfaction of shooting one dead, once he has sufficiently goaded the man into taking a swing at him; it’s absolutely nightmarish.

One could argue that this is what fiction is for; it gives us the chance to see wrong things done right, if only subliminally. But it disturbs me that it has become so popular, and even more so that it has become thrilling to me personally. It can’t be a good sign.

I should end this here because it’s plenty to think about, but I need to talk about the equally disturbing issue number two . In Gone Girl, there are some really amazing, excellent feminist mini-manifestoes squeezed in between the many damning things that our bad-girl protagonist says and does. Again, I find myself bothered that we can’t see a strong, wonderful woman who notes that “I like strong women” is usually said by a man who hates strong women; that expecting one’s husband to tell her why he was out all night is deemed ‘shrill fishwife’ behavior that will destroy a marriage (because goodness knows, the marriage can’t fail over a guy who can’t find his phone or his front door at night.)

In this harrowing so-called era of post-feminism, when the states are shooting down women’s right to control their own bodies with abortion laws that are so restrictive as to be either very expensive or impossible, and ‘personhood’ amendments (which I was happy to see fail) that order the woman to honor a garbanzo-bean shaped spot of tissue and blood more than she values herself, her family, and her future, why oh why must the character who issues some genuinely truthful and brilliant statements regarding the worth of a woman also be a conniving, manipulative, narcissistic monster? With domestic violence not in abeyance and the word “bitch-slap” being considered only slightly edgy when included in a joke, why can we not have real heroes who are strong women—not slinky, young femme fatales who use their bodies as bait, but women who use their brains and social skills to get at the truth?

If I sound like it haunts me, it’s because it does.

If you want to know the standard book review information about story arc, character development, and setting, go and read what the New York Times had to say, or better still, go look at the string of awards garnered by this novel. It’s very strong writing, and of course it is not (as far as I can see) intended to make a political point.

On the other hand, people that live in war-torn nations will tell you everything is political. At dinner time, who eats and who doesn’t, that is political. Who lies, and who tells the truth; who can see a doctor and who can’t; these are every day issues that are also massively political.

As for me, I frowned and flagged the pages when I saw these hot buttons pop up, but I kept turning the pages, because I wanted to see how the story would end. And it’s a great book, sure to keep you up way past your bedtime if you aren’t careful.

But there is no ducking the fact that it is also a product of the time in which we live. Let us come up for air from time to time, and view things as they are, lest we get sucked into the oily abyss of socially sick ideas without even realizing we’ve been had.

Top-Secret Twenty-One, by Janet Evanovich *****

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topsecrettwentyone“Hold on here,” Lula said. “Are we talking a rocket like ZOOM BANG! and everything’s blown all to hell?”

“It was more like BANG WHOOSH!” Briggs said…”And at great personal risk to myself I rescued the hamster.”


“No shit?” Lula said. “Is that true?”


Oh, great literature is good for the mind, but once in awhile we just need a little mind candy to perk up our day, and at that, Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series excels. We’ve got the usual cast of crazies as well as a war of vengeance between Grandma Mazur and Joe Morelli’s Grandma Bella. We have attack chihuahuas, plenty of explosives, and a trip to Atlantic City. What more can we ask for?

For those reading in digital format, be aware that a teaser for one of Evanovich’s other series books takes up the last 11% of the book. I was crushed when it ended at 89%, because I had expected it to keep going.

Now I will have to read something else until #22 comes along!

All That Glitters, by Michael Murphy*****

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allthatglittersThis was a quick read, and a fun one. Don’t be left out in the dark when it hits the shelves in January!

Jake Donovan and Laura Wilson have left the Big Apple in their dust and gone to Hollywood, where Laura is about to enter a new phase of her career with a lead role in one of the new talking pictures. All That Glitters, the new episode of Michael Murphy’s Jake and Laura series, a cozy mystery  if ever there was one, is full of Depression-era flavor, complete with celebrities from the time and place in which is it set. The writing is tight and sassy. Murphy has penned a winner! My thanks go to Net Galley and Alibi Publishers for the ARC.

Jake has promised Laura that his risky gumshoe days are over; he is a novelist now, a new leaf turned over for the woman he loves. Who would dream that Blackie Doyle, the protagonist of his series, would have to solve a real-life murder to clear author Donovan of a murder charge that has been tethered to him by scant evidence and lazy cops? Louella Parsons, a real-life celebrity journalist whom Murphy has borrowed to add spice to his already spunky story, wants to see him behind bars; just think what a scoop it represents!

The story is enhanced by one detective who carries a torch for Jake, and another who creates all manner of ridiculous situations with his obvious, bumbling surveillance. Murphy peppers the narrative and dialogue with generous applications of Depression-era slang that sounded to this reviewer as if it had fallen from the lips of her late parents. In other words: it’s a doozy!

Cold weather has come, and now is the perfect time to curl up in your favorite warm hidey-hole with this extremely entertaining mystery. You never know; you may become addicted to the series.

Stranger things have happened!

Taking the Fifth, by J.A. Jance *****

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takingthefifthJ.A. Jance has three series running. This one, with protagonist J.P. Beaumont as the detective who works the damp shadows of Seattle, is the best. All of the books in this series are really good, but this particular novel signals a sea change that will affect how the rest of the series plays out. It is also one of the most memorable (of 600+) mystery, detective, or thriller novels I have ever read.

Taking the Fifth has a strong flavor of noir, and J.P. Beaumont is one of the last of the really good guys. Jance weaves the reader through a brutal story involving the drug trade. You may put down this book once or twice just to wash your hands and rinse out your mouth. And yet, like the junkies in Seattle’s back alleys, you’ll be back for more. The author hits the ground running, and the ending is entirely believable, yet not obvious or expected.

If you haven’t read up to #4 in this series yet, you are running behind. If you are quick about it, you can get through the first three in time to read this one before October runs out. Get busy!

Burning Angel, by James Lee Burke *****

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I’ve enjoyed and reviewed the whole Robicheaux series over the course of the last year and a half, burningangeland began with a much more recent one that I read out of sequence because it found its way into my home. So now that I’ve commented multiple times upon the brilliance and eloquence of this writer, I just have to get this off my chest:

Does this protagonist EVER eat VEGETABLES? (Onions on a sandwich don’t count!)

We move through the plot lines with a steady series of meals, & this makes it realistic. Some crime/mystery writers have protagonists who appear to never eat or sleep, & at some point one starts to notice. This writer uses food to evoke a sense of setting, constantly parading before us his begniets, his boudin, his po’ boy sandwiches. He fries fish and gobbles that up, too.

In one of his novels his narrative mentions a bad guy as being among those who let their bodies get vastly overweight because they eat wrong and don’t care what they look like, and I want to say, maybe they didn’t get your excellent DNA, pal, because even though you jog and work out, your diet is a walking heart attack. Coffee, Dr. Pepper, fried fish, dairy, and starch. Holy crap.

Okay, I just had to rant this once about that, because I’ve been thinking about it awhile.

The story line itself is like others, except that it isn’t; by this time he has established a following, and the series is consistent in its approach and has characters we see again, and others that are hauntingly real, but that we probably won’t see. As always, Burke uses his characters to show us the ambiguity in humanity, and that sometimes the people you expect to be good guys aren’t all that good, and that sometimes the archetypical bad guy has some good in him, too. In this story, a gangster gives his life to save Dave’s. This also gives him one more dead person to talk to and dream about. But it isn’t stale; it makes me snuggle a bit more deeply under the comforter at night and think, “Ah yes! Here we go!”

If you are a reader of Burke’s who fancies Clete Purcel, as my spouse and I do (and my guy, who is almost always strictly a nonfiction reader, is completely hooked on this series and is reading ahead of me now, chuckling happily whenever he runs across Cletus), be assured he is an integral part of this particular story, and he’s in fine form.

The constant struggle Robicheaux finds throughout his career is that when you are a cop, you have a decent paycheck, the authority to do things that a private citizen cannot, and a certain amount of personal protection, especially in dealing with mobsters. But the problem with being a cop is that you’re working for an apparatus that is not set up to defend those who need it most:

“The big trade-off is one’s humanity…you start your career with the moral clarity of the youthful altruist, then gradually you begin to feel betrayed by those you supposedly protect and serve. You’re not welcome in their part of town…the most venal bondsman can walk with immunity through neighborhoods where you’ll be shot at by snipers. You begin to believe that there are those in our midst who are not part of the same gene pool. You think of them as subhuman…whom you treat in custody as you would humorous circus animals.”

From there, he describes the quick, slippery slope in which a cop may shoot a suspect who held something out that glinted in the very dark night and which the cop thought to be a weapon. After shooting the man with the screwdriver or car keys in his hand, a weapon with a filed serial number gets wrapped in the guy’s hand, then dropped nearby. And cops stand by one another in these cases. The corruption has solidified, and you are no longer on the side of the angels.

He does a nice job with character development here. His wife Bootsie is not the frightened and easily horrified woman she once was; when he launches himself out into the darkness to do something dangerous, she sends him off with the reminder: “Watch your ass, kiddo.”

Alafair, an enchanting toddler when the series started, has begun dating. She won’t let him call her ‘little guy’ anymore. And she learns how to use a gun, because it seems as if bad guys are always lurking around, waiting to exact revenge either on her father, or against him by harming her family. She wants to be ready.

He’s on the force; he’s off it. The bait shop/cafe doesn’t make more than 15K a year; the family can’t live off that. The private detective business Clete recruits him into doesn’t make good money either. The only takers are the bad guys they don’t want to deal with.

At one point, someone reminds him that having his badge means he gets to walk on the curb instead of in the gutter. But he is ambivalent, because being the enforcement arm of the US government isn’t pretty, and there’s no way to turn that around. Being a rural deputy rather than a city cop is the compromise he has made at this point, but it’s still a nasty business, and as usual, the ending is bittersweet.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Folly, by Laurie R King *****

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follyWhoa Nellie! King is one of my favorite authors, and I like her best when she gets away from the Holmes’ wife series and into strong contemporary fiction like this.

Rae Newborn is our protagonist, and she’s been having some mental health issues. She takes herself off to do a project on a remote island, property owned by her uncle. She has a feeling she is watched all the time, and so she is glad she is somewhere that she knows she has all to herself. Who the hell would come all the way out here? There’s no ferry service. You’d have to go to a lot of effort to get there, and there’s really nothing on the island beyond her uncle’s house, which needs a lot of work.

Unfortunately, that creepy feeling intensifies once she is on the island.

I started reading and an invisible hand reached out of the pages, grabbed me by my shirt’s front and yanked me in. I was on that island, and let me tell you, it got smaller, and smaller, and smaller…heart-pounding and absorbing, I could not stop till it was done.

I gave it to a friend to read when I was finished. When she had finished it, she asked me not to give her any others by this writer, because it was so adrenaline-pounding that “it was a little much for me.” And it is a lot. It is a psychological thriller by a master of the genre.

Often by now I acknowledge whoever gave me the galley to read free, but not this time. I bought this book at cover price from my own pocket, and I am telling you, it was worth every cent.

If you have a low threshold for really gripping prose, (or if, like my friend, you have recently experienced a loss and are tender around the edges), get something a little bit tamer. But if, like me, your favorite roller coasters are between book covers, this one is for you. Brilliantly plotted with a story line that accelerates and whips you around until it’s over.

Pleasantville, by Attica Locke *****

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pleasantvilleJay Porter has a full plate, and so his legal career has been set on cruise control. Money is the least of his worries; he is successful, and has won a very large case, though it hasn’t paid yet. No, his issues have to do with family, and with grieving. And with grieving. And with grieving. His wife Bernie died young and fast due to an illness that she knew she had, but had chosen not to share. She pushed him to follow through on his enormous case against the oil company that had sickened, even killed people in their own close-knit, middle class African-American suburb outside Houston, Texas. It was important to everyone that the families affected experienced justice. But now he wishes he had spent more time by his wife’s bedside and less in the courtroom. His self-hatred for the time spent away from his wife and two children during that final crisis has left him determined not to set foot in another court room. Not ever.

And so this sequel to Black Water Rising, the red-hot hit by this author, starts out ominously, as a vulnerable teen waiting at a bus stop wonders whether she should run from the car that is watching her, even though she is so far from home that she doesn’t know how to get back, or wait for that bus. Next thing we know, she’s been murdered.

But Jay Porter is still too caught up in his own personal situation to pay much attention at first. Bernie’s sister Evelyn helped him get Bernie’s clothes packed up and moved out, but he can’t look at her car. Can’t look. And the holidays coming around the corner, all the gut-punching emotion with which they are fraught, that stinks too.

At this point, I should let you know that you can’t read this yet. It won’t come out till April, but I got my ARC from edelweiss books a week ago, and I’ve been reading it obsessively, so now is the time to review it. I will post this again when the book comes out, but for now, you can pre-order it, or put it on your Christmas list. After the holidays have come, gone, been cleaned up and winter survived, wouldn’t it be nice to come home and find this heart-pounding thriller waiting in the mailbox to make your weekend better? And what a story it is!

And so, back to Jay Porter. Porter is holding Cole Oil to the award the courts granted to the many citizens he represented. His fee, 20 million dollars, will be enough for him to retire on. He can send his secretary into the retirement she longs for, and he can put his feet up and be a father to his kids. But oh, how he wishes Bernie could be there.

Meanwhile, his friends and neighbors are growing agitated about Alicia Nowell’s disappearance. She is the third girl from the community to go missing in the past few years. The first two were kept alive for a few days; their bodies were found on day 6, and the coroner ruled they had been dead for only 24 hours or less. So they figure that girl is out there, alive, somewhere. Volunteer crews are searching fields after the cops have been there, squaring off grids in professional fashion while others knock on doors, try to get information that the local cop shop hasn’t found. And in the midst of a mayoral race, hay is being made by the opponent of the traditional Black candidate. Because the neighborhood has been slowly, insidiously (to some) changing since the death of Jim Crow. Now young Black kids from strong families don’t have to live in Pleasantville to find a good house. They can move wherever they want. That’s good, right? But Latino families looking for good schools and good housing find reception that is sometimes tense as they ease into town, and the old guard realizes they may no longer be a unified force politically.

Disbelief and horror take hold when the grandson of the community’s most venerated elder is arrested for the murder of Alicia Nowell. Assuming that an error has been made and without a second thought, Jay, who by coincidence happens to be at the police station while Neal Hathorne is being questioned, strides into the interrogation room and announces that he is Neal’s attorney. He has no idea what a firestorm he has unleashed upon himself, and upon his family.

I am retired, and have the luxury of several hours of designated reading time every evening. It’s pretty sweet. But this book caught me by the hair and made me stay with it, modifying my schedule so I could see just what the hell is happening here. My e-reader followed me down to the kitchen. It followed me into the laundry room. I was cranky when the phone rang and interrupted my time with Jay. Because after all, we had to get him out of this mess, and what the hell is going on with his daughter Ellie? Good thing he is being a careful father so that we won’t have to deal with that old, hackneyed now-they’re-after-his-own-kid plot line. Jay is smart enough to realize his daughter fits the profile of the kidnapped and murdered girls, and he is looking out for his girl. We respect him for it, and I nodded with approval at the e-reader as I fed the dog, went out to get the mail. I broke or spilled things four times because I wasn’t looking at what I was doing; I was reading this book, because the book couldn’t wait.

If Locke’s fingernail-biter of a tale reminds me of the style of any other writer, it is of James Lee Burke, now an octogenarian who is unlikely to write much more. And although only Locke knows whether it is intended as a nod to that bayou living legend, she names the bereaved parents Robicheaux. I rather liked the touch, if that’s what it was.

So whether you order this book, request it as a gift, or buy it when it comes out, consider it a must read. This book is already creating a buzz six months prior to publication, and it is going to be a monster. Don’t let yourself be left out!

A Penny for the Hangman, by Tom Savage *****

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a penny for the hangmanTom Savage is not new to the scary-book biz, but he was new to me. Maybe that is why I fell for the formulaic-looking beginning to this book. Ho hum. Been there, read that. Since it was obviously a fast read, I figured I would get it over with, write my review, poor fellow, and move on.

That was my mistake.

Here’s the premise: Karen Tyler is a journalist just looking for the meaty, headline-grabbing story that will launch her career. Her editor isn’t giving her much to work with. Then comes the phantom phone call. It relates to an infamous historical murder, and it is too tempting for a journalist with any kind of moxie to walk away from.

See, many years ago, a pair of juvenile delinquents had murdered their entire household. It was an unthinkable killing spree. One of the youngsters was found at the scene of the crime; the other had painted himself in the blood of his family (and that of an innocent servant who was in the way) and made a break for it. The coast guard picked him up. Both boys went away to serve long sentences; when they were released, neither was young anymore.

Tyler, our journalist, gets a phone call from one of the two killers, and he offers her an exclusive interview, swears there is more to the story than anyone knew. He will even pay her plane fare to St. Thomas, adding a free tropical vacation to his offer.

We, the readers, chant that same refrain we have chanted during so many scary books and movies: Don’t do it! Don’t get on that plane! Don’t get on that boat! Don’t go to that island! It’s a trap!

To reinforce our fears, the narrative is punctuated with journal entries by various characters in the story. And oh my my my, it sure doesn’t look good for our gutsy but perhaps imprudent reporter.

But nothing, no nothing, is the way it seems. I caught onto one plot trick, but then by the time I caught on, Savage had pretty much given me all the puzzle pieces, and it wasn’t a major plot point that I sleuthed out, it was fairly incidental. Savage is a magician with story, and he has more hidden up his sleeve than any reader can possibly guess!

So for Halloween this year, give yourself a gift that will keep those shadows jumping on the wall as you read in your favorite book by the fire…or the space heater…or…well, you get the idea. This story, which will be released October 7, has more twists, turns, uphill battles and plunges than Space Mountain, and more bodies than a slasher flick (but without the excessive gore, at least on my own personal ick-meter).

Thank you and thank you again to Net Galley and Random House for treating me to Savage’s work. His most successful book before this one, they say, is Valentine, and it goes onto my to-read shelf.

Why do we read these terrifying tales with blood on the stones and body parts in places they don’t belong? I think it is because they make us feel so much safer and more secure in our own little nooks and crannies. When there’s a killer thundering around every corner, it makes our own problems seem so small.

If you are in need of that sort of pick-me-up, or if you just adore a book in which things and people unknown lurk in the shadows—or not—well maybe so, actually—then you just have to get Savage’s book. If you aren’t up for reading it all by yourself, then you can read it with your friend or partner, and it will be twice the thrill.

Highly recommended!