thriller

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464. Pretty Things

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Stock

Author:  Janelle Brown

Genre:   Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

496 pages, published April 21, 2020

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Pretty Things tells the story of two very different women.  Nina is a grifter who grew up bouncing from town to town with her less than honorable single mother.  Vanessa is an heiress who has made a name for herself as a lifestyle Instagram celebrity.  Their worlds collide in Lake Tahoe where the two engage in a cat and mouse, table turning game of deceit and duplicity.

Quotes 

“Nothing is ever as pure as it seems at first glance; there is always something more complicated to be found when you peel back the unmarred surface of pretty things.”

 

“Perspective is, by nature, subjective. It’s impossible to climb inside someone else’s head, despite your best-or worst-intentions.”

 

“It’s easiest to judge from distance. That’s why the Internet has turned us all into armchair critics, experts at the cold dissection of gesture and syllable, sneering self-righteously from the safety of our screens. There, we can feel good about ourselves, validated that our flaws weren’t as bad as theirs, unchallenged in our superiority. Moral high ground is a pleasant place to preach, even if the view turns out to be rather limited in scope.”

 

“But I suppose that’s the point of it all, for Vanessa: To throw herself into the world she wants to inhibit in the hopes of forgetting the one in which she really lives. Who am I to say she’s wrong to try? We all build our own delusions and then live inside them, constructing walls to conveniently hide the things we don’t want to see. Maybe it means that we’re crazy, or maybe it means that we’re monsters, or maybe it’s just the world we live in now makes it so hard to separate truth from image from dream.”

 

“Anything you do in fury’s service feels justifiable; no matter how petty, how small, how nasty or cruel.”

 

“Caption-and-comment culture in all its brevity leaves out the middle ground, where most of life is found.”

 

“Social media feeds the narcissistic monster that lives within us all, I would think to myself. It feeds it and grows it until the beast takes over and you are left outside the frame, just looking at images of this creature, like everyone else in your feed, wondering what it is that you birthed and why it’s living the life you wish you had.”

 

“Maybe our greatest strength as human beings is also our greatest weakness, the need to love and be loved.”

 

“and that, in fact, for most people not born into privilege, the playing field is a steep incline and you are at the bottom with boulders tied to your ankles.”

 

“They say DNA is destiny. And probably this is true for those with gift coded in their genes: say, a rare beauty or intelligence, the ability to run a four minute mile or dunk a basketball, or perhaps just innate cunning or insatiable drive. But for the rest of the world, those born without some obvious greatness, it’s not your DNA that will get you ahead; it’s the life you were born into. The opportunities you were (or weren’t) handed on a silver platter. It’s your circumstances.”

 

“Smarts mean a lot in the world, but good looks even more.”

 

“I watch and I wait. I study what people have, and where they have it. It’s easy because they show me. Their social media accounts are like windows into their worlds that they’ve flung open, begging me to peer inside and take inventory.”

 

“In the end, we are all our mothers’ children, no matter how saintly or evil they might be; and the loss of their love is the earthquake that cracks your foundation forever. It’s permanent damage.”

 

“This is the great horror of life: that mistakes are forever, and cannot be undone. You can never truly go back, even if you want to retrace your steps and take another route. The path has already disappeared behind you.”

 

“There is no one path in life that is set before you, I’m starting to realize; no one is making your decisions for you.”

 

“When you’re documenting everything you do, you stop living life for yourself and start living it as a performance for others. You’re never in the actual moment, just the response to the moment.”

 

“Sex—it can be about love, yes. And it’s wonderful when it’s that, and God, baby, I hope that’s what you’ve found. But it’s also a tool. Men use it to prove a point to themselves, about their power to take what they want. You’re just the first rung on the ladder of their world domination. And when that’s the kind of sex you’re having—which is most of the time—you got to make sure that you’re using it as a tool, too. Don’t let yourself be used up by them, all the time believing it’s some kind of equal relationship. Make sure you’re getting just as much out of it as they are.”

 

“Was it any wonder that people on the wrong side of the glass would eventually decide to take a hammer and break it, reach through and take some of it for themselves?”

 

My Take

Pretty Things was a roller coaster thrill ride that I whipped through.  In the same vein as Gone Girl, Janelle Brown knows how to write a cliff hanging page turner.  I love getting caught up in a non-stop, well written thriller and thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent reading Pretty Things.

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450. The Institute

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:   Fiction, Horror, Thriller, Fantasy

561 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In the middle of the night, twelve year old Luke Ellis is kidnapped from his house in suburban Minneapolis and his parents are murdered.  Luke wakes up in a bizarre facility known as The Institute which imprisons kids like him with special powers including telepathy and telekinesis.  Luke’s mission is to escape from The Institute.

Quotes 

“Great events turn on small hinges.”

 

“He wanted to tell Luke that he loved him. But there were no words, and maybe no need of them. Or telepathy. Sometimes a hug was telepathy.”

 

“It came to him, with the force of a revelation, that you had to have been imprisoned to fully understand what freedom was.”

 

“It was so simple, but it was a revelation: what you did for yourself was what gave you the power.”

 

“There was an abyss. And books contained magical incantations to raise what was hidden there, all the great mysteries.”

 

“It came to him (and with the force of a revelation) that life was basically one long SAT test, and instead of four or five choices, you got dozens.”

 

“Seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by atomic bombs, the world is still here even though many nations have atomic weapons, even though primitive human emotions still hold sway over rational thought and superstition masquerading as religion still guides the course of human politics.”

 

My Take

Another quick-moving, compelling read by Stephen King.  Not his best work, but very enjoyable nonetheless.  Perfect escapism for a vacation.

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449. In Six Days: An Eco-Terrorism Fable

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Mike Mendelsohn

Author:   Mike Mendelsohn

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller

289 pages, published 2020

Reading Format:  e-Book

Summary

In Six Days:  An Eco-Terrorism Fable is a thriller that follows a two eco-terrorists who are destroying ecological harmful sites throughout the U.S. in an escalating fashion.  It also follows a washed up, widower with a free spirited daughter who has made a small fortune trading bitcoin and a cabal of Republican congressmen who have blood on their hands.

Quotes 

I read this book as part of a book group of which the author, a first time fiction writer, is a member.  I commend him actually writing a book, something that is very hard to do.  As a conservative, I am not the target audience for this book.  I found the portrayal of the “evil” Republican congressmen to be one-dimensional and clichéd.   I imagine that those with a more left-wing persuasion might enjoy this book more than I did.

 

My Take

I read this book as part of a book group of which the author, a first time fiction writer, is a member.  I commend him actually writing a book, something that is very hard to do.  As a conservative, I am not the target audience for this book.  I found the portrayal of the “evil” Republican congressmen to be one-dimensional and clichéd.   I imagine that those with a more left-wing persuasion might enjoy this book more than I did.

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438. Pieces of Her

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Karin Slaughter

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime

496 pages, published May 21, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

Pieces of Her is a twisty thriller that follows two tracks.  In the present day track, Andrea Cooper is on the run after watching her mother Laura professionally kill a would be killer.  As she makes her escape, Andrea learns that her mother is not who she thought she was.  The second track takes places more than twenty years earlier and provides the back story for Laura.

Quotes 

“Love doesn’t keep you in a constant state of turmoil. It gives you peace.”

 

“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds. —Mexican Proverb”

 

“She had dozens, even hundreds, of friends, but not one single person knew all of the pieces of her.”

 

“Men can always reinvent themselves,” Laura said. “For women, once you’re a mother, you’re always a mother.”

 

“Age is a cruel punishment for youth.”

 

“Men never have to be uncomfortable around women. Women have to be uncomfortable around men all of the time.”

 

My Take

I found Pieces of Her to be a serviceable thriller with a few interesting plot points.  However, it would have been improved by condensing to a shorter version.

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426. Long Bright River

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Ashley Christianson

Author:   Liz Moore

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime

482 pages, published January 7, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Long Bright River takes place in Kensington, a rundown Philadelphia neighborhood that has been decimated by the opioid crisis.  Mickey is a single mother and a beat police officer trying to escape her painful childhood by making a better life with her young son.  Her estranged sister Kacey, from whom whe was once inseparable, is a junkie and a prostitute.  When Kacey disappears and young women begin showing up as murder victims, Mickey risks everything to find her sister before it is too late.

Quotes 

“This was the secret I learned that day: none of them want to be saved. They all want to sink backward toward the earth again, to be swallowed by the ground, to keep sleeping. There is hatred on their faces when they are roused from the dead.”

 

“Who on earth can explain, in words alone, the great gutting tenderness of holding your child in your arms? The animal feeling of it—the baby’s soft muzzle, the baby’s new skin (which throws into relief the wear your own has endured), the little hand reaching up to your face, searching for family. The quick small pats, light as moths, that land on your cheek and chest.”

 

“I wouldn’t listen. I wanted everything to stay as it was. I was more afraid of the truth than the lie. The truth would change the circumstances of my life. The lie was static. The lie was peaceful. I was happy with the lie.”

 

“Some people do have trouble with Kensington, but to me the neighborhood itself has become like a relative, slightly problematic but dear in the old-fashioned way that that word is sometimes used, treasured, valuable to me.”

 

“I tried hard to ignore the low noise that thrummed throughout my day, some tolling, cautionary bell. I wouldn’t listen. I wanted everything to stay as it was. I was more afraid of the truth than the lie. The truth would change the circumstances of my life. The lie was static. The lie was peaceful. I was happy with the lie.”

 

My Take

I really loved Long Bright River, a gripping, beautifully written thriller that is so much more than a thriller.  Author Liz Moore takes you deep inside the life of Mickey Fitzpatrick, a flawed but deeply human police officer, who struggles to do the right thing as she is repeatedly forced to deal with difficult situations.  The back stories of Mickey and her sister Kacey are heart breaking but ring very true.  I couldn’t put this book down.  Highly recommended.

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425. The Silent Patient

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Alex Michaelides

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller, Mystery

325 pages, published February 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Silent Patient is a psychological thriller written from the point of view of Theo Faber, a criminal psychotherapist whose latest patient is Alicia Berenson, a famous painter who is in a mental ward after killing her husband Gabriel, a successful fashion photographer.  Since the murder, Alicia has refused to speak.  Her most recent painting, entitled Alcestis, is a self portrait and is based on the Greek myth of a female heroine who is betrayed by her husband who selfishly asks his wife, Alcestis, to die in his place. When Alcestis is returned to him from her death, Alcestis mysteriously remains mute.

Quotes 

“Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist. We need to ask ourselves, is this someone who will be honest with me, listen to criticism, admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible?”

 

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. —SIGMUND FREUD”

 

“The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it. —ALICE MILLER”

 

“We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.”

 

“About fireworks?

About love. About how we often mistake love for fireworks – for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm – and constant. I imagine you do give Kathy love – in the true sense of the word. Whether or not she is capable of giving it back to you is another question.”

 

“At the time I didn’t understand. But that’s how therapy works. A patient delegates his unacceptable feelings to his therapist; and she holds everything he is afraid to feel, and feels it for him. Then, ever so slowly, she feeds his feelings back to him.”

 

“There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other.”

 

“Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness: an act of possession that instantly gives way to nothing. It reminded me that there was a world outside this house: a world of vastness and unimaginable beauty; a world that for now, remained out of my reach. That memory had repeatedly returned to me over the years. It’s as if the misery that surrounded that brief moment of freedom made it burn even brighter: a tiny light surrounded by darkness.”

 

“Love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”

 

“You know, one of the hardest things to admit is that we weren’t loved when we needed it most. It’s a terrible feeling, the pain of not being loved.”

 

“I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health. We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged – we study psychology to heal ourselves. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.”

 

“No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”

 

My Take

The Silent Patient is a taut thriller that delves into the worlds of greek mythology and modern day therapy.  It kept me guessing and there were some unexpected twists at the end.  Recommended.

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420. Midnight Sun

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Jo Nesbø

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

273 pages, published February 16, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Midnight Sun tells the story of Jon, a hitman for Oslo’s biggest crime lord The Fisherman, who is on the run after he betrays his boss.  Jon flees to a small, isolated town in the mountains of Norway that is so far north the sun never sets.  While seeking sanctuary from a local religious sect, Jon falls in love with Lea, a bereaved mother and her young son, Knut.

However, the Fisherman’s men are closing in.

Quotes 

“I shut my eyes and concentrated on the sun, and on feeling it warm my skin. On pleasure. Hedon. The Greek god. Or idol, as he should probably be called seeing as I was on hallowed ground. It’s pretty arrogant, calling all other gods, apart from the one you’ve come up with, idols. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Every dictator’s command to his subjects, of course. The funny thing was that Christians couldn’t see it themselves. They didn’t see the mechanism, the regenerative, self-fulfilling, self-aggrandising aspect which meant that a superstition like this could survive for two thousand years, and in which the key–salvation–was restricted to those who were fortunate enough to have been born in a space of time which was a merest blink of the eye in human history, and who also happened to live on the only little bit of the planet that ever got to hear the commandment and were able to formulate an opinion about the concise sales pitch (“Paradise?”).”

 

“You couldn’t see anything, you were just getting on with your life, and then one day you could just physically feel that you’d got caught in the gravitational field, and then you were lost, you got sucked into a black hole of hopelessness and infinite despair. And in there everything was the mirror image of the way it was outside. You’d keep asking yourself if there was any reason to have any hope, if there was any good reason not to despair. It was a hole in which you just had to let time run its course, put on a record by another depressed soul, the angry man of jazz, Charles Mingus, and hope you emerged on the other side, like some fucking Alice popping out of her rabbit hole. But according to Finkelstein and the others, that might be exactly what it was like, that there was a sort of mirror-image wonderland on the other side of the black hole. I don’t know, but it strikes me that it’s as good and reliable a religion as any other.”

 

“I felt I was about to say something, that the words were on their way, I just wasn’t quite sure which ones they were going to be. And when they arrived it was as if they had arranged themselves, that I wasn’t in charge of them, yet they were still born of the clearest logic.”

 

“He rubbed his chin. “Then you have to believe that living as a Christian is in itself good. That renunciation, not succumbing to sin, has a value for human beings even in this earthly life. On a similar theme, I’ve read that sportsmen find the pain and effort of training meaningful in itself, even if they never win anything. If heaven didn’t actually exist, then at least we have a good, secure life as Christians, where we work, live happily, accept the possibilities God and nature give us, and look after each other. Do you know what my father—also a preacher—used to say about Læstadianism? That if you only counted the people the movement had saved from alcoholism and broken homes, that alone would justify what we do, even if we were preaching a lie.” He paused for a minute. “But it’s not always like that. Sometimes it costs more than it should to live according to Scripture. The way it did for Lea…The way I, in my delusion, forced Lea to live.” There was a faint tremor in his voice. “It took me many years to realise it, but no one should be forced by their father to live in a marriage like that, with a man they hate, a man who had taken them by force.” He raised his head and looked at the crucifix above us. “Yes, I remain convinced that it was right according to Scripture, but sometimes salvation can have too high a price.”

 

“He designed churches. Because he was good at it, he said, not because he believed in the existence of any gods. It was a way of making a living. But he said he wished he believed in the God they paid him to build churches for. That might have made the job feel more meaningful.”

 

My Take

I had previously read The Snowman by Jo Nesbø and really enjoyed it.  So I thought I would give Midnight Sun a read.  Okay, but not nearly as good.  I recommend skipping it.

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411. The Deserter

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Mike Brady

Author:    Nelson DeMille

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Suspense

448 pages, published October 22, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Army Special Operator Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor of the Criminal Investigation Division are sent in by the military to Venezuela to capture Captain Kyle Mercer of the Army’s elite Delta Force.  When Mercer disappeared from his post in Afghanistan, a video released by his Taliban captors made international headlines.  But it was unclear if Mercer deserted before he was captured.  A second video sent to Mercer’s Army commanders revealed that Mercer intentionally disappeared.

Quotes 

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

 

“He had a clean shot, but he also had an informal rule of trying not to kill anyone within an hour of landing in a new country.”

 

“The first casualty of war is the truth.”

 

“I’m always ready for anything, but prepared for nothing.”

 

My Take

The Deserter is a somewhat engaging, but a bit clichéd, thriller.  With the nonstop machismo of the main character, I think its appeal was wasted on a 54 year old woman like me.

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398. The Secret Place

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Suspense, Foreign

480 pages, published August 28, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

A year after the discovery of a teenaged boy’s murder at a girlsʼ boarding school, Detective Stephen Moran is brought in with Detective Antoinette Conway to reopen the case.   Moran had been waiting for his chance to join Dublin’s Murder Squad when sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey arrives in his office with a photo of the boy with the caption: “I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.”  Under the watchful eye of Holly’s father, fellow detective Frank Mackey. Moran and Conway investigate the murder which leads them to Holly’s close-knit group of friends, a rival clique, and to the snarl of relationships that bound all of them to the murdered boy.

Quotes 

“You forget what it was like. You’d swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst.  How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.”

 

“I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.”

 

“She hears all the voices from when she was little, soothing, strengthening: Don’t be scared, not of monsters, not of witches, not of big dogs. And now, snapping loud from every direction: Be scared, you have to be scared, ordering like this is your one absolute duty. Be scared you’re fat, be scared your boobs are too big and be scared they’re too small. Be scared to walk on your own, specially anywhere quiet enough that you can hear yourself think. Be scared of wearing the wrong stuff, saying the wrong thing, having a stupid laugh, being uncool. Be scared of guys not fancying you; be scared of guys, they’re animals, rabid, can’t stop themselves. Be scared of girls, they’re all vicious, they’ll cut you down before you can cut them. Be scared of strangers. Be scared you won’t do well enough in your exams, be scared of getting in trouble. Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl.”

 

“Trust your instincts, Dad always says. If something feels dodgy to you, if someone feels dodgy, you go with dodgy. Don’t give the benefit of the doubt because you want to be a nice person, don’t wait and see in case you look stupid. Safe comes first. Second could be too late.”

 

“She wants to leap up and do a handstand, or get someone to race her fast and far to wreck them both: anything that will turn her body back into something that’s about what it can do, not all about how it looks.”

 

“They always act like they’re having an amazing time, they’re louder and high-pitched, shoving each other and screaming with laughter at nothing. But Becca knows what they’re like when they’re happy, and that’s not it. Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won’t lift away.”

 

My Take

The Secret Place is the sixth book was the fifth book that I have read by Tana French (and the fifth in her Dublin Murder Squad series).  While I loved her other books (The Witch Elm, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor) I liked, but did not love, The Secret Place.  I found the characters and the central mystery a bit less interesting than previous French reads.  It is still a good book, just not quite up the standard French sets in many of her other books.

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396. Broken Harbor

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Foreign

450 pages, published April 30, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In one of the half-abandoned luxury developments that populate Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children have been murdered.  Mick “Scorcherˮ Kennedy of the Dublin Murder Squad investigates the case and finds that all is not as it seems.

Quotes 

“Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.”

 

“Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who’ve been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you’re not looking, without you adding to the drama.”

 

“People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you’ve done in your life, and they still cared about you after all that: they’re not replaceable, you know?”

 

“But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone’s mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else’s hands, so it won’t weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.”

 

“I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.”

 

“If you think you’re a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you’ll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life.”

 

“One of the reasons I love Murder is that victims are, as a general rule, dead… I don’t make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me fore a sicko or- worse-a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don’t show up outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry, and you never have to worry about what it’ll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.”

 

My Take

Broken Harbor was the fifth book that I have read by Tana French (and the fourth in her Dublin Murder Squad series) since starting my thousand book quest.  Like The Witch Elm, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, Broken Harbor did not disappoint.  French is a gifted storyteller and her mysteries are much more about the human nature involved than whodunit.  A great read.

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