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377. The Woman in Cabin 10

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ruth Ware

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

357 pages, published April 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Woman in Cabin 10 is a thriller that takes place in the constrained confines of a high end luxury yacht that has set sail on the North Sea.  Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, is on board to cover the maiden voyage.  At first, she enjoys the glamour and opulence.  However, when the weather starts to turn, Lo is awakened in the middle of the night and views a woman being thrown overboard.  When she rings the alarm bell, no one believes her since no passengers are missing.  Things become more desperate for Lo as she begins to doubt her own sanity and struggles to figure out what happened.

Quotes 

“My friend Erin says we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we’re no good, that if we don’t make this promotion or ace that exam we’ll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are Maybe that’s true. Maybe mine just have louder voices.”

 

“Maybe that was closer to the truth–we weren’t captor and captive, but two animals in different compartments of the same cage. Hers was just slightly larger.”

 

“I love ports. I love the smell of tar and sea air, and the scream of the gulls. Maybe it’s years of taking the ferry to France for summer holidays, but a harbor gives me a feeling of freedom in a way that an airport never does. Airports say work and security checks and delays. Ports say… I don’t know. Something completely different. Escape, maybe.”

 

“There’s a reason why we keep thoughts inside our heads for the most part—they’re not safe to be let out in public.”

 

“Of course the one type of sashimi you really must try is fugu,” Alexander said expansively, smoothing his napkin across his straining cummerbund. “It’s simply the most exquisite taste.” “Fugu?” I said, trying to insert myself into the conversation. “Isn’t that the horribly poisonous one?” “Absolutely, and that’s what makes the experience. I’ve never been a drug taker—I know my own weaknesses, and I am very aware of being one of life’s lotus-eaters, so I’ve never trusted myself to dabble in that sort of thing—but I can only assume that the high one experiences after eating fugu triggers a similar neuron response. The diner has diced with death, and won.”

 

“she had made her way up the corporate ladder by treading on the backs of more young women than you could count, and then, once she was through the glass ceiling, pulling the ladder up behind her. I remembered Rowan once saying, Tina is one of those women who thinks every bit of estrogen in the boardroom is a threat to her own existence.”

 

My Take

I gave The Woman in Cabin 10 four stars because it has the quintessential quality of a good thriller:  I couldn’t put it down.  In a similar fashion to Something in the Water (a page turner that I also really enjoyed) Ware does a great job of keeping the tension high, the red herrings plentiful and the twists coming at just the right moment.  Highly recommended vacation read.

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362. The Colorado Kid

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Novella

205 pages, published October 4, 2005

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Colorado Kid is a novella by master storyteller Stephen King that centers around an unsolved mystery.  On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There’s no identification on the body.  It’s more than a year before the man is identified and the more that is learned about the man and the bizarre circumstances of his death, the less that is understandable.  It seems like an impossible crime.

Quotes 

“Sometimes loving eyes don’t see what they don’t want to see.”

 

“Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it’s too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It’s a man’s most anonymous age.”

 

“Here I am, ninety years old and ready for the cooling board, using a brand new Macintosh computer, and there you sit, twenty-two and gorgeous, fresh as a new peach, yet scrawling on a yellow legal pad like an old maid in a Victorian romance.”

 

“Well then, I’m going to tell you a secret almost every newspaper man and woman who’s been at it awhile knows: in real life, the number of actual stories – those with beginnings, middles, and ends – are slim and none. But if you can give your readers just one unknown thing (two at the very outside) and then kick in what Dave Bowie there calls a musta-been, your reader will tell himself a story.”

 

“We poor humans are wired up to always think the worst is gonna happen because it so rarely does.”

 

“You go back to that old business the way a kid who’s lost a tooth goes back to the hole with the tip of his tongue.”

 

“It was that kind of story. The kind that’s like a sneeze which threatens but never quite arrives.”

 

“I like a woman who hasn’t decided the kitchen’s a place of slavery just because she works for a livin.” “I feel absolutely the same way about a man,” 

My Take

While I’m a big fan of Stephen King, I really didn’t enjoy The Colorado Kid that much.  Not enough story, character development and an unsatisfying ending.

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344. Then She Was Gone

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Lisa Jewel

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

359 pages, published April 17, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

Then She Was Gone tells the story of Laurel whose 15 year old daughter Ellie disappears.  Ten years later, Laurel is a divorced woman in her early 50’s who starts dating a charming stranger named Floyd whose 9 year old daughter Poppy is a precocious, pretty and reminiscent of Ellie.  Things then take a dark and unexpected turn.

Quotes 

“When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it’s like I go back into the dream.”

 

“I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing.”

 

“Did you know that the parts of the brain involved in decision-making aren’t fully developed until you’re twenty-five years old?”

 

“If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along.”

 

“If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along.”

 

“That was how she’d once viewed her perfect life: as a series of bad smells and unfulfilled duties, petty worries and late bills.”

 

“People try and make out there’s a greater purpose, a secret meaning, that it all means something. And it doesn’t.”

 

“She’d never worked out how he’d done it, how he’d found that healthy pink part of himself among the wreckage of everything else. But she didn’t blame him. Not in the least. She wished she could do the same; she wished she could pack a couple of large suitcases and say good-bye to herself, wish herself a good life, thank herself for all the memories, look fondly upon herself for just one long, lingering moment and then shut the door quietly, chin up, morning sun playing hopefully on the crown of her head, a bright new future awaiting her. She would do it in a flash. She really would.” 

My Take

Then She Was Gone was a quick, captivating read.  Author Lisa Jewell does a particularly good job with the main character Laurel and her struggles to keep living after her 15 year old daughter disappears.  There are also several twists that kept me turning the pages of this book.

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343. In the Woods

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

464 pages, published May 27, 2008

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In the Woods opens with the disappearance of Peter and Jamie, two twelve year old children, from the woods nearby their small town of Knocknaree in Ireland where they often played with their best friend Adam.  Adam is discovered the next day in the same woods with his tennis shoes soaked in blood and no memory of what happened.  Fast forward 20 years later and Adam (who now goes by Rob) is a police detective in a nearby town.  When another 12 year old is found murdered near in the same woods where Peter and Jamie disappeared, Adam and his partner/best friend Cassie are assigned to the case.  The investigation stirs up lots of old memories for Adam and his life begins to unravel.

Quotes 

“I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn’t find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.”

 

“I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect.”

 

“The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you cracking to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other’s hands.”

 

“Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.”

 

“Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.”

 

“She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. “You should go for younger women,” she advised me. “They can’t always tell.”

 

“We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.”

 

“If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn’t forgive her for being hurt.”

 

“People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it’s all backwards. It’s not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.” 

My Take

After reading and loving The Witch Elm earlier this year, I definitely wanted to read more by the incredibly talented Tana French.  In the Woods is the first of her six book Dublin Murder Squad series and did not disappoint.  French compensates for a slowly building (at times meandering) plot, by creating detailed and nuanced characters in a richly drawn atmosphere.  This is a mystery and you want to know what happened, but you are also happy to spend time in the compelling world created by French.  I look forward to reading more from this impressive writer.

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342. In a Dark, Dark Wood

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Ruth Ware

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller

308 pages, published April 19, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Nora, the protagonist In a Dark, Dark Wood, hasn’t seen her former best friend Clare for ten years since they left University.  When she receives an invitation to Clare’s Hen Party (British for Bachelorette Party) set in a remote part of the English countryside, Nora equivocates but ultimately decides to attend, a decision she will come to deeply regret.

Quotes 

“Clare watched them from the far sofa, and I found myself watching her, remembering how she loved to observe, how she used to throw a remark out, like a pebble into a pond, and then back quietly away to watch the ripples as people scrapped it out. It was not an endearing habit, but it was one I could not condemn. I understood it too well. I, too, am happier watching than being watched.”

 

“People don’t change,” Nina said bitterly. “They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves.”

 

“I always thought that being self-sufficient was a strength, but now I realize it’s a kind of weakness, too.”

 

“there’s one thing I dislike more than being hurt, it’s being seen to be hurt.”

 

“There are days when I don’t hear a single human voice, apart from the radio, and you know what? I quite like that.”

 

“There was something strangely naked about it, like we were on a stage set, playing our parts to an audience of eyes out there in the wood.”

 

“You’d think people would be wary of spilling to a writer. You’d think they’d know that we’re essentially birds of carrion, picking over the corpses of dead affairs and forgotten arguments to recycle them in our work—zombie reincarnations of their former selves, stitched into a macabre new patchwork of our own devising.”

 

“There’s a kind of focusing effect that happens when you’re very ill. I saw it with my granddad, when he was slipping away. You stop caring about the big stuff. Your world shrinks down to very small concerns: the way your dressing gown cord presses uncomfortably against your ribs, the pain in your spine, the feel of a hand in yours. It’s that narrowing that enables you to cope, I suppose. The wider world stops mattering. And as you grow more and more ill, your world shrinks further, until the only thing that matters is just to keep on breathing.” 

My Take

In a Dark, Dark Wood is a serviceable thriller with a few twists and turns to keep things interesting.  I’ve read better of this genre, but still enjoyed my time with this book.

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322. Find Her

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Lisa Gardner

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Crime

402 pages, published February 9, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Find Her is a crime thriller that tells the story of Flora Dane, a young woman who  was kidnapped while on spring break.  For 472 days, Flora was held captive and did what she needed to do to survive.  Once released, Flora turned into a vigilante avenger.  Hired to find another abducted young woman, Flora finds herself ensnared again with her potential murder or release leading to a taut climax.

Quotes 

“Survivors make it because they learn to adapt. Adaptation is coping. Coping is strength.”

 

“Because it’s one thing to survive. It is much, much harder to truly live.”

 

“There’s no rewind, or erasing, or unmaking. The things that happened, they are you, you are them. You can escape, but you can’t get away. Just the way it is.”

 

“IN A DETECTIVE’S WORLD there was one true blight on society, and it wasn’t the master criminal; after all, superpredators were few and far between. It was the media.”

 

“I don’t know who I am,” I say. “No one does. Everyone spends their lives figuring that out, even people who’ve never been kidnapped.”

 

“You know about trauma bonding, right?” the agent asked abruptly. “Forget kidnapping victims, you see it all the time with battered women. They’re isolated, at the mercy of their dominating spouse, going through intense spells of abject terror followed by even more emotionally draining periods of soul-wrenching apologies. The trauma itself creates a powerful bonding element. The things these two have gone through together, how could anyone else ever understand? It becomes one more thing that makes a woman stay, even after her husband has beat the crap out of her again.” 

My Take

Find Her is a quick, captivating read.  I had previously read Lisa Gardner’s novella The Fourth Man and can definitely recommend Find Her over that short book which was just okay.  In Find Her, Gardner creates a compelling protagonist in Flora and hooks you into Flora’s world and experiences through lots of interesting details on survival and recovery.

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320. The Witch Elm

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lynn McInnes

Author:   Tana French

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Crime

528 pages, published October 9, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The protagonist in The Witch Elm is a modern day Dubliner named Toby, a carefree twenty something with a job at an art gallery, a nice flat and the perfect girlfriend.  Toby’s idyllic life is shattered when he is attacked in his home and left for dead.  During his recovery, he moves into the family home to take care of his Uncle Hugo who is dying of cancer.  While there, a long decomposed body is found inside the hollow of a large wych elm tree on the property.  As  Toby and his family begin to uncover the mystery, layers and layers of duplicity are revealed that has Toby questioning his own sanity.

Quotes 

“But we’re so desperate, aren’t we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it.”

 

“The thing is, I suppose,” he said, “that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath.”

 

“I knew straightaway, from his smile, that he wasn’t a doctor; I’d already got the hang of the doctors’ smiles, firm and distancing, expertly calibrated to tell you how much time was left in the conversation.”

 

“Once the fear took hold, I was fucked. I’d never known anything like it could exist: all-consuming, ravenous, a whirling black vortex that sucked me under so completely and mercilessly that it truly felt like I was being devoured alive, bones splintered, marrow sucked.”

 

“I’ve never got the self-flagellating middle-class belief that being poor and having a petty crime habit magically makes you more worthy, more deeply connected to some wellspring of artistic truth, even more real.”

 

“Faye had always been sweet, flaky but sweet, unlikely to ask about your problems but deeply concerned about them if you reminded her they existed.”

 

“The wych elm’s whole crown was gone, only the trunk left, thick stubs of branches poking out obscenely. It should have looked pathetic, but instead it had a new, condensed force: some great malformed creature, musclebound and nameless, huddled in the darkness waiting for a sign.” 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed the many hours of reading that I spent with The Witch Elm and discovered a deep appreciation for the writing talent of Tana French.  Her characters are so multi-dimensional and so thoroughly fleshed out that you feel as if you are living your life right alongside of them.  While the book excels as a character study, there is also a fascinating mystery at its heart that keeps you reading long after it is time to turn off the bedside light.  Highly recommended.

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317. The Outsider

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Suspense

561 pages, published May 22, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

When an eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park, all the evidence, from eyewitnesses to fingerprints to DNA, point to Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls.  Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney arrest him with what seems to be a bulletproof case.  When Maitland’s alibi checks out, the authorities start to questions their rush to judgment, but have no answers as to how the two contradictory circumstances are possible.

Quotes 

“If you can’t let go of the past, the mistakes you’ve made will eat you alive.”

 

“I believe there’s another dozen thoughts lined up behind each one I’m aware of.”

 

“I would like to believe in God,” she said, “because I don’t want to believe we just end, even though it balances the equation—since we came from blackness, it seems logical to assume that it’s to blackness we return. But I believe in the stars, and the infinity of the universe. That’s the great Out There. Down here, I believe there are more universes in every fistful of sand, because infinity is a two-way street.”

 

“Dreams are the way we touch the unseen world,”

 

“My tongue runs like a supermarket conveyor belt on payday.”

 

“Money was no cure for sorrow, Alec reflected, but it did allow one to grieve in relative comfort.”

 

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ ” 

My Take

The Outsider is quintessential Stephen King.  You get to affectionately know a cast of characters comprised of normal people in a normal town that have to deal with something completely abnormal.  King, a master storyteller, delivers the goods once again.

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316. The Silent Wife

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   A.S.A. Harrison

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

326 pages, published June 25, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Silent Wife is a psychological thriller about a marriage that is at risk and how far one woman will go to keep what she believes to be rightfully hers.

Quotes 

“Life has a way of taking its toll on the person you thought you were.”

 

“Other people are not here to fulfill our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will generate feelings of anger and resentment. Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasizing the positive.”

 

“In asserting that people don’t change, what she means is that they don’t change for the better. Whereas changing for the worse, that goes without saying.”

 

“She didn’t know then that life has a way of backing you into a corner. You make your choices when you’re far too young to understand their implications, and with each choice you make the field of possibility narrows. You choose a career and other careers are lost to you. You choose a mate and commit to loving no other.”

 

“Basic personality traits develop early in life and over time become inviolable, hardwired. Most people learn little from experience, rarely thinking of adjusting their behavior, see problems as emanating from those around them, and keep on doing what they do in spite of everything, for better or worse.”

 

“We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions – and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another.  Do you want your man to be a man or do you want to turn him into a pussy? Don’t think you can have it both ways.”

 

“You will not be the same person coming out of a relationship as you were going into it.”

 

“Even if you forget that´s not the same as if it never happened. The slate is not entirely wiped clean; you can´t reclaim the person you were beforehand; your state of innocence is not there to be retrieved.”

 

“It’s money not education that’s the holy grail in America.”

 

“The woman who refuses to object, who doesn’t yell and scream—there’s strength in that, and power. The way she overrides sentiment, won’t enter into blaming or bickering, never gives him an opening, doesn’t allow him to turn it back on her. She knows that her refusal leaves him alone with his choices.”

 

“Acceptance is supposed to be a good thing – Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Also compromise, as every couples therapist will tell you. But the cost was high – the damping of expectation, the dwindling of spirit, the resignation that comes to replace enthusiasm, the cynicism that supplants hope. The mouldering that goes unnoticed and unchecked.”

 

“Time hangs suspended, and yet it’s about to end. Death should be a seduction, not a rape. Given one more minute he could do so much. Even the guilty are allowed to make a phone call, send a message. How alive he feels, how brightly he shines, like a lit fuse, a firecracker about to go off. What he wouldn’t give for a minute more, just one ordinary minute tacked crudely onto the end of his life.”

 

“As for herself, every morning on waking she gives thanks to the God she doesn’t disbelieve in. Although she can’t credit him with saving her, she needs this outlet for her gratitude.” 

My Take

Much in the same vein as Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, The Silent Wife was a page turner that I couldn’t put down.  Interesting insights into a long term marriage on the rocks, with some twists and turns that kept me engaged.  Great vacation read.

 

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313. Elevation

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Fantasy, Novella

146 pages, published October 30, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In Elevation, Stephen King tells a supernatural story about Scott Carey, an ordinary man who has steadily been losing weight but whose appearance hasn’t changed.  Scott weighs the same in his clothes and out of them, no matter how heavy they are.  Scott is engaged in a battle with the lesbians next door whose dog regularly poops on Scott’s lawn.  Both are trying to launch a new restaurant, but the people of Castle Rock want no part of a gay married couple, and the place is in trouble. When Scott finally understands the prejudices they face–including his own—he tries to help.  They become friends and are with Scott as he approaches zero weight and all that entails.

Quotes 

“Everyone should have this, he thought, and perhaps, at the end, everyone does. Perhaps in their time of dying, everyone rises.”

 

“Everything leads to this, he thought. To this elevation. If it’s how dying feels, everyone should be glad to go.”

“He thought he had discovered one of life’s great truths (and one he could have done without): the only thing harder than saying goodbye to yourself, a pound at a time, was saying goodbye to your friends.”

 

“life is what we make it and acceptance is the key to all our affairs.”

 

“Why feel bad about what you couldn’t change? Why not embrace it?”

 

“He used to say what you deserve has nothing to do with where you finish.”

 

“Gravity is the anchor that pulls us down into our graves.”

 

“Then his lungs seemed to open up again, each breath going deeper than the one before. His sneakers (not blinding white Adidas, just ratty old Pumas) seemed to shed the lead coating they had gained. His previous lightness of body came rushing back. It was what Milly had called the following wind, and what pros like McComb no doubt called the runner’s high. Scott preferred that. He remembered that day in his yard, flexing his knees, leaping, and catching the branch of the tree. He remembered running up and down the bandstand steps. He remembered dancing across the kitchen floor as Stevie Wonder sang “Superstition.” This was the same. Not a wind, not even a high, exactly, but an elevation. A sense that you had gone beyond yourself and could go farther still.” 

My Take

My Take:   While Elevation is lesser Steven King, it is still an engaging, page turning story.

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