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282. Something in the Water

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Jackie Funk

Author:   Catherine Steadman

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Crime

342 pages, published June 5, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

When documentary filmmaker and Londoner Erin meets and then marries the handsome and successful investment banker Mark, she believes she has achieved the perfect life.   However, when Mark loses his job, the soon to be newlyweds start to worry about money.  While a surprising turn of events during their South Pacific honeymoon has the potential to allay their financial worries, it also stirs up all sorts of trouble leaving Erin wondering how well she really knows her husband.

Quotes 

“… She told me not to let it make me angry, not to let it break my heart, but to remember that we all lose the things we love the most and how we have to remember that we were lucky to have them at all in the first place.”

 

“always read outside your comfort zone. That’s where stories come from. That’s where ideas come from.”

 

“Sometimes you’re the lamp post, and sometimes you’re the dog.”

 

“It’s impossible to know if we were a good thing that broke somehow or a bad thing that eventually became exposed. But either way, if I could just go back now to the way we were, I would. I would, without a moment’s hesitation. If I could just lie in his arms one last time, I could live with an illusion the rest of my life. If I could, I would.”

 

“But you don’t sign up for certain things without knowing the rules, Erin. And if you’ve signed up for the game, then you can’t complain when you lose. You got to lose with dignity is all; a good sportsman always lets people lose with dignity.”

 

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” 

My Take

Something in the Water is a taut, page turning thriller in the same vein as The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl.  Steadman knows how to bait the hook and reel in her reader.  Even though I had an inkling of the big plot twist, this book was still compelling reading until the end.  A great fun read!

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254. The Word is Murder

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Michael Koss

Author:   Anthony Horowitz

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Suspense

400 pages, published June 5, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Word is Murder opens with Diana Cowper, a wealthy woman who is the mother of a famous British actor, planning her own funeral.  Six hours later she is strangled.  Daniel Hawthorne, a bigoted, gruff, yet brilliant investigator teams up with author Anthony Horowitz (who inserts himself into the story under the guise of documenting Hawthorne’s exploits) to solve the crime.

 

Quotes 

“Again, I found myself wondering what it must be like to work there, sitting in a room with those miniature urns, a constant reminder that everything you were and everything you’d achieved would one day fit inside.”

 

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

 

“But the thing is, you see -and to be honest, I don’t like to mention this- I’m a bit short. There just aren’t enough people getting murdered.”

 

“I’ve often wondered how I would have managed if I’d been born with a stammer or chronic shyness. The modern writer has to be able to perform, often to a huge audience. It’s almost like being a stand-up comedian except that the questions never change and you always end up telling the same jokes.”

 

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

 

My Take

Having recently read several of Anthony Horowitz’s books (especially the terrific Magpie Murders), I really looked forward to diving into The Word is Murder.  While not as good as Magpie, it was still a thoroughly entertaining mystery with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing. I especially enjoyed how Horowitz uses himself as a foil to the grumpy, eccentric Investigator Daniel Hawthorne.

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244. The Child Finder

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Rene Denfeld

Genre:  Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Crime, Suspense

256 pages, published September 5, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Three years after five year old Madison Culver disappeared without a trace in a snow filled Oregon forest while her family was choosing a Christmas tree, the authorities believe she is dead.  Holding on to hope that their daughter is still alive, her parents turn to Naomi, a private investigator with a track record of finding lost and missing children who is known as The Child Finder.  Naomi understands children like Madison because she herself was once a lost girl.

 

Quotes 

“No matter how far you have run, no matter how long you have been lost, it is never too late to be found.”

 

“Fear never keeps anyone safe.”

 

“No one ever told you what to do when love went away. It was always about capturing love, and keeping love. Not about watching it walk out the door to die alone rather than in your arms.”

 

“In the years since, she had discovered the sacrament of life did not demand memory.”

 

“But he saw Naomi as the wind traveling over the field, always searching, never stopping, and never knowing that true peace is when you curl around one little piece of something. One little fern. One little frond. One person to love.”

 

“I’m afraid,” she confessed, her voice quiet.

“Of what?”

“That if the box is opened I might want and want and never be filled.” She took a breath. “That you will get tired of filling it.” She paused and spoke her deepest fear, turning to his ear. “That you will use me and throw me away.”

 

“A farm without stock, a home without children. The world here was dying.”

 

My Take

The Child Finder is a quick and compelling read that had me hooked from the get go.  The story hums along with well drawn and indelible characters.  While the subject is disturbing (kids kidnapped or disappeared), it is handled well, in a non-gratuitous manner.  Recommended.

 

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232. Into the Water

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Paula Hawkins

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

368 pages, published May 2, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Summary:   Into the Water is a mystery/thriller by Paula Hawkins, author of the wildly successful The Girl on the Train.  This book tells the stories of different women, from the days of alleged witchcraft to the present, who died in a place called the Drowning Pool.

 

Quotes 

“Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.”                    

 

“There are people who are drawn to water, who retain some vestigial primal sense of where it flows. I believe that I am one of them. I am most alive when I am near the water, when I am near this water. This is the place where I learned to swim, the place where I learned to inhabit nature and my body in the most joyous and pleasurable way.”

 

“No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day.”

 

“Yes, it is. It’s, like, when someone has an affair, why does the wife always hate the other woman? Why doesn’t she hate her husband? He’s the one who’s betrayed her, he’s the one who swore to love her and keep her and whatever forever and ever. Why isn’t he the one who gets shoved off a fucking cliff?”

 

“We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.”

 

“Watching someone in the throes of raw grief is a terrible thing; the act of watching feels violent, intrusive, a violation. Yet we do it, we have to do it, all the time; you just have to learn to cope with it whatever way you can.”

 

“She had never realized before her life was torn apart how awkward grief was, how inconvenient for everyone with whom the mourner came into contact. At first it was acknowledged and respected and deferred to. But after a while it got in the way—of conversation, of laughter, of normal life.”

 

My Take

After thoroughly enjoying The Girl on the Train, I had high hopes for Paula Hawkins follow up effort Into the Water.  While Into the Water is not bad, it not nearly as the captivating read of The Girl on the Train.  The character development was fine, but the plot and twists were just so-so.

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201. Career of Evil

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Robert Galbraith (pseudonym for J.K. Rowling)

Genre:  Fiction, Crime, Thriller, Suspense

492 pages, published October 20, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Career of Evil is the third book in the Cormoran Strike crime thriller series, written by J.K. Rowling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.  Private Detective Strike returns with his assistant Robin Ellacott, in a mystery based around soldiers returning from war.  When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin Ellacott, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman’s severed leg.  Strike surmises that there are four people from his past who he thinks could be responsible.  With the police focusing on the one suspect Strike does not think is the perpetrator, he and Robin take matters into their own hands, and delve into the dark and twisted worlds of the other three men.

 

Quotes 

“The story, like all the best stories, split like an amoeba, forming an endless series of new stories and opinion pieces and speculative articles, each spawning its own counter chorus.”

 

“Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know. How many times had he and Charlotte split? How many times had their relationship fallen to pieces, and how many times had they tried to reassemble the wreckage? There had been more cracks than substance by the end: they had lived in a spider’s web of fault lines, held together by hope, pain and delusion.”

 

“You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the days made it easy to forget that this totally cost-free luxury existed.”

 

“He possessed a finely honed sense for the strange and the wicked. He had seen things all through his childhood that other people preferred to imagine happened only in films.”

 

“Nobody who had not lived there would ever understand that London was a country unto itself. They might resent it for the fact that it held more power and money than any other British city, but they could not understand that poverty carried its own flavour there, where everything cost more, where the relentless distinctions between those who had succeeded and those who had not were constantly, painfully visible.”

 

“Being sworn at by random people was the price you paid for living in London.”

 

“Hell’s built on regret.”

 

“This, he thought, was how women roped you in. They added you to lists and forced you to confirm and commit. They impressed upon you that if you didn’t show up a plate of hot food would go begging, a gold-backed chair would remain unoccupied, a cardboard place name would sit shamefully upon a table, announcing your rudeness to the world.”

 

“Strike knew how deeply ingrained was the belief that the evil conceal their dangerous predilections for violence and domination. When they wear them like bangles for all to see, the gullible populace laughs, calls it a pose, or finds it strangely attractive.”

 

“Those who did not know the ocean well forgot its solidity, its brutality.”

 

My Take

Career of Evil is the third book in J.K. Rowling’s series based on Detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott.  I had previously enjoyed The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm, mostly because of the character development and relationship of Strike and Robin, rather than the central crime/mystery.  I found the same to be true with Career of Evil, although I found it to be a slightly lesser book than the first two installments.  However, I still recommend it and plan on reading the fourth book in the series when it is published.

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195. Moriarity

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Michael Koss

Author:   Anthony Horowitz

Genre:  Fiction, Crime, Suspense, Mystery

285 pages, published December 9, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Moriarty is author Anthony Horowitz’s second entry into the Sherlock Holmes genre, following up on The House of Silk.   The books are not related and even have different characters.  Notably, there is no Sherlock Holmes in Moriarity other than as a remote figure.   The stand in for Holmes is Inspector Athelney Jones, a Scotland Yard detective and devoted student of Holmes’s methods, whom Conan Doyle introduced in The Sign of Four.

 

Quotes 

“Give him his due: this is a man who has always faced his fears square on, whether they be a deadly swamp adder, a hideous poison that might drive you to insanity or a hell-hound set loose on the moors. Holmes has done many things that are, frankly, baffling – but he has never run away.”

 

“Robert Pinkerton used to say that a lie was like a dead coyote. The longer you leave it, the more it smells.”

 

“It seemed that there was nothing you could find here that was not expensive and very little that was actually necessary.”

 

My Take

I would have given Moriarty three stars, but the big twist at the end deserved an extra half star.  I enjoyed this take on the Sherlock Holmes genre more than The House of Silk.  However, both pale in comparison to Magpie Murders which is the best mystery by Anthony Horowitz that I have read.  If you are a mystery devotee and a fan of Sherlock Holmes, then you will enjoy Moriarty.

 

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178. Magpie Murders

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Michael Koss

Author:   Anthony Horowitz

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Suspense

496 pages, published June 6, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

When editor Susan Ryeland is given the manuscript of Alan Conway’s latest mystery novel, she has no reason to think it will be much different from any of his others.  After working with the bestselling crime writer for years, she’s intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries that occur in quaint English villages.  In the vein of Agatha Christie, Alan’s traditional formula has proved hugely successful.  When the new book (which is included for us to read) abruptly ends before the dénouement, things start to get very interesting as we are thrust into a completely different, yet inherently related, murder mystery.

 

Quotes 

“But I’m not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we enjoy it.”

 

“You must know that feeling when it’s raining outside and the heating’s on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book. You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover.”

 

“Rumours and malicious gossip are like bindweed. They cannot be cut back, even with the sword of truth. I can, however, offer you this comfort. Given time, they will wither and die of their own volition.”

 

“It’s strange when you think about it. There are hundreds and hundreds of murders in books and television. It would be hard for narrative fiction to survive without them. And yet there are almost none in real life, unless you happen to live in the wrong area. Why is it that we have such a need for murder mystery? And what is it that attracts us? The crime, or the solution? Do we have some primal need of bloodshed because our own lives are so safe, so comfortable?”

 

“As far as I’m concerned, you can’t beat a good whodunnit: the twists and turns, the clues and the red herrings and then, finally, the satisfaction of having everything explained to you in a way that makes you kick yourself because you hadn’t seen it from the start.”

 

“he had expressed the belief that everything in life had a pattern and that a coincidence was simply the moment when that pattern became briefly visible.”

 

“I had chosen to play the detective—and if there is one thing that unites all the detectives I’ve ever read about, it’s their inherent loneliness. The suspects know each other. They may well be family or friends. But the detective is always the outsider. He asks the necessary questions but he doesn’t actually form a relationship with anyone. He doesn’t trust them, and they in turn are afraid of him. It’s a relationship based entirely on deception and it’s one that, ultimately, goes nowhere. Once the killer has been identified, the detective leaves and is never seen again. In fact, everyone is glad to see the back of him.”

 

“One can think of the truth as eine vertiefung – a sort of deep valley which may not be visible from a distance but which will come upon you quite suddenly. There are many ways to arrive there.”

 

“I held out the packet and suddenly we were friends. That’s one of the only good things about being a smoker these days. You’re part of a persecuted minority. You bond easily.”

 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed the fiendishly clever and enigmatic Magpie Murders.  In fact, for four straight hours I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.  Having previously created the Alex Rider books, the television series Foyle’s War and having written for Midsomer Murders and Poirot, Author Anthony Horowitz, OBE, is as prolific as he is talented.  If you like murder mysteries, then you must check out Magpie Murders.  Highly recommended.

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174. The Cuckoo’s Calling

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Boulder Librarian

Author:   Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Suspense

455 pages, published April 30, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

While The Cuckoo’s Calling, a murder mystery and book one of a series featuring private detective Cormoran Strike, lists the author as Robert Galbraith, that is a pseudonym.  It is actually written by J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame.  The book opens with Detective Strike hired to investigate the death of supermodel Lula Landry (known to her friends as the Cuckoo) which has been ruled a suicide by the police.  After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator.  He is down to one client, has creditors on his back, has just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.  The Landry case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers.

 

Quotes 

“Seven and a half million hearts were beating in close proximity in this heaving old city, and many, after all, would be aching far worse than his.”

 

“Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawnmowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.”

 

“You’re like everyone else, Strike; you want your civil liberties when you’ve told the missus you’re at the office and you’re at a lap-dancing club, but you want twenty-four-hour surveillance on your house when someone’s trying to force your bathroom window open. Can’t have it both ways.”

 

“Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed.”

 

“In the inverted food chain of fame, it was the big beasts who were stalked and hunted.”

 

“The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.”

 

“When you are young, and beautiful, you can be very cruel.”

 

“There’s people who’d expect you to take a bullet for them and they don’t bother rememb’ring yuh name.”

 

“Couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself.”

 

“Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s traumatised memories;”

 

“I am become a name.”

 

My Take

When my son Nick was in Elementary School (he is currently a college student), he and I read all of the Harry Potter books together and we both loved living in the wildly inventive and fantastic world created by J.K. Rowling.  Based in modern day London, Rowling has created a different type of world in The Cuckoo’s Calling, one that I also enjoyed inhabiting during the almost 16 hours that I spent listening to the audio book version.  The Cuckoo’s Calling has everything you could want from a mystery/suspense/thriller:  compelling and real characters, a gritty plot that hums along at a rapid clip, an inside look at a world different from the one you inhabit, plenty of red herrings to keep you guessing and some surprise twists at the end.  It’s no surprise that I’m looking forward to reading book 2 in this series.

 

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163. Summer House with Swimming Pool

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Herman Koch

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense

387 pages, published January 26, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

When famous actor Ralph Meier winds up dead, the authorities begin to suspect Dr. Marc Schlosser, Ralph’s personal doctor and friend.  As the story unfolds, we learn that the real truth is a lot more complex than simple malpractice.  Still haunted by his eldest daughter’s rape during his family’s stay at Ralph’s extravagant beachfront summerhouse, one they shared with Ralph’s family, film director Stanley Forbes and Stanley’s younger girlfriend, Emmanuelle, Marc believes that the perpetrator of the rape could be either Ralph or Stanley.  Stanley, who is weirdly fixated on Marc’s daughters’ future fashion careers, seems like an obvious suspect.  However, Marc’s reasons for wanting Ralph dead become increasingly compelling as events start to unravel.

 

Quotes 

“There are times when you run back through your life, to see whether you can locate the point at which it could still have taken a different turn.”

 

“You get a stain on your pants. Your favorite pair of pants. You wash them ten times in a row at 160 degrees. You scrub and scour and rub. You bring in the heavy artillery. Bleaches. Abrasive cleaners. But the spot doesn’t go away. If you scrub and scour too long, it will only be replaced by something else. By a stretch of fabric that is thinner and paler. The paler cloth is the memory. The memory of the spot. Now there are two things you can do. You can throw the pants away, or you can walk around for the rest of your life with the memory of the stain. But the paler cloth reminds you of more than just the stain. It also reminds you of when the pants were still clean.”

 

“Free-ranging single men are like a house that has been empty too long. There must be something fishy about the house, the woman thinks. Up for sale for six months and it’s still vacant.”

 

“Life as a widow, she thinks, will always be like this. The friends will go on proposing toasts for months (for years!). To her. To their new center of attention. What she doesn’t know yet is that, after a few courtesy calls, it will all be over. The silence that will follow is the same silence that always falls after a life in the shadows.”

 

“Flippancy. A laughing matter. It’s like with funerals. They are, first and foremost, expected to be fun. There is laughter and drinking and bad language. To keep the whole thing from being too bourgeois. A bourgeois funeral is an artist’s worst nightmare.”

 

“An overburdened liver sounds different from a healthy one. An overburdened liver groans. It groans and begs. It begs for a day off.  A day to deal with the worst of the garbage.”

 

My Take

Best-selling Dutch author Herman Koch is a unique voice whose writing is a bit unnerving.  On the recommendation of a Boulder Librarian (who also recommended Summer House with Swimming Pool) I had previously read The Dinner.  While I found that book to be the superior read, Summer House has its captivating moments.  Koch takes you inside the warped psyche of Dr. Marc Schlosser.  Marc’s take on biology and human relations is sometimes ghoulish and creepy, but it is never boring.  If you liked The Dinner, you might want to give Summer House with Swimming Pool a try.

 

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144. Room

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Emma Donoghue

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Sociology

321 pages, published September 13, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Room has a very interesting premise.  Five year old Jack has spent his entire life confined to a small room along with his Ma.  They have constructed an entire world within the confines of a very limited space.  At night, Ma shuts him in wardrobe, so he can be safe when Old Nick visits.  While Room is home to Jack, to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years.  Ma has created the best life she can for Jack, but she is psychologically on the edge and knows she needs to somehow free them before she has a complete breakdown.  She devises a bold escape plan which depends on the courage of Jack.  However, being free from Room is only the beginning of Ma’s struggle.

 

Quotes

“So they’re fake?” “Stories are a different kind of true.”

 

“Really, a novel does not exist, does not happen, until readers pour their own lives into it.”

 

“Jack. He’d never give us a phone, or a window. “Ma takes my thumbs and squeezes them. “We are people in a book, and he wont let anybody else read it.”

 

“Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.  “Huh?” “Scaredybrave.” “Scave.”

Word sandwiches always make her laugh but I wasn’t being funny.”

 

“People don’t always want to be with people. It gets tiring.”

 

“I bang my head on a faucet. “Careful.” Why do persons only say that after the hurt?”

 

“I think the sea’s just rain and salt.”

“Ever taste a tear?” asks Grandma.

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s the same as the sea.”

I still don’t want to walk in it if it’s tears.”

 

“It’s called mind over matter. If we don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

 

“The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it’s going to be the next minute.”

 

“[E]verywhere I’m looking at kids, adults mostly don’t seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don’t want to actually play with them, they’d rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there’s a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn’t even hear.”

 

“Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.”

 

“In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there’s only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit….”

 

My Take

I listened to Room as an audio book and was captivated by the story.  Told from the perspective of a five year old boy who has never been outside a small room, Donahue has created an entire new world, creatively filled with routines and make believe devised by Ma to keep her and Jack sane and healthy,  inside that room.  Just as interesting is the escape plot hatched by Ma and Ma and Jack’s response to the outside world once they do escape.  It is interesting how Jack responds to all of the things we take for granted and compelling to see how Ma struggles to integrate back into a world she hasn’t lived in for more than seven years.  Room demonstrates the resilience of the human spirit and the extraordinary bond between a mother and her child as Ma and Jack move from one world to another.

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