A woman wakes up in hospital after having a car crash in a bad part of town and she can’t remember the hell what she was doing there. Soon afterwards a body is found close to the scene of the accident, with her gloves nearby. Amnesia is such a handy literary device, and used to […]
My Soul to Take by Yrsa Sigurdardottir
My favourite Icelandic crime writer’s early novels are inventively gruesome (pins pushed into the feet of the murder victims, anyone?) but always interesting. This one, set in a health retreat that was previously a farmhouse, is no exception. It does however have a particularly bewildering number of characters with confusingly similar names -Birna, Berger, Berta. Trying […]
The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne
I didn’t love this one as much as I should have, judging by the rapturous reviews plastered all over the front and back covers. Certainly the author has a remarkable knowledge of and feel for hunting and marsh living. I was however a bit put off by the Helena, the protagonist, and her almost slavish devotion to […]
The Day is Dark by Yrsa Sigurdardottir
Three workers disappear, one by one, from an isolated research station in a remote part of Greenland where the locals are inexplicably hostile and secretive – who can resist? Sigurdardottir is a master at creating a creepy atmosphere in her novels, where unsettling events from the past taint the lives of the living. Sigurdardottir’s protagonist lawyer Thora […]
The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter
You can’t really beat a surname like Slaughter for a thriller writer, can you? This was my first read of Slaughter, and it’s a good one. Two daughters and their mum are brutally attacked by two men – the mum is killed and the truth of what happened to the daughters slowly emerges over the course […]
The Way Back by Kylie Ladd
I found myself holding my breath for some of this novel, extremely invested in how a thirteen year old girl, Charlie, would get back to her family after being abducted. All the characters are well drawn and believable, each existing in their own orbit of agony after Charlie goes missing. Being inside the head of the […]
The Last Tudor by Philippa Gregory
Gregory says this ‘may be’ the last novel she writes about the Tudor period. Fair enough. She has thoroughly plumbed the depths and written from the perspective of almost every prominent woman in the period, but she does it so well. The Last Tudor focusses on Jane Grey and her two sisters. Manipulated by her grasping […]
The Upstairs Room by Kate Murray-Browne
The testimonial from Joanna Canon on the front cover states “I couldn’t put it down” but I could – quite easily. This one is a just sufficiently unsettling for you to keep being bothered reading, but it’s thoroughly hampered by the two main female characters. Both drift so passively through their lives that they may as […]