Thriller

I really want to like the novels of Caroline Overington but don’t, somehow. Her latest The Lucky One is set somewhat inexplicably in California, an odd choice for an Australian journalist which adds nothing to the storyline but can possibly be put down to an attempt to woo American audiences. And who can blame her […]

A competently written thriller with a few nice twists and turns. The protagonist, Cass, fails to assist a woman whose car has stopped on a remote road in the middle of a storm. Later Cass learns the woman in the car was brutally murdered shortly after she saw her. She feels bad but doesn’t go […]

This one is a winner. A boy and his troubled mother nurture an unhealthy obsession with the MacBride family, whose patriarch once failed to grant the boy a scholarship at an English private school. Many years later his revenge culminates in a baby being taken from its mother. Grief, obsession, anorexia, post natal depression, affairs, abuse, […]

“So I Lyfted to Home Depot, where I bought some random stuff, rope and duct tape, plastic bags, cable ties, and plastic gloves. The girl at the register winked and said she’s also a big fan of Fifty Shades and this is what has become of our society. Fucking and killing are the same damn […]

I didn’t like Hawkins’ previous novel The Girl on the the Train much and I don’t like this one much either. It’s a solid story muddled by being told from no less than ten different perspectives – hard to keep up with who is who. The supernatural element – an old woman who hears the […]

This is a slow burning thriller but the last 150 pages make you want to batten down the hatches and read read read, breathlessly. It begins with Rachel shooting her husband (who can resist reading on?) then skips back in time to Rachel’s background. There’s a little bit too much background for my liking -Rachel […]

Sigurdardottir is the thinking person’s thriller writer. She’s an Icelandic PD James – less about gory, shocking crimes and more about characters and motivations. This one’s a winner – a luxury yacht comes crashing into a harbour with no one on board. Among the missing are a family with six year old twin girls. The […]

This alleged thriller is pretty stupid; full of massive, illogical, gaping holes in the plot and burdened with a thoroughly self absorbed protagonist, Isa. The only bit that rings true is Isa’s love for her baby, whom she lugs from place to place with a startling lack of planning, all the while being uniformly awful […]