Jo Spain’s previous thriller The Confession involved a man walking into a house and beating another man to death with a golf club in front of his wife. The death in Dirty Little Secrets is rather less spectacular; the deceased is found a full three months after she died, and it’s unclear whether foul play is involved. Her […]
Thriller
The Last by Hanna Jameson
Twenty one people remain alive in a Swiss Hotel after multiple cities, including Washington, are destroyed by nuclear bombs. They have no means of communication with the outside world and no way of knowing if they are the only survivors. Then they discover the body of a girl and the post apocalyptic survivalist story also […]
Blood Orange by Harriet Tyce
Alison is a bit of mess – she’s pretty much a functioning alcoholic and a guilt ridden wife and mother, embroiled in a messy affair with a colleague. The only aspect of her life she has under control is her work as criminal barrister, and she’s about to get her first murder to defend. The […]
The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
There are good trashy reads and bad trashy reads; this one is a classic example of just how good a trashy read can be. Nine friends gather in a remote Scottish hunting lodge for their annual New Years’ Eve get-together. The majority of the group are friends from university, trying a little too hard to […]
The Flower Girls by Alice Clark-Platts
This English thriller tap into our horror of and fascination with children who kill. At six years old, Rosie was young enough to escape criminal responsibility after she and her sister killed a toddler nineteen years ago. Laurel, her sister, was ten years old at the time and received a murder conviction. Abandoned by her […]
The Lost Girls by Jennifer Spence
This beautiful Australian novel is about choices and the inevitability of loss. The protagonist, Stella, finds herself in the past and tries to change her daughter’s fate, but can she? Is it possible to save people from exercising their own free will? I’m not usually a fan of novels involving time travel but here it’s dealt with […]
The Suspect by Fiona Barton
Now this is a good, absorbing read. Two eighteen year old British girls go missing during their gap year in Thailand. Kate Waters, the journalist sent to cover the story, gets a nasty shock when her son, who’s also in Thailand, becomes a suspect in the girls’ disappearance. This clever novel taps into a parent’s worse […]
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
The first seven-eights of this novel is packed solid with cliches worthy of multiple eye rollings, but then it takes an unexpected turn that almost makes it worth reading. First, the cliches: tortured and beautiful artist (tick), multiple men who seem to be dangerously attracted to her (tick) including a therapist who appears to be […]