You’ve got to love a book that starts with a woman whining about how hard it is to dig a grave, especially when it turns out she’s digging it for her husband. This one won’t change your life or encourage deep thinking, but it is a ripper read. The main character, Erin, is quirky, capable […]
Latest Reviews
Girls’ Night Out by Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke
Such a silly book. Three women, friends from twenty years ago, go on a holiday to a Mexican resort and spend several days addressing their past and present insecurities in a manner reminiscent of six year olds. The writing is mired in cliche after cliche, like this: “She followed him, wondering whether he might hold […]
All is Not Forgotten by Wendy Walker
A deeply uncomfortable read. Not just for its graphic decription of the rape of a 15 year old girl, but for the feelings the narrator stirs up in the reader. Alan is a psychiatrist who says of his wife: “I do not admire her….I feel intellectually superior to her….I have encouraged her to pursue a […]
The Other Wife by Michael Robotham
I must admit I find Robotham’s clinical psychologist protagonist Joe O’Loughlin quite irritating, and I prefer the novels he is not in, like The Secrets She Keeps. In this novel O’Loughlin maintains his usual fairly inexplicable appeal to women while charging headlessly and relentlessly towards disaster. He is attacked in a hospital, at a bus […]
The Geography Of Friendship by Sally Piper
Oooh, this is a good one. Piper’s beautiful writing elevates this novel above so many thrillers. Her description of the Australian bush and the three women tramping through it are utterly free from cliche, and quite mesmerising. By the end we feel we know all the women well, especially Samantha. The three women, friends from […]
Need to know by Karen Cleveland
What do you do when you’re a CIA analyst and you find out your husband is a Russian agent, a ‘sleeper’. It’s a sad indictment of the American system when the CIA analyst in question, Vivian Miller, can’t turn her Russian spy husband in because, amongst other things, she would lose her job and the […]
The Death Of Mrs Westaway by Ruth Ware
This mildly interesting little thriller attempts to go deeper than Ware’s previous novels, In a Dark, Dark Wood and The Woman in Cabin 10. There’s a whole family of characters to get to know and a deeply mysterious housekeeper who Knows More Than She’s Saying. There’s a multitude of mysteries to be solved, and the […]
In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware
Some quite odd, neurotic and generally unlikeable people gather in an isolated cabin in the woods for a hen’s weekend. Inevitably, things go horribly wrong. The moral is: don’t accept an invitation to a hen’s weekend from someone you haven’t seen in ten years. Derr. This is a quick read for people who like their […]