Just the Nicest Couple

 Fiction by Mary Kubica

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Lily and Christian are the titular Nice Couple in this story. They are young professionals looking to start a family soon, but at the beginning of this story something happens that threatens them. The reader begins to see that under their nice exteriors, Lily and Christian are willing to do anything to preserve their reputations, even if it's not so nice.

This book was okay but too slow for a thriller. It did have a surprise twist at the end.

I also read by this author: Local Woman Missing

Still Missing

 Fiction by Chevy Stevens

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

The missing realtor on Vancouver island was a pretty famous case to begin with. Then when she was miraculously found almost a year later after an harrowing hostage ordeal, Annie O’Sullivan’s name was even more well-known. But Annie feels like she’s still missing in a way; she can’t get over her fear that she could be abducted again and media attention is worse than unhelpful. Can Annie return to any kind of normal life?

This was an exciting and unsettling story with some surprises.

I also read by this author: Always Watching

The Undoing Project

Subtitled: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
Nonfiction by Daniel Lewis

https://www.audible.com

The titular Friendship that Changed Our Minds was between two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the middle of the twentieth century. While these men were pretty interesting and their work very interesting, this book itself was not all that interesting.

Although the author gave a lot of information about both men (and a lot of extraneous information, including irrelevant things about his previous successful book Moneyball ), the book didn't read like a story about people. I don't like stories that aren't about people.

I think I would have done better just to read their psychology papers.

Count My Lies

 Fiction by Sophie Stava

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Sloan Caraway is a liar, and she admits it. Well, she admits it to herself at least. At the very beginning of this book she tells a nice-looking single dad at the the park that she is a nurse named Caitlin. But Sloan is wearing scrubs because she is a nail technician, not a nurse. And it turns out the dad is not exactly single...

Soon "Caitlin" is ingratiating herself with the dad AND his wife, and angling to get herself hired as a nanny. But is she going to be able to keep track of all the lies she had told when she's there long-term? And what if her fake nursing skills are really needed?

This was a really exciting thriller that kept me guessing!

Tell No Lies

Fiction by Gregg Hurwitz

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

 Daniel Brasher is a counselor working with ex-cons when he finds a threatening letter in his interdepartmental mailbox that reads, "Admit what you did or you will bleed for it." Fortunately, it's not addressed to him; unfortunately, it's a couple of weeks old and the person to whom it was addressed has already been murdered.

Then Daniel discovers three other similar letters meant for different people. Can he prevent more bloodshed? And what did these potential victims do, if anything, that they are being punished for? And especially, what does this whole thing have to do with Daniel himself?

All these questions are answered by the end of the story. This was an exciting story with several surprises, although some of the twists were a bit over the top.

I also read by this author: Don't Look Back

Look Closer

 Fiction by David Ellis

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

At the beginning of this book, Lauren Betancourt is murdered in her expensive Grace Park, Illinois, home. It's Halloween night, and to all appearances, she was killed by the man she was having a secret affair with. But is that really what happened?

This was an exciting thriller with several surprises. Most of the characters were truly awful people...

Bad Monkeys

 Fiction by Matt Ruff

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder, and she's being interviewed by a psychiatrist when she makes some startling claims. Jane says she's been employed by a worldwide organization who is tasked with fighting evil by identifying and removing it. Specifically, Jane claims to be an assassin for the unnamed organization; she says she kills Bad Monkeys, that is, people who are deemed irredeemably evil and dangerous to others.

This is an interesting beginning, and the book starts out really good. Unfortunately there are so many unbelievable plot twists, and Jane is such an unreliable narrator, that I ended up unsure at the end of the story what had really happened. The novel gave me a bad case of I-Can-No-Longer-Suspend-My-Disbelief-Syndrome.**

**I-Can-No-Longer-Suspend-My-Disbelief-Syndrome: 

(See The Truth About the Accident by Nicole Trope)

This is when the plot twists push the boundaries of believability too far, (such as a long-lost-identical twin showing up at the last minute to take the blame when it had never before been mentioned that the person has a twin) or too often (such as three or four coincidences lining up to reveal the final twist.)

The Choice: Embrace the Possible

 Nonfiction by Dr. Edith Eva Eger

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

In 1942 Dr. Eger was a Jewish teenager in a town on the border of Czechoslovakia and Austria. Her father was a talented tailor and her mother and two sisters were accomplished musicians. Then suddenly the Nazis were in power and the family was shipped to Auschwitz. In 1980 Dr. Eger is a respected psychologist in El Paso, Texas. This book is about what happened to her in between.

It's a very moving story and also she has practical advice about overcoming trauma.

A Mouthful of Air

 Fiction by Amy Koppelman

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

At the beginning of his story, Julie Davis is a pretty young mother of an almost-one-year-old son. She's going about her day in 1997 New York City, trying to tell herself that everything is okay. The problem is, she's just recently emerged from a private mental hospital after a serious suicide attempt a month ago, and she is really REALLY not okay. Her mental state will not improve when she visits the gynecologist the next day and discovers she is pregnant again.

This novel is an affecting and believable portrait of a woman suffering from severe depression. It's hard to read. There was a movie starring Amanda Seyfried, and I would imagine that watching her beautiful face experiencing this much emotional pain would be particularly sad.

It's well written but way too despondently bleak. And the ending is not happy either...

Saving Max

 Fiction by Antionette Van Heugten

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Danielle's teenage son Max is severely depressed, suicidal, and acting out violently. She is forced to take him to a residential mental facility where she hopes Max can get help. But Max seems to be getting worse instead of better, and he ends up accused of murdering another patient! Can Danielle prove his innocence, as she hopes to do?

This was an okay thriller, but it had a lot of unbelievable elements (especially in the courtroom scenes), and Danielle exhibited a raging case of Hell-Bent Syndrome**, which can be tiresome to read about. 

**Hell-Bent Syndrome

(See The Shape of Snakes by Minette Waters)

This is where the protagonist spends the majority of the book Hell-Bent on solving/getting to the root of whatever the problem of the story is (to the exclusion of everything else in his/her life), while EVERYONE else tells him/her to STOP IT. Many times this path involves the main character getting (or coming perilously close to being) fired, evicted, divorced, disowned, and/or bankrupted, all in pursuit of the elusive TRUTH that he/she is SURE is about to be found.

In real life, this would land our friend the protagonist straight in the looney bin. Think about it: When EVERYONE else's version of reality is the polar opposite of yours, that is called, "You're crazy, dude." (In layman's terms.) But not in the world of the Thriller Novel.

In the Thriller Novel, the sufferer of Hell-Bent syndrome is inexplicably and against all odds proven right in the end, and gets to say "I told you so!" to all the nay-sayers in his/her life who thought he/she was nuts. And then he/she magically recovers everything lost during the downward-spiral portion of the story, like the proverbial country song played backwards. ("You get your wife back, your truck back, your job back...")

Rabbits for Food

 Fiction by Binnie Kirschenbaum

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

At the beginning of this book, a woman (possibly named Bunny) is institutionalized after a long slide of depression followed by a violent breakdown. She is refusing treatment.

A few chapters in, I realized that reading the chronicle of her spiraling decline might devastate me beyond repair, and I had to stop reading. Maybe the author should take it as a compliment that her prose affected me so...

I'm logging the book here as a Did Not Finish so I don't accidentally try to read it again.

Ward D

 Fiction by Freida McFadden

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Amy is a medical student doing her clinical rotation in psychiatry, a specialty she has no intention of pursuing due to her personal fears about mental illness. In this story she does her first overnight shift on Ward D, the locked psychiatric wing of the hospital, and she will have to face those fears head-on.

This was an exciting thriller with several surprises! 

I also read recently by this author: The Crash

Brass Ring

 Fiction by Diane Chamberlain

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

At the beginning of this story, Claire Harte-Mathias is the perfect wife to her husband Jon, an accomplished man who also is paralyzed from the waist down. Claire has lived a charmed life, going from a happy childhood to an idyllic marriage seamlessly. But Claire is also repressing almost everything about herself without knowing it. 

Across the country, her estranged sister Vanessa has a very different set of memories about their childhood; to Vanessa the past a dark and dangerous place. The two girls were separated by their divorcing parents as children and haven't been in contact since. Vanessa wants to keep it that way.

This was an amazing book in my opinion. I notice that many reviewers disagree and say they hated it and hated Claire specifically. While it's true that Claire is actually kind of a terrible person, I felt that the author gave us enough insight into her personality to make her understandable. It takes great writing to create realistic characters like this. But then, I'm a real Diane Chamberlain fangirl.

I also read recently by this author: Secret Lives

Becoming Chloe

 Fiction by Catherine Ryan Hyde

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Jordan is living on the streets when he meets a damaged girl who doesn't like her real name, so she decides to be called Chloe. He works hard to take care of her, but soon learns that just changing Chloe's name doesn't change all the bad things that have happened to her. Desperate to save her, Jordan embarks on a quest to show Chloe the good and beautiful things of the world, and eventually learns how to see them for himself.

After several books I didn't like, I went to this author I always enjoy, and she did not disappoint. Great characters and a good story!

I also read recently by this author: Electric God

The Best Minds

Subtitled: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
Nonfiction by Jonathan Rosen

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This was a hard book to read.

It was long, for one. And it was sad. The author's best childhood friend Michael Laudor is the smartest and most popular guy on the block growing up in the seventies. They are at school together through high school and college, and it seems that Jonathan feels a little in Michael's shadow as they mature into adults.

But Michael is both brilliant and mentally ill. When his schizophrenia begins to manifest itself after graduation, Michael endures a hospital stay and defers his admission to Yale Law School. Still, he is able to attend the next year with support from his father and from the school dean. The dean, along with many other law professors, sees Michael's mental illness as a disability like any other, and with the newly passed ADA laws in place, feels that Michael can succeed at law school with reasonable accommodations.

And Michael does well at Yale Law, with help. One scene that really affected me in this section described Michael's dad Chuck patiently talking though Michael's pervasive hallucinations. Upon waking up in the morning, Michael would believe that his room was on fire. Chuck would call and gently remind his son that the fire wasn't real, convincing Michael to put out his hand to verify that the false fire was not actually hot, and then coaxing Michael to put his feet onto a floor that looked like an inferno. Reading this one has to admire both Chuck's devotion to his son and Michael's courage in facing such a terrifying world every day.

But law school doesn't last forever, and unfortunately neither will the aging Chuck. When Michael enters the workforce, he finds that world much less accommodating. Things simply will not end well for Michael, and that's not a spoiler. (The synopsis notes actually DO give away the ending, which I regret knowing in advance. So I recommend not reading the entire book jacket.)

In short, this was a well-written book that gives you a lot to think about, but it's heavy and depressing.

Where You End

 Fiction by Abbot Kahler

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Kat and Jude are twenty three year old identical twins. When they get in a car accident and Kat loses her memory, Jude takes the opportunity to rewrite history in order to protect her sister from the reality of their actual shared past. But the past always comes out, especially in psychological thrillers…

I didn’t really like this book. It was so obvious that Jude was making things up and then so annoying how bad a job she did of it. Then the revelations of the twins’ true history was just awful: both too graphic and oddly under-explained. I guess it mostly held my attention but I ended up disliking pretty much every character. 

Sociopath: A Memoir

 Nonfiction by Dr. Patric Gagne, PhD

https://www.audible.com

The author of this memoir is a diagnosed sociopath. From a very young age, Patric realized she didn't feel things the way other kids did; she couldn't feel some emotions at all and others seemed dulled and blunted. She worried that this meant she was irretrievably bad, and set on a lifelong journey to find out what was wrong with her and what could be done about it. She ended up with a PhD is psychology.

This was a very entertaining memoir to read. Of course, it could be all made up, since sociopaths are also liars, but I don't really think so. It was all very interesting.

Here's something that bugged me: What is up with this woman's name? Is it weirdly shortened from Patricia? Did her parents want a boy? It would have been very easy for her to explain her name in the narrative: Just have someone ask her about it! I mean, don't tell me no one has ever in your whole life asked you why you have a boy's name, Patric! Or is it a pseudonym? Why doesn't this bother anyone else?

It Didn’t Start With You

Subtitled: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

Nonfiction by Mark Wolynn

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This was an interesting psychology book about how the traumatic events our ancestors experienced can actually live on in our own DNA, even if we’re not aware of it. 

I really liked the case studies, and I kind of skimmed the more scholarly parts…

Acceptance: A Memoir

 Nonfiction by Emi Nietfeld

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This was a really interesting memoir about a girl with seriously messed-up parents who saw an Ivy League education as her way out. 

About the title: Emi's goal is college acceptance while every psychiatrist and social worker tell her that she must accept her limitations. 

I for one am very glad she didn't listen to the nay-sayers and instead made education her goal. Still, she doesn't sugarcoat the struggles she still faces and the fallout from her past. 

I Remember You

 Amazon Prime Kindle Fiction by Brian Freeman

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Hallie, a writer who lives in Las Vegas, is having a very bad day. Then her day gets worse, and she dies.

Good news though! She comes back, thanks to a quick-acting doctor with a defibrillator. But there's one problem: now she has a whole bunch of memories that aren't her own, even though they feel as if they are....

This was a really good thriller. I will look for more by this author.

I also read recently (for free!) by Amazon Prime Kindle: The Child Between Us