Fiction by Agatha Christie
This story, starring recurring characters Tommy and Tuppence Beresford (see The Secret Adversary and N or M?) was not as engrossing as most of Agatha Christie's stories. Still, there was a good mystery and a surprising ending.
I also read recently by this author: At Bertram's Hotel
Fiction by Joshilyn Jackson
Mirabel is a working actress who left Georgia for Hollywood almost twenty years ago and had never planned to return. However, a recent situation with an increasingly creepy stalker and a job offer for the lead in a series filming in Atlanta has changed her mind. She moves to a nice high-rise apartment in Atlanta with her twelve-year-old daughter Honor and hopes the stalker won't follow them.
The reader can probably guess that is a vain hope; if the stalker didn't come looking for Mirabel, then how could this be a book? But this is NOT a predictable thriller. It had several surprises and great characters. I highly recommend it!
Fiction by Armando Lucas Correa
This book begins in 2015 with Elise Duval, an eighty-year-old woman who gets a shock from reading an old letter written in German, a language she didn't remember she actually knew. It seems she had repressed some memories from her childhood in France during World War Two, and had somehow forgotten that she had originally been German. Then the story goes back to the early 1930's in Berlin and a Jewish woman called Amanda Sternberg, who gives birth to two daughters and then has to figure out how to save them from the Nazis.
This was a good story, but it seemed to skip some details and leave things unresolved. According to the book jacket, it's "based on true events," so that may be the reason for the dearth of information.
Fiction by Catherine Newman
In this story a family goes to Cape Cod for week in the summer, as they have done every summer for more than twenty years. There are two grown children and two elderly grandparents. Nothing much happens over the course of the week, but the point is the relationships.
This is an emotional novel from the point of view of an empty-nest mother, which is a perspective I can definitely relate to. I liked the book, and much of it resonated with me. I did kind of wish there was more plot.
Fiction by Meg Elison
This is the last book in the "Road to Nowhere" Series (see below). It was a good conclusion to the series, in that it wrapped everything up pretty well while producing some surprises at the end. Still, it was kind of sad to me; I liked the characters of Flora and Etta a lot and really wanted them to end up happier.
I suppose it's hard to have a happy ending in a post-apocalyptic world...
Fiction by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Toby Fleishman is getting divorced, and he's just discovering the shallow world of online dating when his (almost-ex) wife Rachel brings his kids (Hannah and Solly) to his place unexpectedly. It's their scheduled weekend, but she drops them off them more than a day early and in the middle of night. Then Rachel disappears, even though she was supposed to have retrieved Hannah and Solly at the end of the weekend and taken them to the Hamptons for a vacation. Has something happened to her?
Semi-spoiler alert: Nothing happened to Rachel. That's not what the book is about. The book is about the characters (mostly Toby, but also his friends Libby and Seth, and eventually Rachel) complaining endlessly about their lives and never actually understanding how much they are contributing to their own unhappiness. Also none of them listen to each other, or even seem to try to understand what anyone else feels.
It was really a depressing book.
Fiction by Antionette Van Heugten
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...")
