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Daisy Darker
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Paperbacks From Hell
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American Mother
Title: American Mother
Author: Gregg Olsen
Genre: true crime
Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.
I read If You Tell awhile ago and was gripped from the beginning. Not just because of the story, but the writing was excellent, as well. So, when I saw the author had a new true crime out, I was really excited to grab it from NetGalley. However, I just never connected with this one and found myself skimming toward the end.
From Goodreads: At 5.02 pm on June 5, 1986, an emergency call came into the local sheriff’s office in the small town of Auburn, Washington State. A distressed housewife, Stella Nickell, said her husband Bruce was having a seizure. Officers rushed to the Nickell’s mobile home, to find Stella standing frozen at the door… Bruce was on the floor fighting for his life.
As Stella became the beneficiary of over $175,000 in a life insurance pay-out, forensics discovered that Bruce had consumed painkillers laced with cyanide.
A week later, fifteen-year-old Hayley was getting ready for another school day. Her mom, Sue, called out ‘I love you’ before heading into the bathroom and moments later collapsed on the floor. Sue never regained consciousness, and the autopsy revealed she had been poisoned by cyanide tainted headache pills. Just like Bruce.
While a daughter grieved the sudden and devastating loss of her mother, a young woman, Cindy, was thinking about her own mom Stella. She thought about the years of neglect and abuse, the tangled web of secrets Stella had shared with her, and Cindy contemplated turning her mom into the FBI…
Gripping and heart-breaking, Gregg Olsen uncovers the shocking true story of a troubled family. He delves into a complex mother-daughter relationship rooted in mistrust and deception, and the journey of the sweet curly-haired little girl from Oregon whose fierce ambition to live the American Dream led her to make the ultimate betrayal.
I really love a great true crime story and have a solid addiction to the ID channel, but I was endlessly bored with this one. This one offered a lot of backstory that I was bored by, and when we get to the trial, many of those chapters are just trial transcriptions. Instead of having a truly evil killer, Stella, she was just obnoxious, selfish, and not all that bright. I rolled by eyes a lot at her. I can’t say I’ll recommend this to everyone, but to those who love true crime might connect with it in a way I didn’t.
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Scenes From My Life
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Cell
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How I’ll Kill You
Title: How I’ll Kill You
Author: Ren DeStefano
Genre: mystery/thriller
Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.
I had no idea what this book was about when I picked it up but assumed it had something to do with murder, given the title and the fact that a woman on the cover is holding a knife. Turns out those women are identical triplets! Although this book was repetitive in parts, at least it was something I’d never read before.
From GoodReads: Sissy has an…interesting family. Always the careful one, always the cautious one, she has handled the cleanup while her serial killer sisters have carved a path of carnage across the U.S. Now, as they arrive in the Arizona heat, Sissy must step up and embrace the family pastime of making a man fall in love and then murdering him. Her first target? A young widower named Edison—and their mutual attraction is instant. While their relationship progresses, and most couples would be thinking about picking out china patterns and moving in together, Sissy’s family is reminding her to think about picking out burial sites and moving on.
Then something happens that Sissy never anticipated: She begins to feel protective of Edison, and before she can help it, she’s fallen in love. But the clock is ticking, and her sisters are growing restless. It becomes clear that the gravesite she chooses will hide a body no matter what happens; but if she betrays her family, will it be hers?
The story is told from Sissy’s perspective, so you never get to know her sisters all that well, which makes the story more interesting. You are guessing what they are up to just as much as she is. Her love for Edison seems plausible, even though she’s being someone she’s not toward him. But the mystery of what her sisters do when Sissy isn’t around is the best part of the plot. Sissy trusts them entirely, but can they actually be trusted? I thought this book needed a bit of an edit to condense some redundancy, but overall, I really enjoyed it and had no idea where the plot was heading.
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Iron Gold
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All Boys Aren’t Blue
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Such a Pretty Smile
Title: Such a Pretty Smile
Author: Kristi DeMeester
Genre: horror
Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.
I became aware of DeMeester from the Books in the Freezer podcast and have been meaning to read her for a while. When this one came on to NetGalley, I knew I would be reading it, and I couldn’t put this one down. I finished in 24 hours and was hooked the entire time. I absolutely loved this one and will be reading more of her work for sure.
From Goodreads: There’s something out there that’s killing. Known only as The Cur, he leaves no traces, save for the torn bodies of girls, on the verge of becoming women, who are known as trouble-makers; those who refuse to conform, to know their place. Girls who don’t know when to shut up.
2019: Thirteen-year-old Lila Sawyer has secrets she can’t share with anyone. Not the school psychologist she’s seeing. Not her father, who has a new wife, and a new baby. And not her mother—the infamous Caroline Sawyer, a unique artist whose eerie sculptures, made from bent twigs and crimped leaves, have made her a local celebrity. But soon Lila feels haunted from within, terrorized by a delicious evil that shows her how to find her voice—until she is punished for using it.
2004: Caroline Sawyer hears dogs everywhere. Snarling, barking, teeth snapping that no one else seems to notice. At first, she blames the phantom sounds on her insomnia and her acute stress in caring for her ailing father. But then the delusions begin to take shape—both in her waking hours, and in the violent, visceral sculptures she creates while in a trance-like state. Her fiancé is convinced she needs help. Her new psychiatrist waives her “problem” away with pills. But Caroline’s past is a dark cellar, filled with repressed memories and a lurking horror that the men around her can’t understand.
As past demons become a present threat, both Caroline and Lila must chase the source of this unrelenting, oppressive power to its malignant core. Brilliantly paced, unsettling to the bone, and unapologetically fierce, Such a Pretty Smile is a powerful allegory for what it can mean to be a woman, and an untamed rallying cry for anyone ever told to sit down, shut up, and smile pretty.
The mother/daughter bond this book explores is fantastic. Caroline and Lila are both such dynamic characters that you can’t help but root for both of them. I absolutely loved their dueling plots. And DeMeester manages to do something a lot of writers don’t. She makes both plotlines meaningful to one another. What happens to Caroline in the past, parallels Lina’s in the present. I thought this book was so well-written, overall, and will be recommending it to everyone.
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In the Lives of Puppets
Pleasant Nights 