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The Spite House

Title: The Spite House

Author: Johnny Compton

Genre: horror

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.

I love finding good horror books, but this one was just okay. Having every chapter be from a different narrator didn’t work. You ended up reading the same event but from another perspective, which was repetitive. However, if the book were third-person omniscient, that would be much less confusing. The story is also told in multiple timelines, adding to the jumble.

As for the plot, the story is fine. For some reason, Eric and his two daughters are on the run and need money. Eric finds a classified ad asking people to live in a haunted house and report what happens. Easy money. But, of course, it’s not as easy as you would think. The story isn’t just a basic haunted house story because it also involves events that occurred in the past and Eric’s family in the present.

I gave this one three starts because I did like the overall book but the multiple perspective narrators was so off-putting that I had a hard time getting past it.

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Bye, Baby

Title: Bye, Baby

Author: Carola Lovering

Genre: thriller

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book

I HATED the characters in this book. The story is about two childhood friends, Billie and Cassie, and how their lives diverged. I guess I was supposed to be sympathetic to Billie because she’s not evil, but her neediness and desperation were so off-putting. And Cassie is an influencer, and I hated her from page one.

Billie is desperate for most of the book to get Cassie’s attention, but Cassie has a new friend group who understands her lifestyle, motherhood, her newfound fame, and her husband’s financial situation. Billie grew up with Cassie, and even though Cassie has always been a gold digger, she loved her anyway.

I did finish the book because I wanted to know what happened, but I can’t recommend this one to anyone. Both characters were so wretched that I don’t want to subject others to them.

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And There He Kept Her

Title: And There He Kept Her

Author: Joshua Moehling

Genre: thriller

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book

I love discovering new authors, and I am happy to say Moehling is one I’ll read more from. I’ve already downloaded the next book in this series. This story follows Ben Packard, who returns to the town he and his family used to visit during the summer. Also, the town where his brother went missing twenty years ago. Packard is now the sheriff and is entangled in the disappearance of two teenagers.

The story is cat and mouse, and you know early on what happened to the teens, but following Packard is worth reading. He’s a great guy, and you root for him to find the truth and become the man he is in private. While this one didn’t keep me guessing because we know the fate of the teens from the start, but following the clues with Ben is a lot of fun.

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Sisters of the Lost Nation

Title: Sisters of the Lost Nation

Author: Nick Medina

Genre: thriller, mystery

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.

Indigenous people of this country are severely underrepresented in publishing, so it’s great when a writer finds his voice in the industry.

From Goodreads: Anna Horn is always looking over her shoulder. For the bullies who torment her, for the entitled visitors at the reservation’s casino…and for the nameless, disembodied entity that stalks her every step—an ancient tribal myth come-to-life, one that’s intent on devouring her whole.

With strange and sinister happenings occurring around the casino, Anna starts to suspect that not all the horrors on the reservation are old. As girls begin to go missing and the tribe scrambles to find answers, Anna struggles with her place on the rez, desperately searching for the key she’s sure lies in the legends of her tribe’s past.

When Anna’s own little sister also disappears, she’ll do anything to bring Grace home. But the demons plaguing the reservation—both ancient and new—are strong, and sometimes, it’s the stories that never get told that are the most important.

Part gripping thriller and part mythological horror, author Nick Medina spins an incisive and timely novel of life as an outcast, the cost of forgetting tradition, and the courage it takes to become who you were always meant to be.

This book was clearly the writer’s first, and he needs a great editor. Too many things are happening in the plot. Anna is a good character, but she is also struggling with her identity… is she gay? is she transgender? That subplot was wholly unnecessary. As told in the third person, Anna’s parents are referred to by their first names, but the author switches to Mom and Dad on occasion. I loved the mythology behind the story.

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The Soulmate

Title: The Soulmate

Author: Sally Hepworth

Genre: thriller

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.

I’ve heard great things about Sally Hepworth’s books, so when I saw this pop up on NetGalley, I grabbed it. I also follow her on Instagram, where she posts delightful, fun things. However, this one fell a bit flat for me.

From GoodReads: Gabe and Pippa Gerard have just moved into their dream house: a cliffside cottage in a sleepy coastal town outside Melbourne. It’s a fresh start to their marriage and the perfect place to raise their two young daughters. But the house’s perfect façade hides something more sinister: The Spot, where the tall cliffs have become a popular place for those wishing to end their lives. After talking someone down from the ledge, Gabe becomes a local hero, saving person after person… until one night, he doesn’t. And Pippa sees Gabe the moment after it happened, standing alone at the cliff’s edge, arms outstretched, palms facing out.

The death is ruled a suicide— Gabe said it was a stranger devastated over her husband’s infidelity. But when Pippa discovers that Gabe knew the victim, she has more questions than answers. Plus, the woman’s husband swears she wouldn’t have jumped. Why would Gabe lie about not knowing her? Why would she have been at The Spot if not to jump? And did she really jump… or was she pushed? As Pippa works to uncover the truth, the foundations of the life they’ve built begin to crack, and their deepest secrets start to unravel. 

The story is told from Pippa’s perspective as well as from the person who died on the cliff, which is a bit weird. I’m not sure why it’s just not told in the third person omniscient. Not only is it from two perspectives, but it’s also in the past and present. This seems like an easy way to tell a story without giving too much away. However, using a different narrator is difficult. See the Dublin Murder Squad books for a masterclass in this style. Narrator aside, the story had some plot twists that were just crammed in there to be “interesting,” and I didn’t believe in them at all. I will probably give Hepworth another try but was underwhelmed by this one.

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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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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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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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The Deluge

Title: The Deluge

Author: Stephen Markley

Genre: climate change fiction

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.

I have only heard amazing things about this book, and with a quote from Stephen King on the cover, I knew this was one I had to read. I truly had no idea what I was getting into. To say this book is good isn’t accurate. It’s not really enjoyable. It’s a giant bummer, honestly. But it’s such an important book and will stick with me for years.

From GoodReads: In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have. 

At 900 pages, this book moves slowly and methodically. If you have the stamina, it’s worth reading, but don’t expect to have the greatest time ever. Global warming is real and we are past the point of being able to salvage the earth. And as this book illustrates, the future is probably bleak. The characters weave in and out of one another’s lives, impacting the world in various ways. What I did love about this book was how all-expansive it was. Markley did his research to the 1000th degree. I could not believe all of this came from one person’s head. I can’t say I recommend this to everyone, but there are some who will find it as profound and important as I did.

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The Night Shift

Title: The Night Shift

Author: Alex Finlay

Genre: thriller

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.

I read Every Last Fear a while ago and thought it was pretty good. Good enough to want to read more of Finlay. So, when I saw this one on NetGalley, I grabbed it, expecting another pretty good book. I was surprised because this one was even better. I loved this one and flew through it in a couple of days.

From Goodreads: It’s New Year’s Eve 1999. Y2K is expected to end in chaos: planes falling from the sky, elevators plunging to earth, world markets collapsing. A digital apocalypse. None of that happens. But at a Blockbuster Video in New Jersey, four teenagers working late at the store are attacked. Only one inexplicably survives. Police quickly identify a suspect, the boyfriend of one of the victims, who flees and is never seen again.

Fifteen years later, more teenage employees are attacked at an ice cream store in the same town, and again only one makes it out alive.

In the aftermath of the latest crime, three lives intersect: the lone survivor of the Blockbuster massacre who’s forced to relive the horrors of her tragedy; the brother of the fugitive accused, who’s convinced the police have the wrong suspect; and FBI agent Sarah Keller who must delve into the secrets of both nights—stirring up memories of teen love and lies—to uncover the truth about murders on the night shift.

I loved that this book follows three different characters, Sarah Keller; Ella Monroe, the survivor of the original murders; and Chris Ford, the brother of the accused. Between those three, you get the full story. And there are some fun plot twists along the way. I did guess the big reveal at the end at the beginning of the book, but there were plenty of other surprises. I’m super critical of good writing, and Finlay wrote a beautifully tight story. I will definitely recommend this one.