I should have ended things with this book as soon as I grew irritated by our narrator’s navel-gazing. But, I persevered, hoping against hope that at some point, ideally before reaching the book’s finish line, I would find what I was reading to be even remotely intriguing. At the beginning we have a young woman […]
More“They could only stitch themselves back together if they did something irreversible.” Heavenly Creatures by way of Patricia Highsmith, plus a sprinkle of Like Minds, and with the kind of teenage morbidity one could find in Hangsaman or Stoker. Adroit and gripping, These Violent Delights is a superlative debut novel. Being the self-proclaimed connoisseur of […]
MoreThe Devotion of Suspect X is an unusual detective novel. By the end of the first chapter readers witness the murder that is at the centre of this novel. We know the identity and motivations of the perpetrator. What follows is a compulsive game of cat-and-mouse between ‘detective Galileo’ and Suspect X. At times this […]
More“There is no time in our lives when we are so conspicuously without mercy as in adolescence.” I don’t think I would ever picked up this ‘obscure’ and forgotten novel if it hadn’t been for the ‘crime fiction’ module I took during my second year of uni. Thanks to that module, which was in every […]
More“The future was a dark corridor. And though she would grope her way through it, the door at the end would be locked tight.” After reading that Hye-Young Pyun’s novel The Hole won the ‘Shirley Jackson Award’, I was intrigued to read her work. Thanks to NetGalley I was able to read The Law of […]
MoreThe opening lines of this novel are wonderfully theatrical: “All three of the Drumm brothers were at the funeral, although one of us was in a coffin.” Our Little Cruelties by Liz Nugent is a gleefully dark novel, filled with mean, selfish, and cruel individuals. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Nugent’s latest […]
MoreAt first I was intrigued by the prologue featuring young Garda Cormac Reilly who—after answering a call out—is faced with his first dead body and two neglected children. The rest of the book, which is set years later and follows a newly transferred to Galway Reilly, was markedly less engaging. Maybe readers who haven’t read […]
MoreIn spite of its flaws Platform Seven is a lot more thoughtful than one might expect from its murder mystery premise. “There was a man on the station only two hours ago who will never go home again.” One of the weakest aspects of this book is that it tries, and doesn’t really succeed, in […]
MoreThis was an unexpectedly silly thriller. While the story’s premise was compelling enough, the characters and various plot-lines are tawdry rehashes of other novels in this genre… The plot seems to focus on uninteresting encounters and two unrelated ‘mysteries’, one around Evie Cormac’s identity and past, and the other one is the case forensic psychologist […]
MoreDennis Lehane has written many superb novels, and while Since We Fell demonstrates many of his strengths, the story seems a lot less focused than his usual ones. The intriguing prologue leads into a story which follows Rachel Childs. In the first 1/4 of the novel we follow her quest for her father. I found […]
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