Reading List by Jennie (Recent and Not-So-Recent)
Bad Date by Ellery Lloyd
This was a punchy little short story that probably doesn’t hold up under much scrutiny. I don’t usually (ever) read short suspense stories, so this was something different – I believe it was an Amazon freebie. It starts with the recording of a podcast with Fay and Poppy; Fay is a fading movie star and Poppy is her personal assistant/life-long best friend. Fay talks about joining Raya, the dating app famous for being for, well, famous people, as well as the unusually wealthy and/or good-looking (I guess?). Afterward, we get a glimpse into Fay’s less-than-glamorous personal life – she’s filed for bankruptcy and is about to be evicted from her rural retreat outside London.
The perspective switches to Fay’s Raya date, Ollie, who met her on the app (she used the alias Francesca). They have a rather awkward date and it becomes clear that something isn’t quite right. From there it’s a slow unraveling (well, as slow as 58 pages can be) of revelations about Ollie’s motives, Fay’s motives, and the roles played by Poppy as well as Fay’s creepy teenage son Wolf.
I gave this a B. I really got into it while reading, but again, the plot really doesn’t bear scrutiny, and the creepiness of a couple of the characters and situations left a little bit of a lingering bad taste. Still, I might check out the author further.
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The Break-In by Katherine Faulkner
I believe this is Faulkner’s third novel; I gave the first two each B+s. This one had what I thought was a very solid and intriguing set-up – the protagonist, Alice, has killed a young man who broke into her home and posed a threat to her five-year-old daughter Martha. As the story begins Alice is dealing with the aftermath, including a police investigation. (Alice is initially arrested, which struck me as unrealistic, but on the other hand I may be looking at it from an American perspective, and perhaps an arrest under those circumstances are more likely under British law? I don’t know.)
Alice is believably a mess; she feels guilty (though she didn’t *mean* to kill the young man, whose name was Ezra – she hit him on the head with a stool to stop him from going into the room her daughter was in; he had a knife in his hand and was ranting incoherently). She finds herself drawn to Ezra’s mother and ends up visiting her (dumb. so dumb) without revealing her identity. While there, she finds a item that she believes was taken from her home (before the break-in), which suggests that Ezra had been there before and didn’t target Alice randomly. She starts to believe and obsessively investigate the idea that there was a reason she was targeted and that there is something she doesn’t know. Meanwhile, she also finds it impossible to ignore the critical online comments about her, which include increasingly serious threats from one commenter.
The story is told in first-and-third person (I don’t usually pay that much attention to this, but I found this slightly annoying and unnecessary, especially because I think there were accompanying tense changes as well). Alice is the main narrator, but we also hear from Linda (Ezra’s mother), as well as Becca, who is Martha’s nanny and Stella, a fellow school mother who was there the night that Ezra broke in. The pieces come together in a fairly predictable way (and as is usual in this type of story, some of the byzantine twists late in the story require not thinking too hard about certain aspects), but I find Faulkner really readable. I wish I found her protagonists a bit more relatable – they all seem to be variations on “neurotic Englishwoman in suspense novel” and that gets old. But the writing solid and the plotting is propulsive, and so this is another B+ for me.
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She Kills Me: The True Stories of History’s Deadliest Women by Jennifer Wright
I’ve read several of Wright’s previous books – all in this style, which consists of short vignettes (usually a few pages). The length of each piece and the breezy style make these books really readable, if not exactly suited for deep thinking. As the title indicates, the stories are about historical female killers. They’re organized into loose sections such as “Killer Queens” and “Avenging Angels.” Some are famous (or infamous) – Boudica, Elizabeth Bathory. But many are historical footnotes (or at least new to me) – like Catherine Monvoisin. An early orphan turned fortune-teller, she ended up in the court of Louis the XIV of France. Catherine allegedly helped Louis’ discarded mistress, Madame de Montspan, to attempt to poison him. This didn’t end well for her. I found this book pretty diverting and would give it a B.
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In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware
I’ll be honest: I read this back in January and apparently forgot to review it? Which sort of jibes with how I feel about it now, though I apparently did give it a B. The blurb reads:
Sometimes the only thing to fear…is yourself.
When reclusive writer Leonora is invited to the English countryside for a weekend away, she reluctantly agrees to make the trip. But as the first night falls, revelations unfold among friends old and new, an unnerving memory shatters Leonora’s reserve, and a haunting realization creeps in: the party is not alone in the woods.
And…that’s not helping me? I feel like I may be confusing it with another book I read about old friends gathered in a remote manor? Or possibly two other books? I could flip through the pages but I think I’m just going to let my current impression stand. Good enough for a B grade (which is what I recorded in my log in January), but forgettable enough that I remember nothing about it.
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