Recent Reads: July 19
Adult murder books, YA murder books
Apparently I’m all about the mayhem this summer? I guess we all have a different definition of escapism.
Scroll down to read about four mystery-thrillers, one absolutely fantastic and three that… well, they kept my interest? Which is actually a heavy lift sometimes, so while it sounds like I’m damning them with faint praise, I’m not.
Well, not much.
I’m still learning about the book world and my place in it, but even I knew then that McTavish was the sourest-tasting word in publishing—popular. It’s the paradox of authorhood: apparently if you’re good enough to be popular, you’re too popular to be any good.
—Everyone on this Train is a Suspect, by Benjamin Stevenson
Adult
Everyone on this Train is a Suspect, by Benjamin Stevenson
First things first: This is a sequel, which I hadn’t realized before reading the first chapter. But because A) I was already irrevocably hooked at that point, grinning ear-to-ear and B) I am a chaos monster, I read it anyway. That said, by the end of the second chapter, I’d already checked every local library within a half-hour drive for the first one, struck out, and so begrudgingly gave Bezos some money so that I could immediately read the first one when I finished this one.
Friends, as usual with my most-loved reads, I don’t even have the words to describe how much I enjoyed it. It’s a murder mystery set on a train (rad) traveling across Australia (also rad), narrated by a mystery author (well, after the events of the first book he became a mystery author, before that he self-published ebooks about HOW to write mysteries; rad rad), DURING A MYSTERY WRITERS’ FESTIVAL SO BASICALLY THE WHOLE CAST OF CHARACTERS ARE MYSTERY WRITERS AND PUBLISHING INDUSTRY FOLKS AND FANS (RAD, RAD, RAD). Our narrator, Ern, tells us the story according to the rules of Golden Age fair play mysteries, and is CONSTANTLY doing commentary about it (RAAAAAAAAADDDDDDDD):
If you think you don’t already know the rules to writing a murder mystery, trust me, you do. It’s all intuitive. Let me give you an example. I’m writing this in the first person. That means, in order to have sat down and physically written about it, I survive the events of the book. First person equals survival. Apologies in advance for the lack of suspense when I almost bite the dust in chapter 28.
Being a big fan of fair play mysteries, he has LOTS of Opinions about unreliable and ghost narrators, heh. He does a great job of sticking to the fair play rules while manipulating our perception to allow most of the reveals to still be surprising—and because of the way that fair play works, when you hit a reveal that ISN’T surprising, you pat yourself on the back for having figured it out ahead of time. It’s a win-win.
After the first murder—in Chapter 11.5—he does a breakdown of all of the various suspects and absolutely reads the audience for filth by telling us A) who is the most suspicious and B) why, and at least in my experience, he was ENTIRELY RIGHT about my reasoning, which was very rude and fantastically hilarious. I felt skewered and completely seen, in the best way possible.
It’s smart, it’s clever, it’s funny—it feels comfortably familiar, but fresh at the same time. On top of that, there’s a thread about the narrator having some big realizations about his own Main Character Syndrome that was really nicely done—it showed such empathy and so much thoughtfulness not just about genre, but about voice, perspective, and storytelling in general. If you’re a person who has TV Tropes bookmarked, pick this one up for sure. It’ll definitely, definitely appeal to fans of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club books, though it’s more on the smirky end of the spectrum than the warm hug end.
There Should Have Been Eight, by Nalini Singh
Set in New Zealand, this is a twisty mystery about a group of college friends, now in their thirties, who are all together again for the first time since one of them—the titular eighth—died by suicide nine years ago. On top of the straightforwardly appealing-to-me premise—I am always a sucker for The Big Chill… but with murder!—it all takes place at a remote Gothic monstrosity of a family estate, complete with secret passages, a mostly burned-down wing, and tragic family history. Also, there’s a secret diary.
There are lots of bumps and twists in the plotting—some of which I saw coming, others that were delightfully surprising. I didn’t feel much in the way of emotional engagement—our narrator, Luna, talks a lot about how much she loved poor dead Bea and how strong their connection was, but I never really felt it, which is obviously something that will vary from reader to reader.
There was a scene where they go into a locked room that I swear to GOD had literal spell books in it, but that detail was never revisited, which was a bummer—but I guess that was just a red herring unless it was a fever dream on my part. (We’ve been in the midst of a heat wave here, so maybe my brain is really and truly cooked?) I took very few notes—including the page number where said spell books appeared—and despite those couple of caveats, I happily chugged through, and will certainly be looking up Singh’s other thrillers.
Young Adult
The Island, by Natasha Preston
The Island uses a classic premise—a group of people is invited to a luxury weekend stay at a remote island, where, SURPRISE, they start getting picked off one by one. In this case, the invitees are all teen influencers (a true crime buff, a gamer, a book reviewer, a make-up expert, etc.) who are being courted by a billionaire who hopes that they’ll give his soon-to-open amusement park a boost in ticket sales.
It’s decidedly fine—I read it in one sitting, it kept me turning pages, and I’m certainly planning on picking up more of Preston’s thrillers—but it’s one of those books that largely dribbled out of my ears approximately three minutes after reading it. The one thing that has really stuck with me is that the ending is really jarring and unsatisfying—I absolutely understand what the author was going for, and it’s a standard horror trope that I have no issue with, but the way she deploys it feels more like she was like, “OKAY, I’M OVER WRITING THIS NOW” and just threw her pen across the room. Which, more power to her—when you’re done, you’re done.
That said, even a two sentence epilogue would have saved me from LITERALLY checking the binding to see if someone had ripped pages out.
Perfect Little Monsters, by Cindy R.X. He
This one has a title that echoes Pretty Little Liars for a reason. A high school queen bee gets done in at a party; everyone is a suspect because she was an absolute monster and everyone hated her. The police narrow in on our narrator, Dawn—even though as the new girl in school, she’d presumably have way less reason to murder someone—because she was apparently the last person to hand the victim a drink. So Dawn starts her own investigation in an attempt to clear her name.
Again, this one is fine. Same deal, I read it in one go, etc., etc., etc. It does more than The Island in terms of trying to tell a story about Bigger Issues—mainly, the effects of bullying—but, like The Island, the characters haven’t stayed with me.
All that said, teen readers who haven’t engaged with nine billion horror and mystery stories may well find the ultimate reveal SHOCKING and SURPRISING—but being the crabby monster that I am, all I could focus on was how it seemed like it misunderstood a classic trope. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this is a revenge story—horrible queen bee gets murdered in a book about bullying, right?—but in my experience, in Big Revenge stories, you save the worst person for last, rather than bump them off FIRST. Here, at the end, the antagonist has two of the dead girl’s minions cornered and gives this whole big speech about how the Queen Bee had to die first because she was so horrible, but that makes no sense psychologically—or in terms of genre conventions—because the whole point of picking off a group of jerks is to make the worst of the worst suffer LONGER. Bond villains give their speeches to Bond—from their perspective, to the Big Bad—not to Bond’s support staff.
If the book had subverted the trope in a way that felt like it was commenting on the trope itself, I’d absolutely have been there for it, but in this case it felt more like it was done for plot reasons, so… eh. But I am aware that sometimes I take these things farrrrrrr too seriously.
Hope your summer is going well—where have you been at for escapist reads? (Or movies! Always here for those recs as well.)
The Island was good—I had a similar reaction to it. I’ve read a few of her books and I’d describe them as solid. I have the Nalini Singh book on my TBR!
Oh, that first one sounds so fun! And you can be happy because I have Camp Scare AND The Clackity here on my shelf.
I spent the spring in a massive reading slump, I think because my husband got laid off and I became unable to focus on anything. I did take refuge in the books of my youth and read like ten Pern books, ha. Then husband got some work, I had an actual escape, spent 3 weeks in the UK, brought covid home, and am finally able to read again, yay! Currently reading a lot of UK history.