“Two Girls Down,” by Louisa Luna, is a quick and intense read about a bounty hunter searching for two missing girls. Alice Vega, the bounty hunter, has a good track record finding missing kids and charges appropriately. The girls’ mother is desperate and with her wealthy mother’s help engages her. Despite her reputation, Vega gets no help from the local police, who are already understaffed and underfunded. They&#...
“Schrodinger’s Dog” is a very fine short story stretched out over the course of a novel, filled with tedious exposition and infodumps that detract heavily from the ideas of the book which involve time travel and killing/not killing a dog. I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway. “Schrodinger’s Dog,” a book with an exciting summary of its plot, fails utterly to live up to the expectations it raises. A ...
“Hunger,” by Roxane Gay, is one woman’s attempt to grapple with the state and size of her body and the way it interacts with the world and the world interacts with it. It’s also a story of endurance, and survival: a story of sexual violence, of eating disorders, of being treated as less than for her weight. Gay is a brilliant writer and accurately portrays the way fat bodies are treated, and the way we take up sp...
“The Summer Wives,” by Beatriz Williams, is the story of new money, old money, and no money colliding on an island in the north east coast, told primarily from the point of view of the wealthy (by marrying into it) Miranda. As she spends her first summer on Winthrop Island, among people who’ve been summering their for generations and among the people who live there year round, she’s swept up in the wake of her dr...
“The Woman in Cabin 10,” by Ruth Ware, was published in 2016 and became a New York Times Bestseller… a reputation it deserves. I devoured the book in one day, deeply regretting that I hadn’t taken it with me on a train ride and wait at a doctor’s office (my husband was with me and I wanted to be polite and not ignore him for a book, foolish decision). Note: I won this book from a Goodreads giveaway. My opin...
“Caged,” by Ellison Cooper, is a fast paced thriller about FBI neuroscientist Sayer Altair, who winds up leading the hunt for an especially twisted serial killer. Said serial killer is kidnapping young women and locking them in cages, dosing them with psychoactive drugs, priming them with mythology about death and dying, and then starving them. It’s a long, slow, scary way to die. Altair and her team are eager to end t...
Oh my god. I won “The Ghost Script” by Jules Feiffer in a good reads giveaway and my very excited opinion is honestly mine. “The Ghost Script” is the third book in a trilogy. If I’d realized that I wouldn’t have entered the contest, as I haven’t read the first two and it can be hard to jump into a series partway through without knowing what’s gone before. But I’m really glad that I e...
“The King’s Justice” is a medieval murder mystery/thriller by E. M. Powell, the first in a new series and thus a good jumping on point for people who are interested in murder mysteries/thrillers set in the medieval period. I won this book in a goodreads giveaway and this review is my own opinion. Content Note: threatened sexual assault to more than one party, domestic violence It’s 1176 and Aelred Barling, a cler...
“The Burning,” by S. O. Esposito, is a fast paced thriller about a woman with Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). It’s an aggressively feminist book that looks at the many different ways rape culture is the status quo, enforced both actively and passively by both men and women. There’s also arson. I should note that I received this book as part of a GoodR...
“Rivers of London,” by Ben Aaronovitch, has been described as adult-Harry-Potter unexpectedly tumbles into Terry Pratchet’s world, a description that usually means that a book is… really, aggressively bad but convinced it’s clever. This is a book that manages to carry it off, though. Young Peter Grant is a probationary constable eager to be promoted to an exciting department investigating murders or somethi...