Tag: thrillers

Social Creature (2018): Tara Isabella Burton

Leave a comment
© Rose Callahan

★★★½

What lengths would you go to for the perfect lifestyle? For Louise Wilson, even a mediocre life would be an improvement. At the age of twenty-nine, she’s lost faith in her New York dreams: her goal of becoming a great writer has lost its lustre, crowded out by the humiliating necessity of three minimum-wage jobs; a grotty apartment in a far-flung, seedy part of the city; and the patronising solicitude of her parents, back in New Hampshire, who hope she’ll return and marry her belittling childhood sweetheart. And then she meets Lavinia. Sparkling, daring, hedonistic Lavinia, who goes to all the good parties and knows everyone; who catalogues her life in breathless detail on the internet and who gives Louise a glimpse of a world she never dreamed of entering. And, once in it, Louise realises that she’ll do pretty much anything to avoid having to leave.

Continue reading →

Lullaby (2016): Leïla Slimani

3 Comments

★★★½

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Leïla Slimani’s bestselling novel evidently strikes a chord with its readers and it isn’t hard to see why. It plays on the deepest fears that any parent can have. What if our children are most at risk from those we’ve hired to care for them? On the very first page, we’re shown a horrific scene: two children brutally murdered, their nanny lying with self-inflicted wounds beside them. It’s a shocking, apparently senseless crime. But then Slimani takes us back, to tell the story of the family, the nanny and the children. Her novel raises uncomfortable but necessary questions about domestic service, modern parenting, class, and the desire to be needed.

Continue reading →

Friend Request (2017): Laura Marshall

1 Comment

★★★

Occasionally we all get moments, perhaps after reading a surfeit of very serious Russian short stories, when we’d quite like to read something a little less demanding. So it was that this much-publicised thriller arrived on my Kindle. I’d spotted posters for Friend Request all over the Tube a few months ago and the premise intrigued me. What would you do if you had a Facebook friend request one morning from an old classmate whom you believed to have died twenty-five years before? (Personally I wouldn’t accept it and would report it to Facebook; but I suppose that’s why I’m not the protagonist of a thriller.) It was a tantalising, eerie scenario. I plunged into the story with gusto, reading it in an afternoon, but, maybe inevitably, it didn’t quite live up to expectations. A taut tale of rising tension is muddied towards the end by too many plot strands and a much-hyped twist that felt more melodramatic than plausible.

Continue reading →

Weekend at Thrackley (1934): Alan Melville

1 Comment

★★★½

This jolly novel is part of the British Library’s Crime Classics series, devoted to resurrecting overlooked treasures from the golden age of British mystery writing. While not an avid fan of crime novels, I have read one book from the series before – Death on the Cherwell – so it’s really the subject that appeals rather than the genre. In Weekend at Thrackley, first published in 1934, a rather feckless young man is surprised by an invitation to a country house weekend in Surrey. But further surprises are to come. Stuffed with dastardly villains, jewel thieves, mysterious pasts and a good dose of pluck, not to mention lashings of humour, this is just the ticket for cosy escapism.

Continue reading →

Before I Go To Sleep (2011): S.J. Watson

8 Comments

★★★★

Further thanks to everyone for your support and messages over the last few days. Give yourselves a pat on the back for being wonderful human beings. For my part, I’ve decided that life is far too rich and busy to sit around feeling sorry for myself, so let’s forge onward and get back to thinking about good books and gorgeous art and crazy operas and all sorts of other lovely things. I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to focus on my blog but, you know what? I’ve realised that writing The Idle Woman is one of the great joys in my life and the best possible tonic for my spirits. So you can all imagine me right now, curling up contentedly with a cup of tea after a busy day, in order to thrash out my thoughts on my most recent read. And this one requires a bit of thrashing.

Continue reading →

The Girls (2016): Emma Cline

2 Comments

★★★★

Following Gone Girl, I switched my attention to Emma Cline’s sun-drenched, twisted slice of 1960s Californian life, which is inspired by the case of the Manson Family (a story, I should stress, that I knew nothing about beforehand). Unfolding at the dreamy pace of a marijuana trip, it doesn’t match Gone Girl’s urgency, but it offers more relatability, in its tale of a fourteen-year-old girl who just doesn’t fit in, and the seductive gang of dreamers who capture her imagination. Few of us, thank God, will have gone as far as our protagonist Evie Boyd, but I suspect that many of us can remember the pain of teetering on that brink between childhood and adulthood, feeling eternally divorced from either place and, somehow, feeling so much older than all the adults around us. Cline manages to produce a book that’s compelling, compassionate and wise, as well as plumbing some of the darker places in the human soul.

Continue reading →

Gone Girl (2012): Gillian Flynn

5 Comments

★★★★

Better late than never, hmm? As an intense period at work came to a close, I decided it was time to welcome the advent of summer with a couple of good, old-fashioned, white-knuckle thrillers. The first of those was a book I’ve managed to avoid having spoiled for me: quite an achievement, considering that it’s a publishing phenomenon, a film, and has been read by everyone else on the planet except my neighbour’s cat. Finally, it was my turn to meet Nick and Amy Dunne, the picture-perfect couple whose marriage begins to go sour when they lose their jobs in the recession, and move from Amy’s native New York to Nick’s native Missouri. When Amy disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary, leaving signs of a struggle and traces of blood on the kitchen floor, everyone thinks they know how this story ends. Only they don’t. Only one person has even an inkling of what’s about to happen… and Nick Dunne is in no position to protect himself.

Continue reading →