Bloody Thrilling - Recent Mystery and Thriller Reads

Enjoy thriller time!

Strange Pictures by Uketsu

Do you know "logic grid puzzles" in which you are given a limited set of clues about a bigger picture of which you are supposed to find details? For instance, like five people sitting in a waiting room of a doctor with five different diseases for five different appointments, and you need to find out their respective names, ailments and appointments. Harmless geek fun which saved my life in many a times of boredom.

Well, Strange Pictures is the book form of a logic puzzle. It comprises five interconnected mysterious short stories revolving around one family which, with the help of pictures and logic clues, the reader analyzes and resolves.

There's no way I can express the fun I had while reading this and I very much recommend it! It's useful to know that the print copy is recommendable, though apparently there's a pdf document with pictures and clues that accompany the audiobook too.

Beautiful Ugly Alice Feeney

The book starts very strong: Grady, an author in a co-dependent relationship with his wife, is a little salty that she isn't home beside him while he waits for the call announcing whether or not he has become a New York Times bestselling author (He has!). Immediately after receiving the exciting news he calls her while she's on her way home from some business meeting. As they speak, she sees something on the street, goes out to enquire, and disappears without a trace, while her husband is still on the phone.

In order to come to terms with his grief and start writing again, Grady travels to a tiny Scottish island where he sees a woman who looks exactly like his wife. Hell, she IS his wife. What's going on?

Up until now I always thought Alice Feeney is one of the few authors who can really ace the killer twist. Unfortunately, with Beautiful Ugly she overstrung that. There were just to many twists and I don't like being whip-lashed with so many, plus, they're very far-fetched too, at some point it didn't make any sense anymore. Still, very compulsively readable, and a nice touch - the first words of every chapter read together give out a message. Mysterious...  

PAR Unit #1 -Head Cases by John McMahon

An audiobook which felt like binge watching a season of Mindhunter, but with a considerably more fun crew orbiting around neurodivergent Agent Gardner Camden with his analytical genius but inability for emotional connections. There's also a mathematician, a weapon's expert, a computer analyst, and a career agent. All of them have at some point in their FBI career screwed up, and ended up in the experimental Patterns and Recognition (PAR) unit to solve especially tricky cases.

When Gardner is sent to investigate the murder of a victim who turns out to be a serial killer supposed to be long dead, the unit connects the dots to form a pattern that leads them to a serial killer who kills serial killers 🤯 Plus this suspect gets personal with Gardner, when telling him he does the dirty work for the FBI!

I really enjoyed this, it's mindless fun you can listen to on the side while doing some chores. It's not too complicated and far-fetched for its own good and as a reader/listener you never had the feeling of not being able to keep up. I'll definitely wait for further installments, consider me a fan!

Wackelkontakt by Wolf Haas

This book has been all the rage at the Hammett Bookstore since its publication a couple of months ago, and I finally got my fingers on a second hand copy! It was a good book too: We follow a guy who does puzzles at home while waiting for an electrician to come and repair a loose contact in the kitchen. To pass the time, he starts a book which is about a mafia person who collaborates with the police, and joins the witness protection program. He gets bored in jail while waiting for his new ID and reads a book, which is about a guy doing puzzles waiting for an electrician, lol.

The story, which is based on the Escher painting Drawing Hands, takes twists and turns and weaves the stories of these two people into each other quite expertly. So, the hype is real, but for now only readable in German, maybe someone wants to publish a translation?

Close Your Eyes and Count to 10 by Lisa Unger

Adele, a single mother of two teenagers, has been left by her husband who got caught up in some illegal money deal and disappeared. She's not doing well financially, her son is being bullied badly, she's being observed by the police due to her husband, and she's still processing the downfall of her marriage. 

Enter charismatic adventurer and social media influencer Maverick Dillan and his team of young, hot other influencers, who make a call for an extreme hide and seek game on a remote island with the winning prize of a million dollar! The one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save Adele's and her children's life turns into a dangerous game and she and the other participants need to fight for survival as a storm rages.

There's more to the story than what I've been telling, it's not that dry; a mysterious disappearance in Dillan's former online game, Adele's son's gamer posse and his fight against his bullies, local beliefs of impending doom... All of them pretty trite and used up tropes, but I really like the way Unger writes, she can pull me out of a reading slump any time and I've again mindlessly listened to this book in no time.