It's finally time for some crime, thriller and mystery again, let's go! I've had tons of time to read over the festive days (it was so wonderful), so there are quite a few short reviews today. Enjoy.
Eye of the Beholder by Emma Bamford
A book inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo sounds amazing at first, but then I remembered that I couldn't even finish my attempt at watching the film, it was confusing and not really enthralling. I thought that this book could give me a push to retry, but that inspiration never came, I'm sorry to say.
Maddy Wight is thrilled to find out that she will be hired as a ghostwriter for the memoir of famous cosmetic surgeon Angela Reynolds, and is still thrilled when traveling to Angela’s amazing estate in the Scottish Highlands. She isn't thrilled anymore when Angela blocks her from trying to collect material for the biography and for some reason acts all secretive and elusive, plus leaves her mansion for work-related reasons. And then there's Scott, Angela's business partner who is not less mysterious and subject to violent mood swings. A walking read flag as we like to call them. And of course she falls for him, especially while weird things happening in the estate, like objects disappearing while handprints on windows appearing, she feels more and more drawn to him. She returns home to London and is all hopeful about the future, but then gets the news that Scott committed suicide by jumping from the Scottish cliffs.
Months later she weirdly comes across a guy who looks exactly like him and what even is happening here? Can she trust what she sees?
There are so many points that don't ad up and require you to suspend your disbelief sky high here. Like start with Angela leaving Maddy alone at her estate and then proceeding their work for the book per zoom meetings... Why call Maddie to stay at the mansion at all? Surely Maddie could have just stayed in London and taken care of business per zoom meetings? Angela just leaves but then there's a man in the house? It's a miracle the two hit it off considering how horrible Scott treats her anyway. And then there's the whole second part of the book, after meeting Conner, Scott's doppelganger... And don't even get me started on the reveal... It's a bit unbelievable, lightly put...
You have to give the author her due, the book is "unputdownable" as they like to say, if for nothing then to see what nonsense comes next.
Knockemstiff by Daniel Ray Pollock
I'm not very sure why I'm putting this into the crime section, because there isn't really a mystery nor really crime crime, just 18 short stories, or rather vignettes in the lives of the very fucked up, very drugged and depraved and hopeless lives of the residents of the Southern Ohio town Knockemstiff. The stories cover a timeline starting in the mid-sixties and reach until the late nineties and are usually, but not always, interlinked, featuring sometimes recurring characters.
I felt a little sad for the people in this hopeless environment, especially those who struggle to get out, but I was also aware that the author inflated and exaggerated much, sometimes for the shock value; the violence, rapes, incestuous relations, gun use are off the charts. And yet the language in which they are described is in parts beautiful, alluring.
"Besides, I'm beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it."
My highlights are Discipline, in which a gym-father pumps his son full of steroids for him to become a body-builder, maybe a little too much though; I Start Over which is about Big Bernie Givens and I don't even know why I enjoyed reading this one so much, but it's about this guy in his fifties who says he wants to enjoy his retirement in his new Chevy, but then, at the drive-in line of Dairy Queen he beats up a group of boys who were making fun of his autistic son; and finally The Fights, which felt like a very honest piece of writing about being torn between being from this place and also being outside of it.
My Husband's Wife by Alice Feeney
One of those signature Feeney books where a play of points of view contributes to the killer twist (or two) which await us in the course of this book.
Eden Fox goes for a jog around her new house that she recently moved into with her husband. When she comes back her key doesn’t fit anymore and another woman who looks like her opens the door. Worse yet - her husband is on the side of this stranger, claiming that's his wife. Who is lying?
In alternating passages about Eden and the Londoner cop named Birdy, the story slowly inches its way towards a twist so violent it will give you a whiplash, it is that intense. Deception, obsession, mystery, it's all here, and in this domestic thriller really nothing is like it seems.
I mean, this was good and fine for a Feeney, she does have worse books, but has definitely written better too.
Giftiger Grund by Thomas Knüwer
This was one of the advanced reading copies that keep on accumulating in the backroom of Hammett and increase by the week without anyone touching them (No worries, my mom is a German teacher for immigrants and refugees, and we sent her a big packet full of advanced copies for new learners to read at home - courtesy of Hammett-owner Christian Koch).
Publication date is in March, and it's about two young people, lost souls kind of: Joran, who has spent the last decade in prison because he knifed someone during a gas station robbery, and is trying to get a hold now that he's free (but it's hard), and then there is Charu, a social media influencer who takes pictures and videos of so called "lost places", abandoned spaces, like the gas station that Joran robbed in the past and is now empty. The two of them are attracted to the place for different reasons but find the same things; one dead body and one little girl in pajama looking for a shelter.
To be very honest, I was expecting big things from this, but ended up shattered. The author won the German crime fiction price with a book titled Das Haus in dem Gudelia stirbt last year, which I haven't read yet, and after reading this catastrophe I'm not sure I want to ever read anything else by Knüwer. First off, the murderer reveal is ridiculous, like any other murderer than the one in the book would have been better. Then there's the way the people talk in this book. I understand many young people speak "Denglish" a heavy mixture of English and German, I know many who don't, but maybe it's different with influencers. The characters in this books speak so heavily Denglish that to understand it, you don't actually have to speak German or wait for a translation. Not that I think this will get a translation. As it stands, this book is impossible to recommend.
The Housemaid by Freida McFadden
I have been resisting the hype of this book as the description didn't really hit me as interesting in any way and it sounded like a regular domestic thriller with a twist. Which it turned out to be. (But the movie hype is gigantic right now!)
The titular housemaid Millie is freshly out of prison (yet again), and counts herself lucky that she gets the job of a live-in housemaid at the rich Winchesters’ beautiful
house. She cleans, she cooks, picks up the daughter from school and lives in the tiny room on the top floor. Which has a lock from the outside only, for whatever reason.
It's all fine and good, except that the lady of the house, Nina Winchester, is very unstable and forgets or contradicts things she says or orders Millie to do, and holds her responsible for her own unreliability, even reprimanding and scolding her for doing absolutely nothing wrong. Meanwhile Millie gets closer to the husband Andrew, who seems like the perfect man until he doesn't.
For the sake of the twist coming in, I won't say anything further, only that if you're someone who read lots of domestic or family thrillers, like Ruth Ware, Alice Feeney, Lucy Foley, then this shouldn't come as groundbreaking. But it's a good book and quickly finishable in one sitting.
Gerçek Ama Hangi Gerçek? by Cüneyt Ülsever
My last crime book is again not in English, but a Turkish crime. We follow retired professor for mathematics Levent Drama after the unexpected death of his wife. Levent is sure that she was killed, but it soon turns out that he is actually clinically paranoid schizophrenic and his late wife was seeing to it that he took his pills regularly.
He coincidentally meets and starts seeing one of his former students, a woman named Hande, to whom he gradually feels attracted to. The two have something like an affair until they are caught in the act by her fiance. The stress thereof makes Levent hallucinate and believe a story about Hande being a secret agent sent to seduce him, and that she needs to be killed. He meets with her and the next day turns himself in for having killed her on a boat. But the police detects that she is very much alive and repentant of their affair. She's not dead, but only yet... She dies really a couple of weeks later, and in the exact way Levent described, so the police start investigating.
I actually quite liked this. There is an unnecessarily extended, unflattering sex scene that wasn't very enjoyable, but apart from that it was quite alright, actually. At least there was an authentic story and awareness about mental health issues.
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