In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

Another writer finds herself in deep trouble in a rural area!  Leonora, a writer living a solitary existence in London, accepts an invitation to a hen party (what we would call a bachelorette weekend) deep in the English countryside.  Lee, or Nora, she went by both names at different points in her life, isn’t quite sure why she went.  True, her best friend was also attending, but she hasn’t talked to the bride-to-be, Clare, her former best friend from school, in ten years.  The party place is pretty odd.  It is a glass house in the middle of the woods.  As one of the guests comments it is like they are on the stage performing for an audience that they cannot see.  The attendees are an odd mix and things get tense until the unspeakable happens.  Someone ends up dead.  Was it an accident as it first appears?  Or was this weekend carefully plotted by a murderer in their midst?

If you enjoy psychological thrillers you have to read this one.  From page one the reader wonders, as the main character does as well, why she even attended this shindig.  And as details of the wedding emerge (including the major fact that she isn’t invited to the ceremony) and the back story of why Nora and Clare haven’t spoken in a decade, you get even more frustrated with Nora – why is she there?  But at the same time, curiosity did kill the cat, and like Nora we want to know why she was invited.  Even though you keep yelling at her to leave, it is understandable why she stays.  Peer pressure is a dangerous thing.  So is temporary amnesia as Nora begins to discover.

So who is dead?  Who is killer?  Why did they do it?  These are all questions that you start the novel with and don’t know the answers to for quite some time.  Thriller readers will definitely enjoy this book – would suggest it for those who loved Girl on a Train.

House of Echoes by Brendan Duffy

House of Echoes by Brendan Duffy

Ben Tierney moves his family from Manhattan to Swannhaven in upstate New York in hopes that starting anew, renovating an old mansion into a destination hotel, will bring his family closer together.  His wife throws herself whole-heartedly into the renovation, trying to find purpose after losing her career in high finance and having a bit of a breakdown.  Ben is trying to write a new book.  And his older son, Charlie, was the victim of intense bullying and the private schools in upstate New York seem like they will be perfect for him.  All seems well, the transition is going smoothly, but little things keep happening.  Is someone trying to warn them away?  Or is something more sinister happening in Swannhaven?

This is a book I wished I read by a roaring fire, sipping hot cocoa with snow gently falling outside.  Would have made it so wonderfully creepy.  But alas, it was not to be, instead we experienced a heat wave.  Still, the book is creepy.  Throughout you wonder what is really going on.  Are the strange things occurring random events, the work of a human (or humans), or something more fantastic at work?  As the story progressed, and I figured out what was really going on, some of my favorite spooky short stories came to mind.  Like in another recent review I cannot name the story for fear of giving away the plot.  You’ll just have to be freaked out and guessing most of the way through just like I was.

The Hand That Feeds You by A. J. Rich

The Hand That Feeds You by A. J. Rich

Morgan Prager is happy.  She’s engaged to a great guy and working on finishing her graduate degree in victim psychology at John Jay College.  When she comes home from class one day she finds her fiancé mauled to death by her beloved dogs.  She doesn’t want to believe her eyes, but the evidence is irrefutable.  Morgan feels strange about it, but she hires a lawyer to help her beloved pets which are all awaiting trial and probable execution.  While worrying about her dogs she is also trying to track down her fiancé’s family to let them know the horrible news.  No relative is turning up in Canada where he claimed he was from.  Actually, no person with his name is to be found anywhere either.  That is when Morgan hears from another woman engaged to her fiancé.  As she breaks into his email account she finds out more and more about the man she was to marry and the other women he was engaged to: other women who are turning up dead.

Morgan finds herself a victim, the very person she is studying, and a persona she thought she successfully left in her past.  As she puzzles out whom this man was the reader is also trying to puzzle out how he could have duped her so thoroughly.  Turns out he mostly likely could have duped anyone.  The character is based on a man the co-authors knew who was engaged to one of their dear friends.

This was a page turner that kept me guessing.  There were some references to a literary classic (can’t tell you which, it’ll give something big away!) that allowed me to guess where things were headed.  A great, truly creepy, retelling of an old story.

The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows

The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows

Layla Beck is living well in Washington DC in the midst of the Great Depression when she has an extreme falling out with her father the Senator.  He declares that she has to get a job and finds one through her uncle who works with the Federal Writers Project.  Layla is sent to the town of Macedonia in rural West Virginia which is celebrating its sesquicentennial and wants a book to commemorate all the wonderful things that have happened in their town.  Needless to say Layla is underwhelmed with the town after her metropolitan life, but she finds the family she boards with extremely interesting: especially single father Felix.  As Layla spends time in Macedonia the people and the place grow on her.  Unfortunately Layla doesn’t grow on young Willa, Felix’s oldest daughter.  Willa plots and schemes on how to keep her father to herself, well, she’s willing to share him with her sister Bird, but not Layla.  Secrets hide at the core of the family, and those secrets spill over into the very being of the town, and all will come out with the writing of the book.

This is a book you want to read in a rocking chair on your front porch sipping a cold glass of sweet tea.  It’s leisurely paced, much like time seems to flow in Macedonia, and you want to mosey along with the characters to get their story.  The part of Unions in small towns and the stark reality of the Great Depression comes through in small and big ways throughout the story.  Was it a simpler time?  Maybe.  But the author shows how even simpler times could be complex when you are living them.

Told from different points of view with glimpses into the past as well as letters (naturally since the author is the co-author of the very successful epistolary novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society) it evokes small town life and the past on every page.

The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora

The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora

A picture-perfect suburb in Connecticut with mayhem, misunderstandings and a little madness at its core is the setting for these linked short stories.  You’ll be fascinated about what is found behind each of these stately front doors.

I was doubtful when I picked this one up.  Stories about families in suburbia in crisis don’t really appeal to me, but this book, while it did touch on that, was so much more.  The thing I enjoyed most?  There were many, many characters, but I never forgot who was who.  When a person I hadn’t read about in five or six stories showed up again the author gave enough vivid clues that you remembered who the character was.  After some books I have attempted to read, and put down after about thirty pages because I couldn’t tell the difference between characters anymore, this was a truly refreshing thing.

Fans of the style of Olive Kitteridge will really enjoy her similar storytelling style. 

The Axeman by Ray Celestin

The Axeman by Ray Celestin

Reviewed by Keith McCoy, Somerset County Library System

Originally Submitted to Library Journal

A rainy stretch in New Orleans right after the Great War, and a serial killer stalks the city.  The method is an axe, and the conceit is a tarot card left behind.  A shunned police detective gets saddled with the case, while an ambitious young black girl with a fondness for Sherlock Holmes pursues him on her own, in hopes of starting her detecting career.  The Mafia has its own interest in finding the Axeman, too.  Celestin’s first novel has loads of noir atmosphere, and the characters are engaging enough.  But the mystery is slow to build, especially with three detectives and three viewpoints, and a teenage Louis Armstrong is only a tagalong to the female PI.  It’s based on an actual unsolved case which covered seventeen months rather than the two months written about here.  The ending comes at the reader from all directions, like a Gulf storm.

Verdict:  A must for fans and denizens of the Big Easy, and perhaps for those who like true crime from the past retold as fiction.

Dietland by Sarai Walker

Dietland by Sarai Walker

Plum, real name Alicia, has always been large.  She had tried numerous diets, including ones that require the buying of cardboard tasting food and paste flavored shakes, but none seem to work.  She buys clothes in a much smaller size knowing that one day, after her soon to be performed weight loss surgery, she will be able to wear.  It seems her whole life is on hold waiting for the day she is skinny.  Then she meets the ladies of Calliope House and her life, everything she thought she knew about herself, will be turned upside down.

This book was classified as “humorous fiction” in almost every source I looked at.  It is not.  Or at least I didn’t think it was.  A book with a hand grenade/cupcake hybrid on the cover should be laugh out loud funny but while light in tone it is quite serious.  It is more than a book encouraging women to be happy with their bodies and forgo painful dieting and surgeries.  Serious issues like the objectification of the female body and the inequality between the sexes are addressed.  People die, women become terrorists, this is not a light chick lit book, but a cynical look at one way, one very violent way, the battle of the sexes could even out a bit.

Kill Me Three Times (Action/Dark Comedy Film from Australia– Starring Simon Pegg)

Kill Me Three Times (Action/Dark Comedy Film from Australia– Starring Simon Pegg)

This is the story of an assassin hired to kill someone.  Oddly enough, he doesn’t seem to be the only one with the target in his sights.

Many review sites have hated this movie, and I’m pretty glad I didn’t consult them prior to choosing to see it.  I loved the way this film was constructed.  It starts at the middle, goes to the beginning and ends with, well, the end.  I didn’t think this sort of storytelling would work in a visual medium but it works remarkably well.  A friend described it as Australian Tarantino, which gives you a clue to the dark humor and that you'll see plenty of interesting shots of arcs of blood as well.  Not as gory as a typical Tarantino, but the main character is an assassin, so you have to expect some violence.  Because of the construction, and how the story is revealed, I can’t say too much more without giving away more of the plot than I should. 

BTW: The last shot in the movie is absolutely priceless.

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

Bill Hodges is a retired detective and retirement is not treating him well.  He’s gained a lot of weight, he’s become an expert on daytime television and he is contemplating suicide more often than he would like to admit.  Of course there are the bad guys that got away that fill his drifting mind, but none plagues his thoughts more than the Mercedes Killer: a sociopath that plowed a stolen Mercedes into a group of people waiting at a crowded job fair killing eight and wounding and maiming many more.  Imagine Hodges’s surprise when he receives a letter in the mail from a man claiming to be the Mercedes Killer.  Is it really him?  Can Hodges catch him himself (with some help from unlikely assistants)?  It’ll be hard, there will be bumps in the road, but Bill Hodges now has a reason to live – to catch this guy and make sure no one else dies.

My only complaint about listening to this book was the need to leave my car to join family and friends at an event, or go to work, and therefore having to stop listening.  Uncle Stevie can really write a mystery.  Yes, there is the expected King gore, how could there not be?  But it is gore-light compared to his usual fare.  The mystery is tight, the characters are great, and I’m really looking forward to the sequel Finders Keepers.

Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris

Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris

Nouf, a sixteen year old bride to be, is found dead in a wadi in the Arabian Desert.  It was assumed that she ran away to the desert, but the autopsy determines that she was hit on the head and then drowned.  How did she drown in the desert?  Did she run away from her marriage?  Or was she kidnapped?  Nafir, a family friend and desert guide, is asked to investigate Nouf’s death and look for the murderer, if she was murdered.  Nouf’s brother Othman also asks his fiancée, Katya Hijazi, an assistant at the coroner’s office to look into the death as well.  Nafir and Katya need to work together to solve the crime, but can the strict rules of society be bent enough to allow the pair to succeed?

I haven’t read anything set in Saudi Arabia before so I thought this would be an interesting read.  I enjoy mysteries in foreign settings so that was another factor in its favor.  However I found this book very difficult to get through.  Once I was about a third into it the mystery really starting to take center stage and I read eagerly.  Before that point it was really difficult going.  It started as a detailed and slow paced introduction to the characters and society, well written, but difficult because of the subject matter.  I am allowed to drive, ride a bike, go outside in any weather (nevermind over a hundred degrees) without my body and face completely covered and interact with men and women at work, at home or on the street.  All things Katya was not allowed to do, and when she did she had to fear the religious police.  I couldn’t imagine living day to day in this city; forget trying to solve a crime.  I’m glad I read it, it was a great mystery, but I don’t think I could take reading any others in the series.  

Half the World by Joe Abercrombie

Half the World by Joe Abercrombie

Thorn dreams of becoming a warrior but despite her fighting prowess she is ostracized by her fellow trainees and given impossible challenges to prevent her from succeeding by her instructors.  After a deadly accident during a training session Thorn is sentenced to death.  Only one person, Brand a fellow young warrior, pleads her case before the minister Father Yarvi.  Thorn is spared from death but she is forced to go on a treacherous journey with Father Yarvi in return for her life.  Brand is not allowed to complete his warrior training because of his betrayal in informing the minister about the injustice against Thorn so he too joins the group journeying south to find allies in the upcoming fight against the High King.  War is on the horizon and our heroes must journey half the world away for support. 

This is completely a girl power book.  Thorn is going against all gender norms; she feels comfortable as a warrior but is totally lost when she starts to develop feelings for her fellow man at arms Brand.  Brand on the other hand is a good warrior, but he just doesn’t like it.  Thorn was kissed by Mother War and Brand by Father Peace; will these two be able to make allies in the south?  Will they be able to create a life together?

Fans of Game of Thrones and other epic fantasy will enjoy this take on a world preparing for war.  There is action and a lot of world building, but it just doesn’t seem as detailed as other fantasy books.  I have to admit it is refreshing to enjoy a great fantasy story in less than four hundred pages.  Teens will enjoy this book as well since the characters are older teens trying to fit in and find their places in this new and changing world.

This is the sequel to Half a King, but it isn’t really a sequel, it’s just set in the same world.  Yes, you will know more about the world and some of the characters if you read Half a King but you don’t need to in order to completely enjoy this book.  I am eagerly awaiting the final book in the trilogy!

Spring (Film – Romantic Horror Hybrid)

Spring (Film – Romantic Horror Hybrid)

Evan flees to Italy when his life in California falls apart.  In Italy he meets up with other tourists and enjoys his time traveling from one place to the next, but he decides to stop off in a small town outside of Naples and help a local farmer on his olive farm in exchange for room and board.  He didn’t choose the town randomly.  He met a beautiful woman at a local café one night and stays on to pursue the relationship.  Unfortunately the girl of his dreams is also the girl of his nightmares.

This movie is categorized as horror, and yes, there are some horrific elements – the makeup and special effects are quite good – but at the core it’s a story about star crossed lovers and whether love will conquer all. 

Interestingly enough I was talking about this movie with a colleague and we can’t agree on the ending.  He saw a hopeful and uplifting ending.  I thought the world was ending with the closing credits.  You’ll have to decide what happens the moment after the film ends yourself.

John Hughes: A Life in Film by Kirk Honeycutt

John Hughes: A Life in Film by Kirk Honeycutt

Reviewed by Laura the Librarian

It is hard for me to believe that "The Breakfast Club" celebrated its 30th anniversary this year. It is one of the seminal teen films of the 80s that launched the careers of a few Brat Packers as well as a brash, young filmmaker named John Hughes. Honeycutt offers a behind-the-scenes look at the rise and eventual withdrawal from the spotlight for Hughes. The illustrated book features great pictures and plenty of first-hand accounts from people who worked with Hughes. This is a warts-and-all look at the talented filmmaker who could be gracious and collaborative one minute and quite mercurial the next. There is plenty of dish about the stars of the movies and what happened on set. John Cusack instead of Judd Nelson as John Bender in "The Breakfast Club?" Jennifer Beals instead of Molly Ringwald as Andie Walsh in "Pretty in Pink?" Hard to imagine. The book also details Hughes start at "National Lampoon," his close friendship with star John Candy and his retreat from Hollywood. This book is a fun trip down memory lane, particularly since we still see Hughes' far-reaching influence today from "The Breakfast Club" as a plot point in "Pitch Perfect" to the reboot of "National Lampoon's Vacation" with Ed Helms. Yep, the original was penned by Hughes. After you read this book, you will want to re-watch many of his films or catch them for the first time. Head to our catalog to start watching.