Find Her by Lisa Gardner

Find Her by Lisa Gardner

Detective D.D. Warren is still on administrative leave after her injury on the job but she has a really hard time pushing paper and supervising from afar, especially with a case like this one.  

Flora Dane was kidnapped years ago and survived 472 days in a wooden box before her rescue.  She is a survivor and has made it her mission in life to never be a victim again.  When she is taken one night she uses all available resources to survive and escape; she is both victim and assailant.  

D.D. doesn’t know what to make of Flora: is she a survivor or a vigilante?  What happened the day her captor was killed?  What happened in those 472 days?  Flora told her story once to one person at the FBI, but has never answered any further questions.  When Flora goes missing again D.D. and her team will need to dig deep into Flora’s past to figure out who could have taken her and why and where she and possibly other missing girls may be before it’s too late.

Great edge of your seat suspense on audio.  While this book is part of a series, you can enjoy it fine as a standalone story.  It’s a hard read/listen, what was done to Flora when she was captive is horrific, but she is a survivor.  It really brings the ideas of trauma bonding and what events like this do to the victim in the long term as well as their families was really interesting to read about in this account.

This is not my first book by Gardner, and it surely won’t be my last.

Hostile Takeover: A John Lago Thriller by Shane Kuhn

Hostile Takeover: A John Lago Thriller by Shane Kuhn

John Lago is back.  After writing The Intern’s Handbook to help his fellow assassins at HR, Inc. survive their employment and after barely surviving the end of his own time as an intern/assassin John decides to marry the girl who is probably the only one more deadly than he in the world and plan a takeover of HR, Inc.  Of course things don’t go as planned.

If you’re a fan of action movies where each stunt is more outlandish and over the top then the last, and one liners fly every which way, this is probably a great read for you.  I would recommend reading the first book (The Intern’s Handbook) before this one.  And read the first two before the third comes out, rumor has it this is going to be a trilogy.

The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

Four siblings are due to inherit the trust their father created for them when the youngest of the siblings turns forty.  Nicknamed “the nest” three of the four are anxiously awaiting the substantial (at least a quarter of a million dollars) inheritance since they have already accrued debt or been living a lifestyle that money is needed to maintain.  Shortly before the inheritance will be in the hands of the siblings disaster strikes.  The most financially stable of the bunch needs money to escape a horrific legal mess of his own creating and their mother, having control of the trust, uses the money in it to pay the bills.  The three other siblings are stunned.  The money they counted on for their entire lives is gone.  What will they do now?

I finished this book about a week ago and was wondering what to write.  I’m amazed at how popular this book is considering that many reviews I’ve read weren’t very positive because some readers loathed the main characters.  This truly is a book about first world problems.  It’s hard to feel too much empathy for these characters because they were counting on money for their happiness, and when the money doesn’t materialize, naturally, it’s a disaster for them.  I wouldn’t say I didn’t like the characters, I just didn’t feel too badly for them, especially when the spouses of two of the siblings kept stressing that they shouldn’t count on “the nest” because they thought it was too good to be true.  And they were right!

I will say it was a compulsive read.  There are a lot of side stories that draw you in and the writing was paced in such a way that you needed to know what happened next.  I would give this author another try, but this is yet another case where I don’t get why the book is so hugely popular.

The Last One by Alexandra Oliva

The Last One by Alexandra Oliva

Zoo is one of twelve contestants on In the Dark, a survivalist-type of reality show.  She is doing this as a challenge to herself before she settles down and starts a family with the man she loves.  Zoo successfully completes a week of group and team challenges and is enthusiastic to start the first solo challenge of the show.  At first the challenge goes well but after weeks stumbling across rotting corpses (she knows they are props, she saw one when she was on a group challenge) and empty houses (how much did the studio pay these people to vacate while she walked by!?) she still holds on to the last clue she received: Home Sweet Home.  Zoo is not a quitter, she is going to see this through to the end.  She is walking back to her husband across Pennsylvania and the ruin the show’s producers have created because she knows home will bring an end to this stupid game.  

The book is constructed in alternating chapters of the events happening for the show and just a few weeks later while Zoo is trying to walk home.  As a reader we know something horrible happened while Zoo was in the woods, a pandemic of some sort, but she stubbornly holds on the idea that it is all part of the show.  She sees cameras and props everywhere; she can’t accept that reality changed outside the game.  The psychological strain of her surroundings, how she is able to change everything around her to fit the story she wants to tell herself, is amazingly well done.  I felt that Zoo was believable with her blinders on, as readers we have her inner thoughts and the processes she goes through to manipulate what she sees with what she desperately wants to believe.

Fans of psychological thrillers will devour this book as will those who enjoy end of the world fiction and reality television shows.  I’ll admit I have never watched Survivor or anything like it, but I was on the edge of my seat listening (wow, great book on audio!) to this debut novel.

The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone

The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone

If you have a spider phobia this book will either desensitize you to the crawling beasties or send you quivering and babbling into a corner never wanting to hear mention of the eight-legged again. 

Swarms of spiders are hatching and what seems like an isolated incident seems to be spreading worldwide.  Millions of spiders are coming up in various areas and the world is in deep trouble.  How do you kill millions of swarming spiders?  Nukes seem like a great option, but do you really want to drop a nuke on your own country? (Spoiler alert: one country does just that.)

This is a great thriller addressing how the world powers, media, and ordinary citizens handle something so bizarre it is most of the time, at least for this reader, impossible to comprehend.

Best thing about the book?  There will be more!  This is part one of a trilogy and it ends in the lovely horrific “just when you thought things couldn’t be worse” sort of way.

The Hanging Girl by Jussi Adler-Olsen

The Hanging Girl by Jussi Adler-Olsen

Seventeen years after a young woman is found hanging from the branches of a tree on the Danish island of Bornholm, Department Q is called in to work the cold case after the dramatic suicide of a police officer who was obsessed with the case and sure that detectives more experienced than him could catch the killer.  Quickly determining that the former investigator was correct, it was murder not a hit and run, Department Q starts to dig into the extremely cold case.

It was great reading about Carl, Assad and Rose again.  All three characters get a lot of page time; we even start to learn more about Assad’s life before Denmark!  The plot goes all over the place and while necessary, some of the detours were a little longer and detailed than I thought they needed to be.  Sun cults, vengeful women, red herrings, hypnotists, this book has it all.

I have listened to all the Department Q novels and enjoyed this one very much as well.  The plot isn’t as tight as previous books in the series, but issues with one of the main characters that are revealed at the end of the book make me anxious for the next.

The Silent Sister by Diane Chamberlain

The Silent Sister by Diane Chamberlain

Riley MacPherson grew up thinking her family moved because her older sister committed suicide.  After her father’s death Riley starts to sort through his belongings to discover that her sister committed suicide after being accused of murder.  Then as she digs into her family’s story she begins to suspect that her sister is still alive and out there somewhere living under a new identity.  Riley desperately wants to find her sister but is afraid that if she does she will put her sister at risk because there are people still looking for her and wanting her to stand trial.

From the beginning of the book you know that Lisa (now Jade) is alive and fled to California.  You read about the life she begins under her new identity while twenty-three years later Riley starts to sort her father’s things.  You’d think there wouldn’t be a lot more secrets to be revealed but there are plenty!  Riley learns a lot more than she bargained for about her family as she starts the journey to find Lisa.

Suspenseful and hard to put down, this is a great summer read.