🌟🌟🌟🌟 A fascinating fictionalized re-telling of the horrors of serial killer Ted Bundy, with a key difference. This story is told not in terms of the protagonist Bundy himself, (who is so small and undeserving of our focus in every way that he is not in fact, even granted a…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A slow burn, this gothic-inspired novel is dark, claustrophobic and brimming with fetid secrets. Jude, our middle-aged first-person POV narrator, is as unreliable as they come. Never fully sober, Jude is hallucinatory, and traumatized as she takes a trip down memory lane. On her first solo visit to the…
🌟🌟🌟💫 With plenty of suspects, this intricately-plotted legal thriller kept me engaged right up through the twists and turns and eventual chilling ending. The horrific murder of an entire family, - mom, dad, adult son and teenage daughter - has the Portland, Oregon community reeling. When Robin Lockwood, criminal defense…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A fast and furious look at memory, trauma and the terror of navigating both, as we meet a survivor of a terrible crime, nine years later, and share in her frantic quest to resolve her part in a past she cannot reconstruct. Charlie Colbert, now a successful NY editor-in-chief,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Creepy and unsettling, this Australia-based read is part domestic thriller, part mystery, and all dark foreboding as the story weaves an ominous path through the trials of three adolescent foster family charges. As each girl suffers domestic tragedy and is “lucky” enough to find herself sequestered in Wild Meadows…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A tension-filled decades-long look at the rawness of need - the things we think, or perhaps are lucky enough to know, we need - to make us whole - and what may be unleashed in our compulsion to find them. Told in the alternating intimate first-person POV voices of…
My second read from this talented author; this is a twisty, sinister story that cannot help but evoke echoes of the atmosphere and tension of the terrible true-life crime story of Gabby Petito. With a spectacularly intimate feel, aided by the first-person POV voice of our main protagonist, Cassie Peters…
🌟🌟🌟💫 Are we destined to follow in the footsteps (good or even evil) of our ancestors? An interesting premise, explored by this author, as we meet nine-year-old Kate Harmon, with her very complicated parentage, who happens to be the only witness to a horrific fatal event. An event which may…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A deep dive into the sublime and the unpleasant, the pretense of living large, and the sheer awfulness that may be hidden, under deceptively ‘normal’ exteriors. Each of the four main protagonists in this story, women all, three of them fortyish and one an octogenarian, have secrets to hide.…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A darkly twisted tale that sets such a creepy tone that I swear I found myself reading this one with one eye closed - prepared to close both if and when the story warranted. And although butting up against the very edge, (my triggers are child and animal abuse,…