Frosta Wings It

Keep It in the Family (2022) by John Marrs

Publisher’s Book Synopsis:

Mia and Finn are busy turning a derelict house into their dream home when Mia unexpectedly falls pregnant. But just when they think the house is ready, Mia discovers a chilling message scored into a skirting board: I WILL SAVE THEM FROM THE ATTIC. Following the clue up into the eaves, the couple make a gruesome discovery: their dream home was once a house of horrors.

In the wake of their traumatic discovery, the baby arrives and Mia can’t shake her fixation with the monstrous crimes that happened right above them. Haunted by the terrible things she saw and desperate to find answers, her obsession pulls her ever further from her husband.

Secrecy shrouds the mystery of the attic, but when shards of a dark truth start to emerge, Mia realises the danger is terrifyingly present. She is prepared to do anything to protect her family—but is it already too late?

My Review:

How is this for a prologue teaser? “Everyone except their families soon forgets about a missing child. And me. I remember every one of them. Because I am the bait that lures them here.”

Twisty, unputdownable, entertaining, mixed media banger of a book. I absolutely love John Marrs, and he never fails to pull me right into his narrative and never disappoints. I open his books, suspend all disbelief in my body, sit back and enjoy the ride.

I find his narrative thrilling and compelling. His pacing is impeccable, and he executes the end-of-chapter cliffhanger so well I call it “to pull a John Marrs” when other authors do it.

Just when you think the title will give it away, he surprises us with a couple and their families and another family later on… You get the gist. The web is cast wide. And as one would expect, every narrator is unreliable. I loved the effective use of mixed media entries to fill in the gaps and offer the reader a more neutral context.

Even though the prose is compelling, the content is dark in all nuances that range from sad to disturbing. Keep it in the Family plays with how far one would go for and from family. Marrs always plays fair, and with the sinuous journey he lays for us, some readers might predict some of the twists. This doesn’t bother me at all. I read books for entertainment and look for well-developed characters I can see as real people, an atmosphere that makes my heart pump faster, and a satisfying ending guaranteed to put a smile on my face. I got all that on top of a tightly plotted fair play puzzle.

I can’t wait for his next novel.

Characters: 9

Plot: 10

Enjoyment: 10

Atmosphere: 10

Intrigue: 10

Writing / Execution: 10

Fainess / Logic: 10

My total rating: 4.93

Website: https://www.johnmarrsauthor.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnmarrs1

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnmarrs.author

Disclaimer: Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

Until next book, be the hummingbird!

The Prisoner (2022) by B.A. Paris

Publisher’s Book Synopsis:

Then
Amelie has always been a survivor, from losing her parents as a child in Paris to making it on her own in London. As she builds a career for herself in the magazine industry, she meets, and agrees to marry, Ned Hawthorne.

Now
Amelie wakes up in a pitch-black room, not knowing where she is. Why has she been taken? Who are her mysterious captors? And why does she feel safer here, imprisoned, than she had begun to feel with her husband Ned?

My Review:

B.A. Paris is one of my favourite authors. She constantly delivers heart-pounding, unputdownable thrillers. As with most of Paris’s books, check content warnings before reading them, especially if you are sensitive to toxic relationship depictions. Paris doesn’t spare the reader from her villain’s antics.

I will try sharing my thoughts without giving away any twists, so I will be somewhat vague regarding the story. I love Paris’s writing; The Prisoner is tightly plotted, the mystery solution is satisfying, and the pacing is organic to the plot.

Mostly because her prose is addictive and partially because the psychological/emotional tension is too much for my heart, I usually consume her books as fast as I can. At the heart of The Prisoner, we have our heroine, Amelie. She is a young and naive woman who attracts wickedness. Amelie is easy to empathize with and root for. But man, Paris made this girl suffer and brought her to her breaking point! I loved following her character development, though.

At times, it was hard to follow Amelie’s arc because of how much I could relate to her. Like our MC, I am gullible and, to an extent, naive. I have no danger radar at all. Unlike her, I have been lucky to have people who have my back and often point out the danger in a situation I am about to blindly get into. I can 100% see a person like Amelie in the same circumstances making the same mistakes. (well, most of them, but let’s remember this is a work of fiction).

The story is told in dual timelines, and at present, Amelie and her husband are kidnapped and kept separately, each in a dark unfurnished room. We need to find out who hired the kidnappers and who to trust. But to give you perspective, Amelie has it easier in that room than in her marriage.

Ned, Amelie’s husband, is evil. He is despicable, amoral, and the poster boy for toxic masculinity. And I really appreciate that Paris didn’t try to give his monstrosity a context or background, thus avoiding its justification. In black and white, Ned is a villain.

My favourite way to consume psychological thrillers is through immersive reading – listening to the audio book while reading with my eyeballs. It adds to the tension and immerses me in the story, reading faster before my blood pressure skyrockets. The Prisoner’s audiobook is outstanding. Georgia Maguire’s pacing was perfect, and I love how she kept the tension throughout the entire book.

Characters: 9

Plot: 10

Enjoyment: 10

Atmosphere: 10

Intrigue: 10

Writing / Execution: 9

Fainess / Logic: 10

My total rating: 4.86

Website: https://www.baparis.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/baparisauthor

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baparisauthor/

Disclaimer: Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

Until next book, be the hummingbird!

The House Across the Lake (2022) by Riley Sager

Publisher’s Book Synopsis:

Be careful what you watch for . . .

Casey Fletcher, a recently widowed actress trying to escape a streak of bad press, has retreated to the peace and quiet of her family’s lake house in Vermont. Armed with a pair of binoculars and several bottles of bourbon, she passes the time watching Tom and Katherine Royce, the glamorous couple living in the house across the lake. They make for good viewing–a tech innovator, Tom is powerful; and a former model, Katherine is gorgeous.

One day on the lake, Casey saves Katherine from drowning, and the two strike up a budding friendship. But the more they get to know each other–and the longer Casey watches–it becomes clear that Katherine and Tom’s marriage isn’t as perfect as it appears. When Katherine suddenly vanishes, Casey immediately suspects Tom of foul play. What she doesn’t realize is that there’s more to the story than meets the eye–and that shocking secrets can lurk beneath the most placid of surfaces.

My Review:

What a beautiful and entertaining modern homage to Hitchcock.

I need to figure out where to start with my review. I have a lot to say, and my thoughts are all over the place. I thoroughly enjoyed The House Across the Lake (HAL). The atmosphere was off the charts. I could feel the crisp air, the warm fire, the cold water, the tension, the desperation, the suspense.

Many people complain about Sager’s female characterizations, but I don’t get it. I have always found his heroines believable and authentic. Maybe I don’t see it because I have always been able to empathize and relate to them as characters, feeling their actions, choices, and speech are believable. I feel this way about Casey – I loved her as a character. Her neurosis, paranoia, and alcoholism were pertinent to the plot and well depicted.

One of the latter twists might make or break the reading experience; personally, I loved it! And I appreciate that plenty of breadcrumbs foreshadowed it, yet it came as a shock.

**Minor/Major Spoilers below** (click on the arrow)

Talking about bread crumbs, all the subtle (and overt) references to Hitchcock films were a bonus (I know many of Hitchcock’s movies were faithful adaptations of novels, but I am going with the common denominator here). I loved trying to find all the Easter eggs hidden in many aspects of HAL – plot, prose, setting, characterization, and subtle references. Other than the apparent Rear Window inspiration, I found elements of The Lady Vanishes, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Dial M for Murder, Rope, The Wrong Man, and Vertigo.

One of the best executions of shocking twists I have read in a long time. HAL makes perfect use of a narrator’s unreliability; it has superb pacing, tight plotting, and a suspenseful atmosphere that feels strangely comforting and nostalgic to Hitchcock fans. In my opinion, Sagers’ best novel yet.

Characters: 9

Plot: 8

Enjoyment: 10

Atmosphere: 10

Intrigue: 10

Writing / Execution: 9

Fainess / Logic: 10

My total rating: 4.71

Website: https://www.rileysagerbooks.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/riley_sager

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/riley.sager

Until next book, be the hummingbird!

Daisy Darker (2022) by Alice Feeney

My Review:

Where to begin with Daisy Darker? I have struggled with a review because I have so much to say, yet no words.

I am a huge Feeney fan, and I feel each book is better than the previous one, but Daisy Darker feels like a true masterpiece. It reads like a crafted work of blood, sweat, tears, joy, and soul. Just go read it for yourself, I urge you.

First off – THERE IS A MAAAAAAPPPPPP!!!!!

And if that is not enough… The characters leap through the page, and each one feels like a real person; their authenticity is an empath’s dream. I can’t picture things when I read, but I always get in the mind of the characters and relate to what they emote – my heart, body and soul went on a rollercoaster ride reading this. I don’t think there was a single emotion I didn’t feel – Joy, Disgust, Happiness, Love, Sorrow, Anger, Frustration, Envy, Pain, Happiness, Freedom… You name it, and you will find it vividly on the page. By the end of the book, I was cathartically shedding tender tears of release in the best possible way.

I will be honest, I have my favourite authors, and I shamelessly hype their books because I think they are that great. As you guessed, Feeney is one of those authors, but I promise you all my review is honest and pretty accurate. I have listened to the audiobook and read the book with my eyeballs, and I honestly feel that if you can, experience both. Feeney’s prose is enticing and envelopes you on its own, and Stephanie Racine’s narration is E-VER-Y-THIN-G. She gets the story and honours it with her pacing, emotion, and narrative choices. I hope Racine will always narrate Feeney’s books. Theirs is a great partnership.

I am an avid Christie fan, and as such, critical of works inspired by / compared to her stories (or at least marketed as such). Daisy Darker is undoubtedly the best, most original, well-written, beautiful homage to And Then There Were None I have ever read. Daisy Darker is not only just as good as ATTWN, but it’s also its contemporary counterpart… With a hint of another one of my Christie favourites – The Crooked House. The Darkers’ family dynamics are as complicated and interesting as The Leonides’.

There I said it. And I dared say it because it is true. Please prove me wrong if you can.

TL;DR: The plotting is impeccable, the characters are vivid, and the puzzle is intricate and fair. Daisy Darker is a contemporary mystery classic. Read it – and listen to it.

p.s. I loved the creepy “poem” just as much as Feeney’s rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle little star in her debut novel. If she ever writes a creepy Mother Goose-esque illustrated book, I will be the first to buy it!

If you’d like to hear Alice Feeney herself read the murderous poem check this video:https://youtu.be/_vNvjX5KQxU

Characters: 10

Plot: 10

Enjoyment: 10

Atmosphere: 10

Intrigue: 10

Writing / Execution: 10

Fainess / Logic: 10

My total rating: 5

Website: https://www.alicefeeney.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/alicewriterland

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alicewriterland

Disclaimer: Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

Until next book, be the hummingbird!

Confessions (2008) by Kanae Minato

My copy was translated by Stephen Snyder

My Review:

Confessions is a hauntingly gripping story about love, loss, motherly bonds, and the worst of human nature. I appreciate how all of the characters are multidimensional, deep and consistent in their actions.

I found it as hard not to understand where they were coming from and, at the same time, remain shocked and disturbed by their actions. Minato did a great job threading the line of revealing their motivation without excusing their behaviour.

Confessions is a book that will linger with me for a while.

Characters: 9

Plot: 10

Enjoyment: 10

Atmosphere: 10

Intrigue: 10

Writing / Execution: 9

Fainess / Logic: 10

My total rating: 4.86

Disclaimer: I couldn’t find any social media for Kanae Minato.

Until next book, be the hummingbird!

Thirteen Storeys (2020) by Jonathan Sims

My Review:

I won’t lie – I thoroughly enjoyed Thirteen Storeys as a whole. I loved each “Stor(e)y” as its own and honestly think this would be a great Shutter or Netflix limited series. There are enough creepy elements in each chapter to hold their own.

Each chapter can be considered its own short story; One can even read 11 of them in any order without compromising the story as a whole. I was fully invested and even had a diagram linking characters and events going for fun.

The ending was not bad, but it did break a little bit of the intrigue, IMO, albeit it remained consistent with previous events and information. The book lost significant points for me in its writing and execution. I gave it 3/10 – Some sentences were tough to follow, and I found myself consistently having to reread paragraphs and sometimes even pages to understand what was going on as it wasn’t always clear what or who was being referenced.

For example, an earlier character completely changed between their chapter and when we met them again in the end. My biggest issue is that a secondary character’s name was changed and alternated many times – sometimes, the author would call them A in one paragraph and go back to calling them B in the next. That took me out of the “zone” quite a bit.

With that said, Thirteen Storeys was still relatively painless to follow, and the author more than made up for it with the atmosphere.

I do hope it becomes a series. I feel it will have tons more appeal in a visual format.

Characters: 7

Plot: 9

Enjoyment: 9

Atmosphere: 10

Intrigue: 9

Writing / Execution: 3

Fainess / Logic: 7

My total rating: 3.86

Website: https://jonathan-sims.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonnywaistcoat

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/jonnydville

Until next book, be the hummingbird!

She Said, Three Said (2020) by David B. Lyons

My Review:

She Said, Three Said is not a book for everyone. It’s not a spoiler to say that the book heavily revolves around Sexual Assault. We start in the deliberation room when 12 jurors go over the evidence presented at trial to decide whether or not to convict three men of their alleged SA of a woman.

This book is heavy. I felt it in the pit of my stomach from the first page. We are in the room with the jurors, feeling their stress of taking the job seriously and the duty of only counting on facts to reach their decision. The juror scenes were intense, and they sometimes got me in tears.

Intercalated with the present juror deliberation, we get the PoVs of the titular her and them three. We leave the book knowing both the truth and the jury’s decision.

I absolutely loved this book; I will be binging on Lyon’s other books. This is the first of a trilogy, and I am so thankful to Dreamscape Media for producing this audiobook. Otherwise, I would have missed out on a fantastic author whose writing is gutwrenching and authentic. I felt like I was reading about a real case throughout the book.

This book could have gone very wrong, but Lyons nailed it. The whole subject was treated with so much respect, and the characters are multidimensional and nuanced. The audiobook has a full cast, and they DE-LI-VERED. Fantastic performance, outstanding book.

Characters: 10

Plot: 10

Enjoyment: 10

Atmosphere: 10

Intrigue: 10

Writing / Execution: 10

Fainess / Logic: 10

My total rating: 5

Website: http://theopenauthor.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheOpenAuthor

Youtube: https://tinyurl.com/yc8r3frk

Disclaimer: Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

Until next book, be the hummingbird!

Can’t Look Away (2022) by Carola Lovering

My Review:

Jake and Molly fell in love at first sight. But their love story ends in heartache for both parties.

Years later, they both move on, and Molly is now happily married to Hunter living in a small town. They are having problems conceiving their second child, and Molly doesn’t feel like anyone understands the pain of her struggles. But then, newcomer Sabrina moves into town, and after two casual encounters – at Molly’s work and at the doctor’s clinic – they become fast friends. But Soon, both of their lives will collide as their past comes back to haunt them.

I am a huge fan of Lovering’s plotting. Her characters are compelling, relatable and are believable. They make real decisions a non-fictional person would make and I find that very refreshing. I also love how her love/intrigue triangles make sense.

She teases us by slowly releasing information, much like that pixel puzzle. Slowly you start seeing it more clearly, until you have the whole picture. It makes for a satisfying reading experience. Without spoiling anything as it is my personal taste, I absolutely adore her endings. So satisfying!

I both read and listened to the book. The audio production was fantastic, Caitlin Davies, Karissa Vacker and Zachary Webber brought the story to life with amazing chemistry, well paced narration, and a superb performance. I feel that it captured the essence of the book perfectly.

Characters: 10

Plot: 8

Enjoyment: 10

Atmosphere: 10

Intrigue: 10

Writing / Execution: 8

Fainess / Logic: 10

My total rating: 4.71

Website: http://www.carolalovering.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/carolatlovering

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carolatlovering/

Disclaimer: Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

Until next book, be the hummingbird!

Reckless Girls (2022) by Rachel Hawkins

I have to say that I didn’t expect to love this book as much as I did, I knew I was going to like it, because Hawkin’s debut thriller was a crazy ride I thoroughly enjoyed.

In Reckless Girls we follow some people who find that it would be a great idea to sail to this desserted Island with a somewhat eerie reputation. What I great idea, right? Gets better when they get to their destination, trust me.

The women in this book are fantastic – layered, grey, unreliable, some are kind of a hot mess, and completely magnetic. I wanted to be friends with them, even though I probably wouldn’t trust any. The relationships between all characters as the tension rises is so thrilling. I really couldn’t put it down. Unfortunetely, I feel that the men weren’t as well fleshed out – they were very similar and honestly the kind of men I do not respect.

Hawkins narrative is so addicting and enjoyable. She has a natural ability to draw the reader in and keep them immersed in the world she creates. Her plotting is tight and even though she throws some fun twists, she always play fair.

Closed Circle. Isolated Setting. Strong Female Characters. Yes, please.

Characters: 8

Plot: 10

Enjoyment: 10

Atmosphere: 10

Intrigue: 10

Deduction: 0

Writing / Execution: 9

Fainess / Logic: 10

My total rating: 4.79

Website: Not Found

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LadyHawkins

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ladyhawkins

Disclaimer: Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

Until next book, be the hummingbird!

Devil’s Creek by Todd Keisling (Goodreads Review)

My enjoyment rating: 1 of 5 stars

Starting now my GR reviews will be based on enjoyment alone, hopefully this would help me actually post them!

This is a book I absolutely didn’t jive with me, if I could DNF I would have done so for this one. Finally I picked it back up since I put it down in March because I needed to finish it before the end of the year and the audiobook came out. Was that wise? No, is the short answer.

If I could let go of everything I hated about this book, I can say Keisling narrative and plotting are consistently good. Structuraly this was a great book, but the choices of direction was atrociously against everything I love about reading. I do reccomend you check trigger warnings.

If you don’t mind crude language, explicit (and taboo) sexual content, cults and anti-feminist writing this book is for you.

I understand that when writing about cults, the author needs to go places that are uncomfortable for most and commit to that narrative. However, there was a choice about a particular character that was unnecessary and quite frankly shallow, insensitive and tone deaf.

Enjoyment 2 Character 7
Ambience 10 Fair Play N/A
Plot 8 Execution 6
Deduction 4
Total 2.9