Gone Girl

Just how well can you ever know the person you love?  This is the question that Nick Dunne must ask himself on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears.  The police immediately suspect Nick.  Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him.  He swears it isn't true.  A police examination of his computer shows strange searches.  He says they aren't his.  And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone.  So what really did happen to Nick's beautiful wife?


Gillian Flynn has one dark mind as Gone Girl is a boat load of crazy.  The narration is split into two, alternating between Nick's thoughts while searching for his wife and Amy's diary entries that reveal more about their marriage than Nick will share.  Right from the start each section of prose has this jittery quality which promptly informed me that this was not going to be a bog standard thriller.  Sure enough, the further I followed Flynn down the rabbit hole that is Amy Dunne's disappearance, the more intense my feelings for the book became.
  I don't want to go into any detail so as to spoil Gone Girl, but it has so many twists, some obvious, some not, and by the end it is hard to know who to empathise with.  A great well paced story, that has some truly horrific moments, I was up until 2 am two nights in a row reading this noir-esque thriller desperate to know what happened next. 

Heart Shaped Bruise

I've seen this on a couple of blogs, yet I didn't set out to read it, but it was another a case of it catching my eye in the library and me thinking why not?

They say I'm evil. The police. The newspapers. The girls from school who shake their heads on the six o’clock news and say they always knew there was something not quite right about me. And everyone believes it. Including you. But you don't know. You don't know who I used to be.

Who I could have been.

Awaiting trial at Archway Young Offenders Institution, Emily Koll is going to tell her side of the story for the first time.

Heart-Shaped Bruise is a compulsive and moving novel about infamy, identity and how far a person might go to seek revenge.

Heart-Shaped Bruise is a YA Crime/Thriller, probably a good introduction for budding crime novel devourers.  The only problem I had, and this may be a tad spoilery, was that I found myself waiting for a twist that never came.  There were too many coincidences for me and I was expecting something a little more complex from the ending.  Still I read it in one sitting.  Tanya Byrne's writing style is definitely compelling, and in Emily she has created a brittle and fascinating character, that perhaps deserved a better story to inhabit.  So, while Heart-Shaped Bruise is not a bad read, and I would recommend it, it is just not what I expected.

The Killing Place/The Silent Girl

A couple of weeks back I was rummaging through the library shelves and stumbled upon the two Rizzoli and Isles books (I've been slowly going in the right order when the library has them rather than ordering them) that I hadn't read yet.  This has been a great series so far, and Gerritsen's books are never a chore to read so I looked forward to a thrilling double feature.

 

The Killing Place

He Watches.
Something terrible has happened in the snowbound village of Kingdom Come, Wyoming.  Twelve eerily identical houses stand dark and abandoned.  The people who lived in them appear to have vanished, seemingly into thin air.
He Waits.
Maura Isles is driving through the area with a group of friends when they find themselves trapped in  snowstorm.   They stumble into the abandoned village to take shelter.  Their nightmare has only just begun.
They Disappear
Days later, Jane Rizzoli flies to Wyoming to search for her missing friend.  A crashed vehicle has been found with four badly burned bodies still inside.  Can one of the corpses be Maura's? 
Jane's hunt for the truth leads her to Kingdom Come.  Where the person who was watching Maura now lies waiting for her...


The Killing Place was superb, and is joint first with Body Double as the best entry in Gerritsen's Rizzoli and Isles series. The dialogue may be a bit shoddy, and very cheesy, but the plot was fantastic. Gerritsen sets it up as horror story and I was genuinely getting a bit creeped out. The Killing Place captivated my attention for a whole train journey, and would probably fare well for a long-haul plane ride as I wanted to find out what was going to happen to Maura. The only fault was that the ending was a bit of a let down, but it was an enjoyable ride nonetheless.



The Silent Girl

Every crime scene tells a story. Some keep you awake at night. Others haunt your dreams. The grisly display homicide cop Jane Rizzoli finds in Boston’s Chinatown will do both.
  In the murky shadows of an alley lies a female’s severed hand. On the tenement rooftop above is the corpse belonging to that hand, a red-haired woman dressed all in black, her head nearly severed. Two strands of silver hair—not human—cling to her body. They are Rizzoli’s only clues, but they’re enough for her and medical examiner Maura Isles to make the startling discovery: that this violent death had a chilling prequel.
  Nineteen years earlier, a horrifying murder-suicide in a Chinatown restaurant left five people dead. But one woman connected to that massacre is still alive: a mysterious martial arts master who knows a secret she dares not tell, a secret that lives and breathes in the shadows of Chinatown. A secret that may not even be human. Now she’s the target of someone, or something, deeply and relentlessly evil.
  Cracking a crime resonating with bone-chilling echoes of an ancient Chinese legend, Rizzoli and Isles must outwit an unseen enemy with centuries of cunning—and a swift, avenging blade.


I didn't enjoy The Silent Girl as much.  I found it hard to keep reading, and guessed who the culprit was about half way through, which is unusual for a Gerritsen book where she normally keeps the identity of her killers hidden until the last few pages.  However, this was still an enjoyable read as I liked the cast character development that wasn't related to the case; like Maura testifying against a cop; and Jane trying to navigate her new family unit. 
  Not every entry in a series can be excellent (apart from the Dresden Files...), so I'm hoping that the next book will go back to combining a great murder mystery with personal development for both Rizzoli and Isles.   

Trust Your Eyes

Thomas Kilbride has been obsessed with maps since he was a child.  Now an adult, he studies an Internet map site called whirl360 in an attempt to memorise every street in the world.  One evening, while studying a street in Manhattan, he notices something unusual in an apartment window: a woman with a plastic bag over her head, being suffocated.  He tells his brother, Ray, what he has seen but the only problem is that Thomas is a diagnosed schizophrenic who rarely leaves his room, let alone the house. Is he telling the truth? Or is this a delusion that can be easily explained?

Linwood Barclay's Trust Your Eyes is best described as a 'Pandora's Box'.  Not content with the central mystery Barclay quickly establishes plenty of grey areas concerning, an incident in Thomas' childhood and the sudden death of Kilbride boys' father, plus the mysterious phone calls that only Thomas is privy to. 

There are plot twists galore: some expected, some not.  At certain points I found this disorientating, as I did the non linear elements, but I was compelled by a story that bordered on the ridiculous, and could fall apart at any moment, to keep reading.  The success of Trust Your Eyes hinges on the use of smoke and mirrors.  Barclay adeptly keeps you wondering how much of Thomas' world is real by misdirecting the reader with plenty of time changes and narrator switches.  These offered insight into different aspects of the plot, but my only criticism is that these portions of the book revealed uninspired and cliched character histories and present actions.  The only two exceptions were Thomas, who felt less of a caricature, and had complexity, as did his brother Ray.  Barclay wonderfully portrayed Ray's struggle of trying to look after and communicate with his brother, while dealing with his own issues.

A great, thrilling, holiday read, but if you're a quick reader I think Trust Your Eyes would probably be a satisfying companion on a long-haul flight. 

The Sinner

The third installment in the Rizzoli and Isles series, finally, focuses primarily on medical examiner Maura Isles.  With the arrival of her ex-husband more is revealed about Maura's life before she moved to Boston.  Case-wise, Jane and Maura investigate a brutal attack inside a convent, which leaves one nun dead and another battling for her life.  Also found is a woman with no face, no hand or feet - could the two cases be connected?

The characterization is spot on, and there are plenty of twist and turns within the plot that kept me reading.  Nothing is ever simple, and the real culprit is always hidden away until the last few chapters.  A fantastic read. 

The Apprentice

Detective Jane Rizzoli, having survived her encounter with The Surgeon, is brought into an investigation of a married couple who have been brutally murdered.  The case takes a turn for the worst when Rizzoli can't help but notice similarities between the crime scene and the work of The Surgeon's in the first book.  Maura Isles is finally introduced as the new Boston Medical Examiner.  However, The Apprentice is about Rizzoli's struggles with the emotional scars left from her showdown with Warren Hoyt, as well as the arrival of the mysterious FBI agent Thomas Dean who keeps usurping her authority.

The best thing about Gerritsen novels, aside from a great plot, are that her characters always come across as fully fledged people, warts and all.  They manage to have lives outside of their work and Gerritsen weaves these elements effortlessly within the main case.  The Apprentice is equally as good, if not better than it's counterpart and I look forward to reading The Sinner.

The Surgeon

Tess Gerritsen's The Surgeon is set in Boston: Detectives Jane Rizzoli and Thomas Moore are investigating a series of murders that have been attributed to 'The Surgeon', labelled so for horrific but precise skills used to maim victims. 

The branding of  as a 'Rizzoli and Isles Thriller' is slightly miss-leading: Isles is not present and Rizzoli, while having her primary character traits and family history established, almost takes a back seat to Moore's story arc with Dr. Catherine Cordell.  Their arc in particular reminded me of Girl Missing, a stand alone Gerritsen story, especially with the lemon Mercedes.  Other than that The Surgeon was a great start to the series; it has a steady plot that gave no early hints or clues as to who the eventual culprit is, which ensures that Gerritsen will keep you hooked until the last page.