An Honest Lie by Tarryn Fisher

Fiction

I don’t know why I had this book in my pile, I can’t remember if it is something I saw in the store and thought it looked good, or if I heard about it from someone, somewhere. But I am kind of regretting my purchase. It’s not a bad story, it just wasn’t for me. 

This novel is part thriller, part mystery, heavy on the past trauma trope, with a lot of suspicious behavior coming from all directions. Rainy is an artist, she recently moved from New York city to live with her boyfriend on the opposite side of the country. She was perfectly happy to do so because loves him more than anyone, including all the people she knew on the east coast, and she would have been completely happy building a life in her new home with him and only him. However, her boyfriend insists that she make some friends. He doesn’t like the idea of himself being the only person Rainy knows in town, and being that he has strong roots on the west coast he insists that she should start by building relationships with his friends. Rainy is both reluctant and uninterested in making connections with the neighborhood wives and girlfriends, an ongoing problem she has been struggling with ever since the events of her childhood. She has trust issues that you will understand once she starts to unveil her past, as well as a desire to remain hidden and unnoticed. 

That’s all I really want to get into in regards to the plot. There was a twist at the end of the story that I wasn’t expecting and I’m not sure if it felt entirely believable to me. I’m not going to get overly worked up about it, it isn’t worth me getting irritated over. I won’t eb reading this again so it is worth my time to mentally rant over. There is one topic I do want to rant a little bit about, that being the cover art. I don’t usually get into the cover art too much, but I’m going to do it here because I had some problems with it. The main character, Rainy, is described as having long, black hair, just like her mother. However, the hair of the woman on the cover looks more like a shade of brown to me. I’m also not sold on the woman being in the pool, Rainy doesn’t even get in the pool during this story, she just sits on a chair next to it while she talks to one of the other women. And the shadow of the plane, and the palm trees, it just isn’t working for me. So little of the story had anything to do with the images portrayed I think that whoever was in charge of artwork could have made some much better choices.

The Pool Boy by Nikki Sloane

Fiction

I have been so engrossed in all the thrillers I have been consumed with lately that when I picked up this book I thought I was grabbing another one. I think it was the dark colors, and the indifferent look on the pool boy’s face on the cover that had me thinking that the head line “you are going to get wet” meant wet with blood. As an avid spicy book reader, I should have known better. I never felt so naive and clueless as when I got to the first intimate scene in this book, which started at chapter four, which is when I realized that this was actually a spicy romance novel and not a murder mystery involving an attractive serial killing pool boy. Does anyone know of a book with this plot? If you do, let me know, I think I would be into it.

So finding out that I was reading a romance novel after expecting a thriller was my first surprise. My second was finding out that this was actually the second book in a three book series, titled the Nashville Neighborhood. The first book is called The Doctor, and the one following this one is called The Architect. After reading this story I think I can guess who the first book focuses on after meeting some of the side characters, but I don’t have an idea who the third book might be about. I am mildly interested in reading the other two stories. 

I can see myself enjoying the other two books in the Nashville Neighborhood series because I did enjoy this one. There was betrayal, conflict, desire, great spice, and a good story to go along with it. It was not all spice, I did not get to use up that many post its when I was marking the juicy scenes, there was actually a plot. So while the tropes are cliche, the attractive older woman hooking up with a young man trope and the pool boy trope, the rest of the story has you wanting to read past the intimacy. I found myself constantly rooting for Troy, our young man of many talents, as he takes risks with his love life, family, and career. I also greatly admired Erika, the leading lady, as she used her connections to help out the young man she finds herself having an unexpected, hot affair with. The two of them are really great together and they are great for each other. 

Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak

Fiction

I was on the phone with my boyfriend this past Wednesday night. He knows that I usually read in the evenings, so he asked me what I was reading. I mentioned that I was enjoying a book that I had already read. He then asked, well, what about the book that I bought you on Sunday? I said that I finished it. He was astonished that I finished a book in less than two days. But it was that good that I couldn’t stop. I looked forward to my lunch breaks at work even more so than usual, because I couldn’t wait until being home at night to continue reading this story.

In the midst of recovering from a troubled past, Mallory gets a job that puts her one step closer towards fitting back in with society. An enthusiastic babysitter and lover of children, she transitions from her job at a daycare to a full time nanny gig with a well off family. The pay is great, she gets to live in her own small cabin next to the woods behind the family home, and the little boy she watches is well behaved. It’s a perfect job with a wonderful family. So of course something is going to go wrong. 

This is an unsettling mystery that hooks you from the very start. I knew I was going to love it as soon as I saw the last picture in the first set of Teddy’s drawings that Mallory sorts through. I made a low whoosh noise because that one drawing was pretty creepy and kind of out of place from the others. I loved getting spooked, so I immediately got excited because I knew that there were weird and scary things in my future. It didn’t get as scary as I was hoping for, but I was not disappointed in the least because there were several twists that I thoroughly enjoyed. I also want to say how very impressed I was with the artwork. The author worked with two illustrators while writing this story, and the three of them together created a perfect illustrated tale.

Mister Magic by Kiersten White

Fiction

I was drawn to this book similar to how I have been drawn to the horror section of the bookstore lately. I just now noticed while I was writing this that I have been reading a bunch of thrillers lately. I guess my mind needed a change from the romantasy binge I ended a few weeks ago and now it has found its new obsession. Think of this as a warm up for October, when I plan to read horror and thrillers all month long. With its vibrant pink cover, which I thought was an unusual choice for a book in the horror section, it seemed to be saying “pick me”. I didn’t even read the back for a synopsis, I just grabbed it and went to the register. 

Not knowing anything about the story going into a new book is a rare thing for me. I usually choose books based on what I read from the back cover or from my ever growing list of books I hope to one day read. By the time I got to the chapter that comes after two, I was hooked. I say the chapter after two because the one that follows two is not titled three, as you might expect. I won’t say what it is, but I loved what the author did, it very much suited the story and I found myself always looking forward to discovering the very on theme chapter names. The plot of the story is based around a very mysterious canceled children’s show that everyone seems to remember differently but that no one can prove the actual events of. Why? Because there is no physical evidence that the show ever existed, no video tapes, no audio recordings, nothing. The story takes place in the present, thirty years after the last episode airs, when there is a reunion of the last group of kids, now adults, that appeared on the show. I was frustrated a lot while I read this, because I was just as confused as the main character, Val, who cannot remember anything from her time on the show with her friends. Something traumatic happened to her, and she cannot remember anything in her life before the age of eight, which is when her father removed her from the show and took her far, far away from where it was filmed. 

It’s an unusual story, with elements of horror and mystery, cults, in more than one type of form, trauma, loss, and closure. It doesn’t exactly have a happy ending, but some people might be satisfied with the way things turned out. I’m still trying to decide if I accept the way things ended or if I would have preferred something else.

This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno

Fiction

This book had me deeply interested in parts one and two, but it started to lose me towards the middle of part three. By part four, I was out. 

Proclaimed to be a horror story, it gives both that and psychological thriller. You can’t decide if there actually is a supernatural presence haunting the main character or if they are going crazy due to extreme grief. But you might get scared regardless of whether or not the events are actually happening to the main character as a lot of what is described is rather disturbing. Besides the scare factor, this story also has a gross factor. Brutal dismemberments, body disfigurements, violent attacks, this tale has the works. It is not the worst story I have read in terms of making me go ‘ew’ but I would put it on my list. 

I can’t say much more without giving away too much of the story, but I will say that it is worth reading. You’re left wondering about what really happened throughout the course of the events and what the aftermath is going to be. Finishing this book had me on the verge of considering a philosophical question, but I never actually got to figuring out what that question might be.