Mystery – Page 3 – Nonfiction and Nonsense

Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak

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.

The Lost Village by Camilla Sten

Fiction

I had a really great time with this book. Until the very end I could not tell if what was going on in the village was real or a paranormal incident. I won’t spoil anything for you, I’ll just give a little background on the plot.

Alice is an aspiring filmmaker, and by aspiring I mean that she went to school for it and has had no success or real life experience in the field yet. Everyone she had classes with seems to be doing well and having success in their careers, yet she can’t seem to land a job. Filming a documentary about an abandoned village in Sweden has been something she has been dreaming of doing her entire life, and she finally has gotten enough money, volunteers, and resources together to begin the project. She’s done the research, rented all the necessary equipment, and sourced together a few good friends to help her scout out the area and take preliminary photos and videos. It seems that she has done all the necessary prep work to make the project go smoothly, including intense research of the area and sourcing former residents of the village to interview. But once she and her crew are in the village all the research in the world has not prepared her for when things start to go wrong almost immediately.

The back cover has it right, it does feel like you are reading a book that would be akin to the Blair Witch Project. It’s a little spooky, mysterious, and has psychological elements. I also really enjoyed reading a thriller that took place in Sweden. I love the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, and while this book was nothing like those books it for some reason made me want to go back and read the whole series again. It also made me want to read another book by this author, titled The Resting Place. So if you decide to read The Lost Village and enjoy it, maybe you will also be interested in another work by the author. If you get to it before I do, let me know what you think!

What Moves The Dead by T. Kingfisher

Fiction

Is it just me, or are there a lot of creepy rabbit book covers on the scene lately? What Moves The Dead is just one of the many that I have seen, and it is the one that intrigued me the most. I was very interested to read what has been described as a reimagining of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, and I can tell you that there were a lot of differences but you can see the parallels.

My favorite character in the book was Lieutenant Alex Easton, and not just because kan was the main character. That is not a typo, for Easton is not a man, but also not a woman, and so the Lieutenant goes by kan rather than him or her. Easton was born a woman, but took on the role and life of a man after her father died when she was young. I was a little confused for the first few pages, because I couldn’t figure out if Easton was a man or a woman, but after the explanation I understood. I was reminded that I had heard of this before, a woman who chooses to live her life as a man. I did a little bit of research and came across the phenomena. These women actually exist in Albania and they are called burrnesha. I read a really great article about them titled The Mountains Where Women Live As Men by Michael Paterniti, which I will put a link to below. There is a good amount of written information regarding these women, and a documentary by the BBC, so if you are intrigued you can find out more by doing your own research. Overall, I think creating this character for the story really made the entire book.

Seeing that I gave away the surprise of the uniqueness of Lieutenant Easton’s life, I will not tell you anymore about the story itself. If you have read The Fall of the House of Usher you might have some idea of where the story is going. The cover itself also gives you a hint of the more morbid details that have been woven into this tale.

For more information about burrnesha:

https://www.gq.com/story/burrnesha-albanian-women-living-as-men

Verity by Colleen Hoover

Fiction

After seeing this book mentioned frequently amongst readers of a particular genre I decided that I had to read it. I then went into this book knowing only what was summarized on the back cover. I was pleasantly surprised with the story, which goes back and forth between the present day and the not so distant past. We follow Lowen as she struggles to get her life back in order while also trying to get the extensive notes of an unfinished book series in order. Then there is Verity, the talented writer who no longer has the ability to finish her series, the very same series that Lowen is trying to make outlines for as she goes through the piles of papers that Verity has strewn about her large office. The themes comprised a mixture of loss, mystery, thriller, romance, desire, and macabre, which worked extremely well together and I loved it.

I could see this becoming a film one day, something which has a racy and perplexing feel comparable to that of Gone Girl, which also happens to be an incredible book. It was a delight to finally read a well written book that was also a little bit sexy, but not overly so, one that didn’t try too hard and was not the main draw of the story. I definitely need more books like this in my life and I am probably going to do some research towards finding ones that have a similar feel. If you couldn’t tell, I am encouraging you to read this book, it is worth it.

The Cold Vanish by Jon Billman

Nonfiction

Last year I read one of the many Missing books by author David Paulides, and in my review I expressed my extreme disappointment in its research paper-like delivery which was about as entertaining as reading a public high school textbook. The cases mentioned could have been so much more intriguing if they were expressed less clinically and with more emotion, thus making the readers feel a connection to the victims and their families. I found what that book was missing in The Cold Vanish by Jon Billman. He closely details the disappearance of Jacob Gray, discussing what was going on in the young man’s life months before he went missing, up until the very end of the search.

Each person that goes missing in the United States, the world even, could have a book written about them. And if every book written about every missing person was done with as much care as was done by this author, the world over would care a great deal more about mysterious vanishings. There are entirely too many mysterious disappearances every year, and in reading this story you learn that missing persons are not documented and kept track of as thoroughly as you would expect that they should be. Search and rescue efforts are not always conducted in the best manner, national parks and forests are not always as cooperative as the family and friends of the missing would like them to be, and there is usually a lack of funding or a cap on it. Even when volunteer groups come to the aid of the missing, there can be a bunch of red tape to cross in allowing both persons and search and rescue dogs into the parks and forests if the government or landowners don’t want them there. It’s a big jurisdictional mess that makes you hope that no one you know ever goes missing.

I would read this book again, and any other missing persons book that is written in the same manner. You learn a lot from it and you get engrossed in the story. It is everything I like in a true life mystery.