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Book Reviews – The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides

The Silent Patient

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Silent Patient is a 5-star psychological thriller. It’s the story of a British psychotherapist who becomes fascinated with a woman, Alicia Berenson, who ostensibly murdered her husband by shooting him in the face five times, and then refused to speak a word in her own defense. Naturally, she was convicted and incarcerated in a mental institution, where she continued to maintain her silence. Theo Faber, the protagonist, gets a job at the institution where she’s locked up, and becomes her therapist, obsessed with getting her speaking agin.
The book is written in a first person POV from Theo’s perspective, interspersed with entries from Alicia’s diary. The interplay between Theo and Alicia is well-done, and this is no mean feat, seeing that she remains silent for most of the book. The other characters are all well-drawn, even the minor ones. The plot is cohesive, and while I did figure out the final twist before it was revealed, it was artfully concealed, yet logical. The chapters are short, which makes for a quick read.



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Stripper gets another 4* review on Amazon!

Stripping for Clues

Stripper! was a great murder mystery involving the heroine Nattie McMasters. Nattie seems to be like all young wannabe detectives and is good at getting her nose in places she shouldn’t. Nattie meets a girl at the college, Becca, and before she knows it, she’s wrapped up so tightly in a whirlwind of murder, spying and stripping. Nattie really is an interesting character and Burns does a great job of introducing each character. Each character introduced to the plot was very aptly described and you could get a feel for what the character was going to provide. Sometimes it turned out to be a complete surprise! I enjoyed the book and am interested in Nattie’s future adventures.

Thanks to Helen Mathey-Horn

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Book Review – The Guardians, by John Grisham

The Guardians

The Guardians by John Grisham

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Guardians is a typical John Grisham novel. That is to say, it is well-written and the legal acumen is superb. This book is the story of a storefront legal office in Savannah that scours the prisons for innocent inmates – not only innocent, but who have a decent chance of exoneration by a group of limited manpower and means. The protagonist is Cullen Post of Guardian Ministries, a lawyer who is also an Episcopal priest. He takes on a client, Quincy Miller, who was railroaded on a murder charge in a corrupt Florida town and has been languishing in prison for over twenty years. As the story commences, it becomes known that there are still some bad guys around who would like to keep Miller in jail and the murder case closed. So an atmosphere of danger has been established.
The book faithfully chronicles Post’s investigation of Miller’s case, which takes him back and forth across the southeastern US, where he meets many interesting and well-drawn characters. In the early stages of the investigation, no one outside of Miller and Guardian Ministries even knows someone is looking into the case, so the impending sense of doom is still present, but not imminent. However, Post knows that at some point, the people who engineered Miller’s conviction will become aware of Guardian’s activities, and consequences may ensue.
The climax comes in an unexpected manner about two-thirds of the way through, but then Post and Guardian get the almighty FBI involved, who bring the bad guys are swiftly to heel. So the last third of the book is simply a detailed account of Miller’s exoneration (a foregone conclusion by now), which isn’t really very suspenseful. Grisham has had a problem with endings since he began writing, and he can also become immersed in the legal details that he knows so well, at the expense of the story. That’s why I’ve docked the book a star. However, the Guardians is still a fascinating read, well worth the time.




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Book Review – Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens

Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Where the Crawdads Sing is an excellent book, but it could have been better. The author’s expertise as a naturalist really shines throughout it, but sometimes, things get lost in that light. The novel is many things — a coming of age story, a murder mystery, a commentary on human relationships in a small town, and a lyrical description of life in eastern North Carolina — and perhaps, the author tried to do a little too much. There are times that her descriptive passages obscure the plot, causing me to gloss over passages that maybe I shouldn’t have to, to get to the meat of the story. And as a North Carolina resident, I found inconsistencies. Owens has her characters traveling to Asheville quite a bit. Sometimes there is a solid reason for this, but sometimes it’s just to visit a city. Problem is, Asheville is just about the furthest NC city (7-8 hours, by car) that they could choose — there are many closer alternatives. Owens occasionally writes in dialect, but the dialects in Crawdads are not those I’ve heard spoken in that part of North Carolina – nowhere did I find a trace of the Elizabethan “hoi toider” speech commpn to that area. I also thought that the story ended quite abruptly – I would have appreciated more time with a middle-aged and older Marsh Girl. Lest you put these criticisms down to mere quibbling, I still think the novel is exceptional, but I also think the points mentioned above justify docking it one star. Read this book. You will be doing yourself a great injustice if you don’t.



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Book Review – Sinner or Saint, by Brenda Donelan

Sinner Or Saint

Sinner Or Saint by Brenda Donelan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Sinner or Saint is the first installment of Brenda Donelan’s University Mysteries that I’ve had the pleasure to read. I’m not generally a cozy fan, but I must say that this one has all the elements that true aficionados seek. Criminology professor Marlee McCabe is an interesting and engaging protagonist, and her hometown of Elmwood, South Dakota and it’s Midwestern State University are well-drawn. The book has plenty of offbeat characters – Marlee’s Supper Club of her college cronies, as well as old boyfriends, cops and townspeople. The mystery is puzzling with many twists and turns, and the solution is unexpected but satisfying as an evildoer gets his (or her!) just desserts. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series, and to future installments. I did drop the rating by one star because of the slow pace and lack of tension.



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Book Review – The Dog Thief and Other Stories, by Jill Kearney

The Dog Thief and Other Stories

The Dog Thief and Other Stories by Jill Kearney

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


An excellent book about broken people and their animal companions. The stories tell of life, and life is not always pretty, or elegant, or even worth living sometimes. You will find pathos here, but the author is well aware that there is beauty in pathos, even though it may be difficult or uncomfortable to notice. Her message is that there is primal bond between people and their pets, and sometimes an animal can give a person things that another human cannot, or will not. Some of the stories also depict the cruelty towards animals of which humans are capable, and it is hard to read these passages, but it is noteworthy that there’s never any cruelty towards the people from the animals. There’s a lesson in that.



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Book Review – Triptych, by Karin Slaughter

Triptych (Will Trent, #1)Triptych by Karin Slaughter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Karin Slaughter loves broken characters. Maybe too much. And maybe that’s why I can’t give five stars to this book. There’s a lot of good in it–the plotting, the pace, the wordsmithery and the suspense. But the characters, especially those in law enforcement, are so broken that I just can’t suspend disbelief enough to imagine they’d even be there. The characters’ flaws end up taking me out of the story again and and again, distracting me from the rest of the good about the book.

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Book Reviews – Faithless, by Karin Slaughter

Faithless (Grant County, #5)

Faithless by Karin Slaughter

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Faithless is the penultimate book in Karin Slaughter’s Grant County series. When I began this series, I really wanted to like it, but each successive installment keeps hitting me as meh. Slaughter is a superb writer–her plotting, pacing, scene construction and word choice are all very good. She is a master at building suspense. I think I’ve finally identifies the problem I have with the stories–I don’t like the characters. All of them are flawed, which seems to be the trend these days, and I’m a romantic at heart, so that rubs me the wrong way. But they also make poor decisions vis a vis their work–decisions that would likely get one severely reprimanded, if not fired, had they occurred in real life. Naturally, the results such decisions are responsible for many of Slaughter’s plot twists, and her characters don’t seem to learn from their mistakes. I just can’t gin up much sympathy for people like that.
In Faithless, protagonists Police Chief Jeffery Tolliver and county coroner Dr. Sara Linton discover the body of a young woman who was entombed alive in a box with an air pipe attached, only to be killed later by cyanide poured down the pipe. The investigation leads to a rural religious cult. However, as much or more of the action in the books come from the characters personal demons–Jeffery and Sara’s on-again, off-again relationship, Detective Lena Adams abusive relationship and Sara’s sister’s involvement with the cult. I figured out the mystery pretty early on, so most of my reading was done just to prove I was right while shaking my head at the characters’ ill-considered actions.
I’ll read the last book in the series just to finish what I’ve started, but I don’t hold out great hope. Of course,these problems might be why the author chose to end the series after just six entries.



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Book Review – A Test of Wills, by Charles Todd

A Test of Wills (Inspector Ian Rutledge, #1)A Test of Wills by Charles Todd
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Test of Wills is as fine an English country mystery as I’ve ever read. Inspector Ian Rutledge is an enigmatic protagonist, broken by horrible experiences in the Great War, voices speaking in his head, now returned to Scotland Yard to pick up the scattered threads of a life he once had. An envious superior has Rutledge assigned to a case that is a political minefield, hoping it will bring him down once and for all. But of course, Rutledge proves equal to the challenge.

The best part pf the book is the author’s meticulous characterization of the village of Streetham and it’s inhabitants. Everyone has a secret and all of them are revealed over the course of the story. The identity of the culprit is clear, but if Rutledge arrests him, he dooms himself. The author neatly resolves the conundrum his hero faces.

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Book Review – Indelible, by Karin Slaughter

Indelible (Grant County, #4)Indelible by Karin Slaughter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the fourth book in the Grant County series that I have read, and I’m obviously ambivalent. There’s something in the books that keeps me reading and I want to like them, but I just haven’t gotten the rush that I get from a book that I really like. This one starts with a bang, literally–two thugs break into police headquarters, shoot a cop in the face with a shotgun and wound other people, including protagonist Chief Jeffery Tolliver, and hold the rest of the occupants hostage, including protagonist Dr. Sara Linton and a bunch of grade school kids on an early morning visit. So this is going to be a suspenseful drama about a hostage situation, right? Well, not really, because the story flashes back to a trip that Jeffery and Sara made at the beginning of their relationship to his hometown in Alabama, where they become embroiled in small town drama and relationship issues. Of course, the mystery is how all of this relates to the taking of police headquarters in the present. We also have the tale of the third protagonist, Detective Lena Adams, who has rejoined the sheriff’s office on her first day back, and now must deal with the hostage situation on the outside. If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. The mystery is eventually solved after many twists and turns, but by the time it was I almost didn’t care. The author seems to introduce plot twists by changing the direction of the story on a whim, getting the reader interested in one plot line then abruptly charging off in a different direction without providing a satisfactory resolution to the current one. The characters follow a similar path–they’re highly reactive, not very proactive. All of this engendered much confusion and frustration in me, the reader.
I do want to finish the series, mainly because Karin Slaughter is one of the most successful mystery authors in history, so she’s gotta be doing something right. But so far, it’s been a rough go. I hope she hits her stride soon.

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