Tag Archives: #thriller

Nobody But Us by Laure Van Rensburg

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Handsome college professor Steven Harding and naïve young student Ellie Masterson drive from New York to a remote cabin for their first holiday together. Expectations are high for a romantic weekend, but what unfolds over those few days will totally blow your mind. Neither of them are who they say they are, and the dark truths underlying their twisted relationship are gradually exposed. 

I literally could not put this book down, and found myself holding my breath at certain moments.  Ellie and Steven were both compelling characters and one of the things I loved most about Nobody But Us was the way in which I got to understand how they had come to this dark place and what motivated their actions. It was such a compelling read.  And the atmosphere and sense of danger was ratcheted up by the setting – an ostensibly beautiful cabin in the remote wilderness, surrounded by trees, in the deepest of snowy winters – it totally heightened the almost-cinematic sense of jeopardy throughout. 

Timely, thought-provoking, deeply atmospheric, full of suspense – this has got to be one of the best psychological thrillers I’ve read for a very long time indeed. 

The Lying Room by Nicci French

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I’ve long been a fan of Nicci French’s Frieda Klein series, one I go back to again and again, so I was really excited to read this stand-alone novel. I’m happy to report it absolutely did not disappoint. The heroine, Neve, is fascinatingly flawed and there were times when I wanted to shake her, but that’s a good thing, right? Means you’re totally ‘in’ the book, and that the characters and situation are both compelling and believable.

I won’t spoil the plot, with all its myriad twists and turns, but it begins when Neve, everyone’s best friend, discovers the body of a man she’s been seeing and decides to remove every trace that she’s ever been in his flat. Except that, this being a thriller, she’ll miss something crucial, which will come back and bite her at some inopportune moment. Well, she does, and it does, except that it’s early on and becomes a classic piece of misdirection. This book is like a masterclass on how to write a suspenseful thriller, because by the end of it you’ve changed your mind ten times about who the murderer really is and you’re still surprised how it turns out.

What Nicci French does so well is ratcheting up the tension with each new secret that’s revealed. There’s an incredible feeling of claustrophobia that grows throughout the novel until you can hardly breathe for wondering when the next blow will fall and whether Neve will survive it. I almost missed my stop on the tube at one point. And it makes a fantastic distraction from all the bilge that’s going on in the news at the moment. Definitely worth a read.

The Dead Ex, by Jane Corry

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Now, I’ve got to be honest here, I’d never heard of Jane Corry before her name came up on a twitter post announcing that two of her books were reduced to 99p on Kindle.  I was waiting for a couple of books I’d pre-ordered to be published and had been reduced to re-reading the Frieda Klein series by Nicci French (v.good) for about the fifth or sixth time. Did I mention I read all the time?

Anyway, I thought I’d give her a whirl, because you can’t go wrong for 99p, right? 

It was great! Very twisty-turny, and although I was certain there was a twist coming, I couldn’t work it out, and I LOVE that in a thriller. I also particularly liked the fact that one of the protagonists, Vicki, has epilepsy, which affects her memory and means she can’t be certain that she didn’t have something to do with her ex-husband’s disappearance – the man at the centre of the plot.  People in my family have epilepsy and I thought that Vicki’s experience was very well done – not overblown or overdramatised but giving great insight into what it’s like to live with the constant risk of seizures.

The plot was quite complex and for quite a way into the book it’s hard to work out the connections between the different protagonists, despite hints and foreshadowing. I think that’s one of the reasons I liked it, because as a reader I had to concentrate more on what was happening in the present and what ‘might’ have happened in the past, and how everyone was interconnected. I wasn’t entirely sure whether I liked some of the characters, but then again I suppose that makes them true to life, because who does like everyone they meet…

I didn’t realise this until I looked her up, but Jane Corry is in fact a Sunday Times bestselling author of a number of novels, and she has a new one out in about a week’s time, I Looked Away. Don’t you just love it when you find a new author and you have a whole heap of new books to read? Can’t wait.

To Kill the President, To Kill the Truth by Sam Bourne

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I binge-read both of these books in a sprint over a couple of days, and I have to make a confession here, I originally read the first one “To Kill the President” quite some time ago. Then, I started reading the new one, “To Kill the Truth”, and fifteen pages in realised I needed to go back and re-read the first one if the second one was to make any sense. That’s both the advantage and disadvantage of being someone who reads very fast. You can read a book over and over again, getting something new every time, but equally you don’t retain that much after each read – otherwise there would be zero room in your head for anything else.

Sam Bourne has definitely got the knack of a gripping first chapter, that’s for sure. As an aspiring writer, I found myself admiring the way he ratchets up the stakes until you are desperate to know what happens next. To be honest, I don’t know how much I want to say about the plot of either of these two books, because I don’t want to spoil it if you haven’t read them. Both of them are extremely timely. In each, he’s managed to build a plot which is highly relevant to what’s going on in the world, touching on key political and social themes. He’s a clever writer, if that makes sense, because in the middle of some racing plotlines, he makes you stop and think about bigger ideas and issues than those which simply live on the page.

The protagonist, Maggie Costello is likeable, fallible and real – there have been a number of excerpts doing the rounds on Twitter from male authors writing female protagonists, where they’ve got it horribly wrong, but that’s not the case here.

If you want a couple of thrillers that’ll glue your eyes to the page, these are highly recommended. Made me want to go and look up Sam Bourne’s back catalogue to see what else I can read.