This year I've read several books that have very literary feels in terms of character development, setting descriptions, thought-provoking topics, and intricate plots - but also have plenty of mysterious elements or twists and turns, which all adds up to make them a thrill to read...
The Current
On a trip home to Minnesota to visit an ailing father, two college roommates end up being fished out of their car after it sinks in an icy river - one is dead, and the other just barely hanging on. As she recovers and starts to recall what happened, her retired sheriff father starts to realize that it was no accident, and in his protective father way wants to take justice into his own hands. This incident also catches the attention of others in the small town, awakening memories of another young woman whose body was recovered from this same river years ago, and it brings back old questions of innocence, guilt, suspicion, potential corruption, and more, which we see through the eyes of the retired sheriff, his daughter, the family of a suspect, and the new sherriff. This one definitely is written in a more literary way than your usual thriller, with its back-and-forth in time complexities, its moody, evocative descriptions/feelings, and its explorations of the feelings/effects of these incidents on characters' lives - rather than just straight-up thriller/crime-solving plot - so you may have to give it a little time to hook you or to feel like you "know" the characters or to understand whether you're reading about the present time or a memory from the past, but once you are in? Oh, so good, in that slowly unfolding mysterious way. I love plots where a current crime brings up the secrets of an old mystery in a small town, and that show the power of the past and the hold it can have over the lives of people and their relationships.
4/5 stars
The Lost Man
Jane Harper is one of my new go-to authors (always looking to scratch that Tana French itch, of course), but I wasn't sure what to think when I learned her newest release was a stand-alone, not continuing the
Aaron Falk series. Until I read it... and decided it might just be her best book yet! There's this central mind-bending mystery of how a man could have died of dehydration out in the Australian outback - while his car, filled with water bottles, was within walking distance. It's intriguing, for sure. But then there's also this family drama - wrapped up in the tensions between this man and his two brothers regarding their farms in the area where he died, in their complicated relationships based on a childhood with a very tough father, in a love triangle. As the family tries to figure out what happened to this brother, the reader slowly unravels their history and uncovers how none of these family members is underneath quite who they seem on the surface. It's this amazing combination of murder mystery and slow burning psychological drama - not to mention the literal burning hot outback setting that just amps up the tension, in how vast and unforgiving a landscape it is, how precarious everyone's survival when they venture away from the homestead. I came away from this one thinking about how, for a book where the characters had to spend hours in the car to get anywhere (from one farm to the next, to the nearest small town, to the edge of their land to repair a fence), it was impressive how completely compelling and unputdownable it was.
4.5/5 stars
Blue Bird, Blue Bird
Darren Mathews is a Texas Ranger - and he's also black, something that doesn't go unnoticed in the small town where he grew up. He's returned home for some tense family reasons, and things in town are equally as tense, especially along racial lines, after the murder of a local white woman and of a visiting black Chicago lawyer. As he tries to help this man's fiancee sort out what happened to him, whether it was a hate crime or a crime of passion, and as he all the while faces his own personal and professional demons, it's a page-turning plot - but it will also get you thinking a lot about race and justice. I liked the emotional layering and the strong sense of place in this rural east Texas setting, but I admit that sometimes the "take justice into your own hands" approach of some characters kind of stresses out rule-follower me, so:
3.5/5 stars
The Lady in the Lake
In 1960s Baltimore, newly divorced, former high-society housewife Madeline Schwartz is finally "finding" herself. She also finds herself, in a literal sense, encountering much more gritty parts of the city, and along with that some intel on the murders of a couple of young girls - which she spins into a developing career as a newspaper reporter, interviewing sources close to the story to try to find out what happened. But it's not just a story of a budding reporter uncovering a crime. Maddy's secrets and somewhat conniving ways make for an interesting psychological twist, where you sometimes wonder if she really cares about these victims, or if she just wants to make a name for herself at any cost. Once I got used to the format, I really liked how the storyline about Madeline worming her way into a job as a reporter and going after the story of the "lady in the lake" (a young black woman whose death had previusly gone almost unremarked by the newspapers) would be followed by a chapter that was from the perspective of someone she encountered in that chapter - a waitress, another reporter, even a baseball player who was in the news. They would just chime in with their own voice this once each, but it made for such an interesting way to get another angle on the story. Overall, you get quite a noir feel, plus an interesting historical context of 1960s era Baltimore in terms of the race relations, gender inequalities, organized crime, and even just the setup of a newsroom/the way reporters did their jobs in that era. Reminded me a little bit of
Little Deaths, a book set in that era that I really liked but never saw mentioned much. (Ebook received from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.)
3.5/5 stars
Searching for Sylvie Lee
Amy has always lived in the shadow of her seemingly perfect sister, Sylvie. Even in adulthood, Amy is living at home in New York with their Chinese immigrant parents while Sylvie dazzles her way through life in terms of her job, marriage, and solving the family's problems. But when Sylvie never returns from a trip to the Netherlands for their grandmother's funeral, Amy has to come out of her shell and overcome her fears of leaving home to go search for her sister - and soon she finds that Sylvie's life and relationships might not have been what they all thought, and that there are some dark family secrets that might have contributed to her disappearance. While the plot has these questions/Amy's search at the center, overall it's a fairly character-driven story, told from the perspective of Amy and her mother in the present, and from Sylvie in the weeks preceding her disappearance, and it deals with many issues of immigrant struggles and yearning for homelands, how parents and children can struggle to understand each other, how family secrets can grow and fester. All this against the backdrop of just knowing that something has happened to Sylvie, but what? The slow-burn pacing and type of tale of the "perfect sister" gone missing and how it affects the rest of the family reminded me of Celeste Ng's
Everything I Never Told You; it also has the cultural identity issues and the idea of immigrant parents having to give up a child and how that affects their lives going forward along the lines of Lisa Ko's
The Leavers. If you enjoyed either of those, definitely give this one a try.
3.5/5 stars
Other great picks that I'd put in this "literary thriller" category given their excellent writing combined with their psychological or plot twistiness:
Miracle Creek,
Tangerine,
Little Deaths,
Norwegian by Night. And of course, all of my top mentioned author:
Tana French!
Faithful Place was always my top pick, and I re-read it again this year. It definitely still holds up, but I think after revisiting it, I now place
The Trespasser as my favorite of hers.
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