Review by New York Times Review
even the most modest mystery novel has the dignity of its lineage. It runs from an echt genius, Edgar Allan Poe, through Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, downriver in time to Kate Atkinson and Tana French. In the permanent war that all genre fiction wages for respect, it can claim partial but persuasive ownership even of Dickens, of Voltaire. But the thriller is new money. Where did it come from? It has indistinct antecedents in the adventure novel, the spy novel and the hybrid midcentury experimentations of Elmore Leonard, but realistically, the answer isn't pretty: Its pure form was the invention of Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsyth, who set their lone heroes loose against immense forces in the 1970s and haven't come back for them yet. The genre spread fast and hard - America had all that unmelting, isolate, stoic toughness, and, with the west at last wholly settled, nowhere to put it, fictionally. Eventually an Englishman came up with Jack Reacher. Now a non-trivial percentage of us is convinced that biology teachers should carry guns. But newness is also opportunity, and as the murder mystery has aged into established strands of nostalgia and noir, the thriller, lissome, elastic, and urgent, seems to grow season by season, while its essential proposal - that some trustworthy institution nearby, the FBI, your law firm, your marriage, is compromised - seems to grow minute by minute in relevance. Something called the Steele Dossier is part of our daily lives. Worrying about the irruption of violence into civil society is pretty last century; the thriller is wondering about civil society itself. TAKE THE CAPTIVES (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99), by Debra Jo Immergut, about a psychologist at a women's prison whose high school crush walks into his office. She remembers nothing about him, and there's nothing about her that he doesn't. The woman, Miranda, is in for murder, while the psychologist, Frank, is there after a misstep in his career. ("I'd been in a cushy practice in Manhattan in fact," he says vaguely, "and was tossed out amid some kind of litigation mess.") Another alarm bell: His father is the inventor of the famous "Lundquist Curve," a predictive test that foretold marvelous things for Frank, its "Baby Zero," once upon a time. Creepy. What ensues is a swift, clever two-hander in which all the soft power belongs to Miranda and all the hard power to Frank. What was her crime, exactly? Will he help her escape? Should she even want him to? We doubt each of them, naturally, and, as their stories emerge, vacillate between possibilities, that she's the manipulator, that he is, that both are, that neither is. For a writer with a literary pedigree, Immergut is a surprisingly awkward stylist, but she's found the genre in which her sense of pacing and character readily excuse that weakness. She's also written a novel of ideas. "The Captives" reserves its truest scrutiny not for Miranda and Frank, but for the two forms of authority that preside over them, mass incarceration and psychotherapy. Immergut artfully heads her chapters by quoting various ethical principles of psychology just as Frank breaks them, progressing from the venial to the mortal. At the same time, Miranda has to navigate the maddening caprices of the prison system while mulling whether she even deserves to be inside it. "The Captives" ends without that shocking lift the best thrillers have - Immergut, perhaps to her credit but to her novel's disadvantage, can't quite commit to real, unredeemed malevolence - but it gets there quickly and surely. Along the way, it dissolves and reconstitutes its characters' notions of what a prisoner owes a prison or a doctor owes a patient. "People get mixed up into things," Frank says. "People sometimes want something so much they do things they never dreamed they'd do." AT FIRST GLANCE, SOCIAL CREATURE (Doubleday, $26.95), a formidable burlesque by Tara Isabella Burton, sharp as a shard of broken mirror, seems to have none of the inquisitive civic watchfulness of "The Captives." The book's muse is a fabulously impulsive young New Yorker named Lavinia, beautiful and brittle, who moves in highly stylized social and literary circles full of people named Athena Maidenhead and Beowulf Marmont. We see her through the gaze of someone altogether different, though - a harassed young outer borough-dweller named Louise, who gets a job tutoring Lavinia's sister. Quickly, almost accidentally, Louise becomes Lavinia's postulant, trying desperately to pay the bills (real and figurative) for their intoxicating circuit of parties and selfies, until - it's a fast turn - she commits a murder in order to belong for one more night. "We cannot be known and loved at the same time," Louise thinks, and suddenly we realize we're in the company not of a striver but a sociopath. Her obvious model is Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley. Whereas Dickie Greenleaf seems completely authentic, however, Burton's New York is a nostalgia act, a Fitzgerald pastiche. She seems caught between instincts, as if she knows this version of the East Coast no longer exists, but once believed in it from afar so wholly that she's nevertheless still hoping to get her invitation. If you walk around Oxford long enough, you'll see an undergraduate holding a teddy bear. Yet on the sly, Burton's tale, like Immergut's, actually has a great deal to say about the very tangible conventions of our time. As it begins, Louise is just skating by as a barista while writing "for this e-commerce site called GlaZam" and working as an SAT tutor - a run-of-the-mill casualty, in other words, of the gig economy. Then she has the epiphany that Lavinia can be her gig. "Social Creature" is at its strongest in this second mode, when it's focusing on Louise's calculations as she's backdating Facebook posts to cover her tracks and stealing the affections of Lavinia's ex-boyfriend. Its superb dialogue and cutting sense of humor help it glide irresistibly past its peculiar conflicted unrealities toward the unnerving moment when Louise has to decide whether to kill again. the English writer Ruth Ware leapt atop best-seller lists by writing psychological thrillers with the kind of burning pace "Social Creature" often has. She likes to use closed settings (a house in the woods, a cruise ship, a boarding school) to create an immediate claustrophobia, a lack of options. She uses the tactic again in the death of MRS. WESTAWAY (Scout Press, $26.99), about a young woman stranded in a castle she may or may not have inherited. Ware's heroine is the waifish Hal, "small, skinny, pale and young," who, after the death of her mother, scrapes together a solitary living by reading tarot on Brighton Pier - another side hustle! - but is nearing the edge of homelessness. Fortunately, a letter arrives announcing that she's been named in a rich woman's will. Hal, convinced that it's a mistake but hoping she might be able to shimmy a few thousand pounds out of the situation, travels to the ancient Trepassen House. There she meets the woman's three sons - and promptly discovers that the will bypasses them entirely in her favor. "The Death of Mrs. Westaway" is a bizarre book, such a straight-faced imitation of Daphne du Maurier and Wilkie Collins that though its flashbacks are set in 1994, you halfexpect a tenant to stagger to the front door of the castle and pay his rent in corn. ("We're short of coal," announces the housekeeper at one point, to which most people Hal's age would probably say "LOL," instead of meekly acceding.) It's also almost unbelievably dull and repetitive. Its jacket copy tries to sell Ware as "the Agatha Christie of our time," which is a reprehensible insult to Christie's truly unequaled narrative efficiency. Occasionally the solution in a bad thriller arrives like a St. Bernard with whisky, briefly reviving the reader. Not this time. Which brother - Harding, the pompous one; Abel, the saintly one; or Ezra, the mischievous one - wants to kill his newfound cousin? What secrets was Hal's mother keeping? You'll be able to guess, and you won't care. Ware deserves a pass for writing one bad book, but that doesn't mean you should read it. INSTEAD, READ OUR KIND OF CRUELTY (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26), by another British writer, Araminta Hall, a searing, chilling sliver of perfection about a toxic relationship that may or may not be finished. The story's telling rests completely in the hands of Mike Hayes, a rich, handsome, young London banker - who's only writing it, he mentions in a tantalizingly casual early clue, on the advice of his barrister. He chronicles his intense relationship with his former girlfriend, Verity, which revolved in large part around a game they called the Crave. Entering a nightclub separately, the two would wait until someone approached Verity, when, on her signal, Mike would roughly intervene. Now, though, as Verity prepares to marry someone else, the issue is whether, as Mike believes without reservation, they are in the midst of their most daring Crave yet, or she has actually moved on. He sees a pattern in all her actions, cruel or kind, and often it does seem to be there. But Mike is also scary. His reactions to other people are strangely mechanized (asked by a colleague to get a drink, he knows to "arrange my face into a smile and say yes") and eventually it becomes clear that he was shaped by a childhood of terrible neglect. "On the day I let them into the flat I was 10 years old and weighed 70 pounds. I was wearing clothes for a 6-year-old ... my teeth were decayed and I was infested with lice." Only Verity has ever made him feel loved. Hall, the author of two previous novels, poses a simple question: Is Verity just as crazy as Mike, or is she his victim? As the twist that shows Verity's complicity keeps not arriving, we grow uneasy, wondering if in fact all we're reading is a portrait of entwined madness and male entitlement. To a degree that's astonishing, this genre is still picking itself up from Gillian Flynn's brilliant and monumentally crucial "Gone Girl," which retaught readers to doubt everything. That doubt lingers all the way through the stunning final pages of "Our Kind of Cruelty," which may well turn out to be the year's best thriller. the patriarchy, then, is another one of those structures, like capitalism or the nuclear family, into which the thriller can slip its flexible frame. Rosalie Knecht sets out to confront all three in her gripping, subtle, magnificently written new spy novel, WHO IS VERA KELLY? (Tin House, paper, $15.95). The book is set in two timelines, the first beginning in Maryland in 1957, the second in Buenos Aires in 1966. In the latter, Vera is a C.I.A. agent, eavesdropping on politicians amid "frank talk of coups" and studying at university. In the former, Knecht carefully reveals the path that led her there, from the loss of her father to the appalling love of her mother to, perhaps most painfully, her emerging consciousness that she might be gay. She finds a home neither in a youth center (memorably situated on "a treeless waste that looked like a scalp shaved for hygienic purposes") nor later at a boarding school. The C.I.A. is her third try. "Who Is Vera Kelly?" is ultimately, like so many spy novels, about loneliness; there's an echo of Vera's sexuality in the way her profession isolates her. Knecht writes well about Argentina, and her culminating scenes, as the political sands shift and Vera realizes she might need to leave, are an exciting if fairly implausible commotion. But her book is most alive in its querying, regretful love for its main character. "I could imagine sex between women only as the final calamity in a bloody drama," she says, "a selfdestructive act of Hellenic proportions." (In "Social Creature," by contrast, it's a mere fact. How fortunate.) Knecht is the real deal. She writes beautifully - Vera, marooned in her quiet fears, watches the dawn over Buenos Aires alone, "the trees undulating softly, the birds muted and confused" - and lets us grasp in our own time that the C.I.A. will fail its charge as surely as the youth center did. Who is Vera Kelly? Nobody's business, really. This is a cool, strolling boulevardier of a book, worldly, wry, unrushed but never slow, which casts its gaze upon the middle of the last century and forces us to consider how it might be failing us still. if knecht has retro cool, Caroline Kepnes is cool right this minute - the only adult at Thanksgiving the high school cousins aren't embarrassed to hang with. A veteran TV writer, in her new novel, PROVIDENCE (Lenny/Random House, $27), she takes a huge swing, aiming to create the kind of star-crossed, decade-hopping, supernatural crime romance that bursts at all the right seams. Its beginning is both terrifically conceived and executed. Jon and Chloe are neighbors who shouldn't really be friends - he's a quiet misfit, she's the opposite - but have an intuitive connection. They meet in a shed in the woods, bonding over the show "The Middle" and the band Hippo Campus. (I had to look up if they're real. They are.) Then, one day, Jon gets kidnapped. Chloe's the last person to give up hope, and finally, after years, he suddenly reappears - handsome, strong, without any memories, and briefly a media sensation, the boy who lived. Their bond is as strong as it's always been, but when weird things start to happen around him, he makes himself leave her behind. "Does he know he's making me crazy?" Chloe wonders. "Does he know I go to sleep with makeup on in case he shows up?" Just when we're maximally invested in them, though, "Providence" loses its momentum. I've rarely been more excited to pick up a book again than I was after 30 pages of it, or more reluctant after 300. It's a technical problem: Nothing happens. Chloe keeps dreaming about Jon, Jon keeps hiding. An obsessive detective named Eggs starts to piece together a few clues about Jon. (Eggs is, ab ovo, a bad blunder, an example of the mistake non-mystery novelists so often make of having a private eye chase answers we already know.) "Providence" has so much promise that you almost want her to write it again, but this time with Jon searching more actively for the truth, and Chloe searching more actively for Jon. Still, Kepnes has an exhilarating, poppy, unexpected voice, like Rainbow Rowell after an "X-Files" binge-watch, and as all of these writers are, she's interested in how things really operate - how the big world ticks away while we're in line at Starbucks. Simone de Beauvoir mocked what she named the "spirit of seriousness" in society, the unquestioning faith we're asked to place in values and systems whose merit remains unproven. In its strongest, most thoughtful iterations, the thriller exercises the same exact skepticism. Has there ever been a time in American life when we needed it more? Charles finch's most recent novel is "The Woman in the Water."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Hal hasn't had it easy in the three years since her mother died. She's dropped out of school and taken over her mother's tarot booth on Brighton Pier, but there was never much to be made from that. Now interest on the money from a loan shark has grown to an impossible amount, and he's threatening to break her bones. So when a letter arrives on creamy stationery from a lawyer in Penzance saying she's an heir to her grandmother's fortune, Hal goes to claim it, even though she knows he has the wrong person. Yet once at Trepassen House, things take an odd turn; a photograph shows she does have connections to the family. Finding the truth, however, turns into a very dangerous enterprise indeed. Ware, who, with a run of acclaimed thrillers, including The Lying Game (2017), has established herself as one of today's most popular suspense writers, twists the knife quite expertly here. Her clues tease readers, making them think they know what will happen next, and they do up to a point. The labyrinth Ware has devised here is much more winding than expected, with reveals even on the final pages. The plotting is not completely seamless, but that is more than made up for by a clever heroine and an atmospheric setting, accented by wisps of meaning that drift from the tarot cards.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this tense, twisty modern gothic set in England from bestseller Ware (The Lying Game), Harriet "Hal" Westaway receives a letter stating that her grandmother, Hester Westaway, is dead, and that Hal is a beneficiary of her will. Hal knows there's been a mistake-her grandmother was named Marion Westaway and died two decades earlier-but the 21-year-old orphan owes a lot of money to some dangerous people, feels comfortable stealing a small sum from wealthy strangers, and decides to use the skills she's honed as a fortune teller on Brighton's West Pier to scam some quick cash. But when she arrives at the crumbling family estate in Cornwall, neither the inheritance nor the Westaways are what she expects. Moreover, she begins to suspect that her invitation was no accident. Is Hal playing the Westaways, or is she somebody's pawn? Evocative prose, artfully shaded characters, and a creepy, claustrophobic atmosphere keep the pages of this explosive family drama turning. Agent: Eve White, Eve White Literary (U.K.). (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Grieving for her mother and barely subsisting (financially or emotionally) as a tarot card reader in Brighton, 21-year-old Harriet "Hal" Westaway is jolted from her three-year melancholy to a panic state by two urgent messages: a threat from a loan shark and news of a recently deceased grandmother's bequest. Alas, family records confirm long-dead Marion-not vastly wealthy Hester-as her grandmother, but Hal, reasoning that she was invited and her plight is desperate, resolves to join the "other" Westaways at stately Trepassen Hall to ply her formidable people-reading skills, gather data, and forge inheritance paperwork. Masterfully pacing revelations of a much darker family legacy now entangling Hal, Ware (The Lying Game) credits the endearing Hal with natural perceptiveness and grit born of adversity: she is not the first Westaway to counterfeit identity for survival's sake. Adept at imparting both dread-Trepassen's surly shades-of-Rebecca housekeeper, the debt collector's malevolent goon-and charm, Imogen Church lends a rapt, compelling delivery and rich vocal tone complementing the classically atmospheric backdrop, which includes drawing-room confrontations, wheeling magpies, and locked-from-outside attic doors. VERDICT Superbly crafted, Ware's twisty tale will captivate her followers, fans of Eve Chase's Black Rabbit Hall, and seekers of character-driven mysteries. Enthusiastically recommended. ["Ware's fourth novel is her best yet, with steadily increasing tension, a complicated...mystery, and a sharp, sympathetic heroine who's up to the challenge of solving it": LJ Xpress Reviews 4/20/18 starred review of the Scout: Gallery hc.]-Linda Sappenfield, Round Rock P.L., TX © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A young woman receives notice of a mysterious bequest. Is it a case of mistaken identity, or will it reveal some truth about her family?In Ware's (The Lying Game, 2017, etc.) fourth novel in as many years, Harriet "Hal" Westaway is barely making ends meet as a tarot reader on the Brighton Pier. Her mother died in a hit-and-run several years before, and in her grief, Hal has drifted into a solitary and impecunious life. Worse still, she's under threat from a loan shark who's come to collect the interest on an earlier debt. So when she receives a letter saying she's been named in the will of, possibly, an unknown grandmother, she decides to travel to Cornwall, despite fearing that it's probably all a mistake. There she meets several possible uncles and a creepy old housekeeper right out of a Daphne du Maurier novel, all against the backdrop of a run-down mansion. As Hal desperately tries to keep up her charade of belonging to the family, she realizes that the malevolent atmosphere of Trepassen House has strong roots in the past, when a young girl came to live there, fell in love, and was imprisoned in her bedroom. Hal just has to figure out exactly who this girl waswithout getting herself killed. Ware continues to hone her gift for the slow unspooling of unease and mystery, developing a consistent sense of threat that's pervasive and gripping. She uses tarot readings to hint at the supernatural, but at its heart, this is a very human mystery. The isolation of Trepassen House, its magpies, and its anachronistic housekeeper cultivate a dull sense of horror. Ware's novels continue to evoke comparison to Agatha Christie; they certainly have that classic flavor despite the contemporary settings.Expertly paced, expertly crafted. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
