Book Review: "This Town Won't Tell" by Rhodi Hawk

Damn, this was soooo good! This was a twisty, gritty, slow-burn thriller that felt a bit like a mashup of S.A. Cosby and Rachel Caine, yet with its own unique power and an unforgettable main character.

Ever since Janey’s mom died when she was young, her life has been messier than most. She drifted from foster family to foster family and did a stint in juvie, where she gave birth to a daughter, Em. After her release she married the baby’s father but they eventually divorced and he was able to keep their house.

Now a recovering alcoholic, her ex has a restraining order against her, which makes sharing custody a challenge. She works as a waitress at a Montana roadhouse (which no longer has a road) and is determined to give Em a better life than she had.

One night she goes to confront her ex for not taking Em to school. She plans to break into his house and frighten him with her cousin’s gun. But she gets caught by a corrupt lawyer, who threatens to turn Janey in for violating the restraining order, which means she’ll lose custody of her daughter. She gets blackmailed into a “one and done,” making a drop under a bridge.

Of course, the blackmail continues far beyond just one time. When she finds out that her cousin used to do the drops and he got murdered, she realizes she’s in trouble. What follows is a tangled web of small-town corruption, violence, and enemies she can’t uncover. Will she survive and get her life back, however bleak it is?

Janey was such a terrific character—tough yet vulnerable, wanting a better life but feeling powerless to change things. I loved the small-town Montana setting and all of the twists Rhodi Hawk threw in. I’d love to see what’s next!

Book Review: "Five" by Ilona Bannister

“Someone will die here this morning, at this suburban train station. It will happen in the next five minutes when the 7:06 to London Victoria arrives.”

So begins Ilona Bannister’s new thriller, which was utterly fascinating. We get a first-hand look at a chaotic morning at a train station, which will end in someone’s death. We don’t know who will die but we assume we know how it will happen.

The book introduces us to five people. There’s Emma, a woman whose life has totally been upended by her sociopathic young son, Gideon. He throws a temper tantrum while waiting for the train and Emma is unable to control him, which makes her an object of judgment by others in the train station.

There’s Sonny, a handsome and impeccably dressed young man, who is seriously addicted to gambling. Matilda is a cantankerous old woman whose anger masks the difficult life she has had. And then there’s Liam, a business manager who appears to know Emma and Gideon but seems to incur their wrath.

While we wait for the train to come into the station and end one of the five people’s lives, the book gives us each of their stories. We don’t have to rest on generalization; we know what each person is struggling with and what brought them to the train station today.

This was so compelling. The narrator invites you to think about who will die, but also who you think deserves to die. We see how flawed each person is, what made them tick, and what are their redeeming qualities. While some of the backstories dragged a bit, I really thought this was a fascinating read.

Book Review: "Lucky Day" by Chuck Tingle

What an utterly creative, chaotic, gruesome, and thought-provoking book this was! Horror is definitely not my preferred genre but Chuck Tingle writes books that are so complex, even as they gross me out at times.

“There are billions and billions of paths for us on any given day, and we certainly remember the ones that lead to something like a brutal car crash. We think to ourselves, Why me? How did I get so unlucky? The problem is, we have absolutely no idea how many times we’ve missed one of the infinite tragic routes, ducking and dodging butterflies left and right. Every day, we never know the billions and billions and billions of car crashes we’re not in.”

Four years ago, Vera, a statistics and probability professor, was celebrating the publication of her first book. It was a fun occasion which was marred by Vera’s coming out to her mother during the brunch. They fought and her mother ran out of the diner. And then disaster struck.

In what would become known as the Low-Probability Event (LPE), eight million people across the world all were killed on the same day, each death more random and bizarre than the next. People shepherding a giant balloon were strangled by its ropes. Someone was killed when a costumed chimpanzee threw a typewriter at them. While Vera escaped death, everyone she cared about was killed.

Vera retreats into her grief for four years, because nothing matters to her anymore. Then she is visited by Special Agent Layne, part of a government agency investigating the LPE. She reluctantly agrees to help Layne once he reveals they’ll be investigating a mega-casino in Las Vegas, where the odds seem strangely in the gamblers’ favor. What they discover, however, is truly eye-opening, and Vera must decide if she cares enough about the world to save it.

There’s a lot of graphic descriptions of death in here, so if that is triggering, this is probably not the book for you. At the same time, this book was shockingly emotional at times, which really made it so much more than a horror story.

Book Review: "The Liz Taylor Ring" by Brenda Janowitz

When a family heirloom surfaces unexpectedly after a number of years, three adult siblings have very different ideas of what to do with it in The Liz Taylor Ring.

Lizzie fell in love with Ritchie when she was 16, when he was dating her older sister. And when they met again 9 years later, the two fell hard for each other and got married.

Through the years, their marriage is tested, particularly because of Ritchie’s serious gambling addiction, and that even causes them to separate for nine months at one point. To win her back, Ritchie gives Lizzie an 11-carat diamond ring, similar to the even larger ring that Richard Burton gave to Liz Taylor. Through the years, the ring symbolized the strength of their love, even through all of the ups and downs.

At some point, the ring disappeared, and each of their children believes something different happened to it. And then when the ring resurfaces in an unexpected place, all three siblings come together (a rarity) and try to decide what to do with the ring. Addy, the oldest, believes she’s entitled to keep it; Nathan, dealing with his own marital issues, sees the ring as a memory of their parents’ enduring love story and he feels like he's the only one who truly understood their relationship, so he should get to keep it; and Courtney, the youngest and a gambler like her father, wants to sell the ring to help her out of debt.

The story shifts back and forth between Lizzie and Ritchie’s love story and the present. Along the way, the siblings realize there’s a lot more to their parents’ lives—and the ring—as secrets and lies are uncovered.

You know I’m all about the family drama, so I enjoyed that aspect of this story, and I liked the dual timelines. However, I’m always a little frustrated when problems could be solved if people just communicated, but isn’t that just like life?