Jenny Milchman: Wicked River
Jenny Milchman’s talent for suspense is of a very high order. I read lots and lots of mysteries – obviously – but it’s rare that I read a book that makes me so squirmy I have to put it down a couple times as I read it. She reminds me of Joseph Finder, in that I had to keep telling myself that this was fiction and wasn’t actually happening.
The book opens at a lovely wedding, but of course, as any suspense fan knows, this wedding is not going to end well. In this case, it’s not the wedding that’s the problem, it’s the honeymoon. Natalie and Doug have a camping/canoeing trip planned for their honeymoon, one that takes them deep into the Adirondack wilderness.
This is a terrifically exciting novel by the always interesting Barbara Fradkin. The second in a series featuring traumatized international aid worker Amanda Doucette, the book opens as Amanda is planning a trek into the Canadian wilderness in the dead of winter, taking along “marginalized” students struggling to acclimate to Canadian culture after fleeing violent situations in their homelands. While the requirement is not that the students be foreign, merely struggling, most of them are from other countries with many Muslims being represented. Amanda’s idea is to build bridges one at a time while sharing a common experience.
Every once in a while you read a book that’s so good, you can’t look up until you finish, and it’s so clear and specific and moving that you know it’s the book the author was meant to write. This novel, set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, is indelible in every way: setting, story and character. Dionne frames her novel with Hans Christian Anderson’s tale The Marsh King’s Daughter, and opens with a woman named Helena relating, in first person, that she’s a kidnapping survivor.
Steve Hamilton’s Exit Strategy, the second book in his Nick Mason series, begins with the kind of slam-bang bravura action sequence that we’ve come to expect before the credits in a James Bond or Bourne movie. Nick must infiltrate a heavily guarded eighty-two-story building, elude or incapacitate at least a dozen Federal Marshals, eliminate a prospective witness and then escape before the big explosion. Adding to the degree of difficulty is Nick’s reluctance to kill innocent people.
Every now and then I have a teeny tiny “free reading” window—when I’m not reading books for Mystery Scene or for the store newsletter or by authors who are nice enough to come and visit us—so when I unpacked a recent shipment and found a new Michael Palmer paperback during this last such free reading moment, I practically squealed with delight. I love these books and have found that since Palmer’s death, and the pick-up of the series by his son, Daniel, there has been no let-up in quality or change in style or storytelling. Unlike his Dad, Daniel himself is not a doctor, but the medical details seem absolutely real.
While I am not very interested in the mechanics of violence—i.e., action scenes—Petrie is pretty good at them. This lean, mean, stripped down novel about an Iraqi war vet with serious PTSD grabs you from the start as he climbs under a porch to remove and subdue a large, smelly and hostile dog. It’s unclear why he’s under the porch, who the little boy on the porch is, or why exactly he has to remove the dog, but as the book progresses the whys and whos come into focus.
First of all, kudos to Ruth Ware for not calling this “The GIRL in Cabin 10”. Thank you, Ms. Ware, for writing a book about adults and referring to them as such. Second of all, I was a huge fan of her first novel, In a Dark, Dark Wood, and this one is even better. No kidding. The skills she brought to her first novel are both refined and sharpened here.
Sometimes the cultural zeitgeist affects writers even more than others, and this year I’ve read several novels addressing sexual violence and even more specifically, the rape culture that exists on college campuses. Jamie reviewed two recent memoirs, The Red Parts and Jane Doe January, involving real cases, and I was captivated earlier in the year by Allison Leotta’s The Last Good Girl. Hank Phillippi Ryan is now joining the fray with her latest, Say No More.
Anyone who has read any of Brian Freeman’s other Jonathan Stride novels set in Duluth know Stride is haunted by the death of his wife, Cindy. He’s in the present happily dating a woman named Serena but it’s been an itch I couldn’t scratch throughout the series – what was Cindy like? How did she die? (I knew she had cancer but the details were murky). What was her relationship with Stride like? Well, readers, those questions are answered at last and I could not have immersed myself more in this novel as I drank in the details of Stride’s marriage. Mr. Freeman, of course, as usual, includes a kick ass thriller on top of all this, so the book is literally impossible to put down.
The first chapter of this novel is a master class on how to kick off a gripping thriller. We meet an unnamed woman as she sneaks out of—somewhere?—we just find out it’s very cold and she has to be quiet. We join her on her escape and ultimate chase and death, caring about her more and more the more we read. In indelible strokes and in a short amount of space—only 9 pages—Castillo introduces her story conflict, brings us a character we care about and are invested in, and establishes a vivid setting. Really, if you want to write a gripping crime novel, this would be a great chapter to check out as an example. But if you’re a reader, like most of us, you’ll simply want to find out what’s next.