Hank Phillippi Ryan: The House Guest
Awhile ago, I thought about the elements of a novel that make it a (good) suspense novel, rather than a straight mystery. Hank Phillippi Ryan’s new novel, The House Guest, hits these marks pretty perfectly, so I thought it would be fun to enumerate them. The first element, to me, is “upping the ante.” By this I mean the main character has to have some kind of mission which is tied to a deeply felt allegiance. In the case of this novel, the main character, Alyssa Macallen, is a society wife who has been unceremoniously dumped by her husband. Because Ryan is excellent at making a reader care about her characters, you begin to care about Alyssa, as she’s living on a knife’s edge, unsure of which way her world will implode.