{"id":3266,"date":"2019-08-01T06:02:49","date_gmt":"2019-08-01T13:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3266"},"modified":"2019-08-01T06:04:08","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T13:04:08","slug":"hank-phillippi-ryan-the-murder-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/hank-phillippi-ryan-the-murder-list\/","title":{"rendered":"Hank Phillippi Ryan: The Murder List"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>What makes a thriller good?\u00a0 What makes one stand out from the pack of \u2013 let\u2019s be honest \u2013 the many, many books at the moment about women in jeopardy who have lost their memories or are unreliable narrators or have terrible husbands?\u00a0 Let\u2019s start with the main character.\u00a0 Lawyer in training Rachel North has none of those problems.\u00a0 Her memory is intact and her husband seems like a doll in a Red Sox cap.\u00a0 She seems reliable and balanced.\u00a0 She\u2019s just \u2013 in a situation.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thrillers need to be plotted like clockwork, without the gears showing to the reader.\u00a0 So someone as gifted as Hank Phillippi Ryan can introduce many characters onto her canvas, turn the wheel of the plot, and a previously introduced character will unexpectedly show up where you least expect it.\u00a0 Gears at work here, but not on display.\u00a0 Masterful.<\/p>\n

Rachel is in law school, married to a defense attorney, and she\u2019s been assigned as an intern to her husband\u2019s prosecutorial enemy.\u00a0 It\u2019s making things a bit frosty at home.\u00a0 She\u2019s come to law school a bit late in the game, and as the story unfolds, we learn about her job as assistant to a state senator in Boston and her time served on a jury, where she actually met her husband.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a murder which happens in Rachel\u2019s past, then circles back.\u00a0 The many threads of Rachel\u2019s life eventually knit together but as the skillful Ryan turns her narrative lens, you aren\u2019t quite sure how they connect.\u00a0 The other thing that makes a thriller great:\u00a0 an ending \u2013 in my opinion about the last quarter of the book \u2013 that\u2019s compelling, impossible to put down, and ties together the threads that have been introduced throughout the story.<\/p>\n

Ryan achieves this in spades.\u00a0 I was reading the book at work and was annoyed when lunch was over and had to set it aside.\u00a0 The ending has a surprise twist I certainly didn\u2019t see coming, and it will make the book stick with you.\u00a0 I wanted to go back and re-read it almost instantly so I could see where Ryan had so cleverly laid her clues.<\/p>\n

The other thing that made this book a standout was the legal background to the story.\u00a0 Interestingly, there’s very little courtroom stuff, it’s all the back of the house details that go on during a trial and an arrest.\u00a0 These details were beautifully rendered.\u00a0 I also felt Ryan has relaxed as a writer, and her true “voice” emerges more and more with every novel. It’s a delight to see it happen.\u00a0 This is a book by a writer at her peak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What makes a thriller good?\u00a0 What makes one stand out from the pack of \u2013 let\u2019s be honest \u2013 the many, many books at the moment about women in jeopardy who have lost their memories or are unreliable narrators or have terrible husbands?\u00a0 Let\u2019s start with the main character.\u00a0 Lawyer in training Rachel North has … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[194,44,21,14,13],"class_list":["post-3266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-forge-books","tag-hank-phillippi-ryan","tag-legal-thriller","tag-psychological","tag-suspensethriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3266"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3269,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3266\/revisions\/3269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}