{"id":4796,"date":"2023-01-31T04:21:43","date_gmt":"2023-01-31T12:21:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4796"},"modified":"2023-01-31T04:21:43","modified_gmt":"2023-01-31T12:21:43","slug":"hank-phillippi-ryan-the-house-guest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/hank-phillippi-ryan-the-house-guest\/","title":{"rendered":"Hank Phillippi Ryan: The House Guest"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Awhile ago, I thought about the elements of a novel that make it a (good) suspense novel, rather than a straight mystery.\u00a0 Hank Phillippi Ryan\u2019s new novel, The House Guest, <\/em>hits these marks pretty perfectly, so I thought it would be fun to enumerate them. \u00a0The first element, to me, is \u201cupping the ante<\/strong><\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 By this I mean the main character has to have some kind of mission which is tied to a deeply felt allegiance.\u00a0 In the case of this novel, the main character, Alyssa Macallen, is a society wife who has been unceremoniously dumped by her husband.\u00a0 Because Ryan is excellent at making a reader care about her characters, you begin to care about Alyssa, as she\u2019s living on a knife\u2019s edge, unsure of which way her world will implode.<\/p>\n

When Alyssa is sitting in a bar one night she strikes up an unlikely conversation with another woman whose troubles seem worse than her own.\u00a0 There are few things more bonding than sharing your troubles with a person in a similar situation, and it\u2019s not long before Alyssa invites the woman, Bree, to stay in her guest house. There are all kinds of ways this could go south, of course, and Alyssa and Bree\u2019s story involves the next essential element, the twist<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 There are several, and they are all good ones.<\/p>\n

The next element: a seemingly unsolvable problem<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 When it becomes clear that Bill is being investigated by the FBI, Alyssa is faced with a conundrum.\u00a0 Does she cooperate?\u00a0 Does she warn Bill?\u00a0 And either way, does her life immediately degrade into utter poverty and loss? Bree and her friend \u2013 boyfriend? \u2013 Dez advise her to cooperate, but Alyssa eventually turns to an old law school buddy to help her figure out what she should do.\u00a0 Bree and Dez are still wild cards, upping the tension and suspense of the story.<\/p>\n

The next element, and I think this one is key, is specificity<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 Ryan\u2019s sweet spot (something she shares with Harlan Coben) is depicting and dissecting a certain slice of society.\u00a0 Coben\u2019s is more the middle class, and Ryan\u2019s is the upper class.\u00a0 Alyssa is a wealthy woman who moves in a rarified stratum of society, and Ryan is expert at depicting this way of life, down to wearing the right Ferragamo shoes.\u00a0 There\u2019s a scene in a country club that\u2019s absolutely delicious.\u00a0 In the future, if anthropologists want to study what upper class life was like in the early 21st century, Ryan\u2019s books are a great starting point.<\/p>\n

And lastly, there\u2019s pace<\/strong><\/em>. Can you put the book down?\u00a0 If your answer is \u201cno\u201d the author has done his or her job.\u00a0 Again, Ryan nails it.\u00a0 The House Guest <\/em>is a compulsive read.\u00a0 It\u2019s more than that as well -there\u2019s also a strong theme of female agency.\u00a0 Both Alyssa and Bree, for different reasons, are underestimated or overlooked.\u00a0 Alyssa has basically been her husband\u2019s beautiful accessory, and she\u2019s discovering that without him around, she doesn\u2019t have much of an identity.\u00a0 In a lot of ways, this novel is the story of her journey of finding both her identity and her inherent strength.\u00a0 This is another wonderful read from a master of suspense \u2013 and character.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Awhile ago, I thought about the elements of a novel that make it a (good) suspense novel, rather than a straight mystery.\u00a0 Hank Phillippi Ryan\u2019s new novel, The House Guest, hits these marks pretty perfectly, so I thought it would be fun to enumerate them. \u00a0The first element, to me, is \u201cupping the ante.\u201d\u00a0 By … 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":[194,44,615,1056],"class_list":["post-4796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-forge-books","tag-hank-phillippi-ryan","tag-psychological-suspense","tag-the-house-guest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4796","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=4796"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4798,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4796\/revisions\/4798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}