Just in time for Halloween! Dan Newman’s THE CLEARING is a suspenseful story within a story. In 1976 four boys were playing the swamps and woods of St. Lucia when one of them dies. The others decide to keep the events surrounding his death secret and instead blame it on island superstition: the monster Bolum. Time passes and while lives are irreparably changed by the child’s death, life does go on.
Fast forward forty years to present day, and our hero, Nate, is returning to the island to put old ghosts to rest. However, in doing so, Nate opens up old wounds and upsets the precarious balance of society on the island. Soon he is being followed and attacked by scary men wielding sacrificed animals and vials of blood. Someone is trying to hush up the events of that night and will stop at nothing to keep Nate and anyone who helps him quiet.
I enjoyed reading this novel which read quickly and was rather thrilling. At the end things tied up pretty neatly, and I felt that Newman expounded the final conclusions a bit too much (just in case someone couldn’t figure it out on their own, I guess); however, all in all, I enjoyed this light read and kept going to the end. A little fantastic – yes. A good read for the Halloween season – yes!
I got mine as an ARC from Net Galley (Exhibit A Publishers) – thanks!
This past spring, a longtime friend suggested that I read THE BOY FROM REACTOR 4. I found it for my kindle on Amazon at a great price. THE BOY FROM REACTOR 4 is a suspenseful, action-packed mystery/thriller, which takes the reader from the US to Russia and deals with espionage, murder, and the effects of the Chernobyl disaster.
Nadia Tesler is the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, living in NYC. She is contacted by a man who says he knew her deceased father, and she agrees to meet with him. To her horror, he is shot while they are greeting each other and he whispers a somewhat garbled message to her before dying. Nadia takes off a quest to discover what he meant, find a formula worth $10 million, and find out the truth about her family and their legacy. Travelling from the US to the heart of Russia and into Siberia and the Aleutian Islands, this novel’s setting serves as a parallel to the emotions of the criminals and the bleak life for many of the people she meets and comes to know in this book. Action packed and thrilling, the action moves at a non-stop pace right until the last page.
I really enjoyed this novel! I like a good crime/mystery, and this one was easy to read and hard to put down! I’m glad my friend recommended it to me. I would love to see it as a movie, too.
Check out this clip I found on You Tube with the author discussing the novel:
I recently got two creepy, YA suspense thrillers from Net Galley. These are the type of book that I loved to read when I was in middle school! Both were re-releases from Open Road Media – thanks, Open Road and Net Galley for my copies!
“Fog” is the first in a trilogy by Caroline Cooney (who has apparently over 100 books for teens; the one I know best: “The Face on the Milk Carton”). In this story a group of Maine island teens leave their homes to attend school on the mainland. Creepy and disturbing things begin happening and one girl, Christina, fights against the evil. Who will win?
When I started “The Twisted Window” by Lois Duncan I knew it seemed familiar. I had actually read it in the 1980’s. Lois Duncan is a masterful storyteller with all sorts of YA titles to her credit, most of them scary and/or supernatural thrillers. In this one, Tracy Lloyd befriends the new guy in school and gets involved in helping him get his supposedly kidnapped sister back from his stepfather. As a kid, Duncan was always one of my favorite authors as her stories are well-plotted and paced.
Tomorrow “Beautiful Lies” comes out. I got this book as an ARC through Net Galley a few months ago. It is thrilling YA fare: identical twin sisters Alice and Rachel share everything (or do they??). When one twin goes missing, some think she’s run away, but her sister believes she’s in trouble, and she has the physical manifestations to prove it. This supernatural, creepy, at times disturbing and confusing book kept me guessing (and reading) to the last page.
I love a good YA read, and this was no exception. However (and this is a SPOILER ALERT), I was confused at times. The twins are switching identities, yet people are calling them by their other twin’s name, but not all people are; and then there is the whole what is real and what is imaginary and what are ghosts theme that was profoundly confusing at times. It’s the kind of book that I like to read twice so that I can go back and pick up clues the second time through.
All in all, a page-turner that I enjoyed!
And thanks, Net Galley and Walker Children’s Books, for my copy to review!
For my beach reading, I downloaded (on Amazon Prime’s read-for-free) “She Can Run”. (Just a note- it looks like this book is currently $1.99 on Kindle). This novel is a thriller of romantic suspense, telling the story of Beth Baker and her two young children as she is running and hiding from her pretty much insane congressman husband (another note- she is formerly widowed and the children are from her first happy marriage). Beth comes to work on a friend of her uncle’s horse farm; however, the friend has died unexpectedly and the farm is now the property of his attractive, young nephew, Jack (who is on leave from the police force after an injury). What follows is a lot of suspense and romance as Beth tries to get her life together and stay alive while her estranged husband seeks her out and a serial killer takes an interest in her.
I enjoyed this light read and found it perfect beach reading in Hawaii! I always like a character that shares my name, though the book’s Beth was far more svelte/attractive/in danger than I am! 🙂
Looking for something scary/gory/thrilling to read this Halloween? Well, thanks to the folks at Net Galley, I received a free ARC of “The Pumpkin Man” by John Everson. In this 300+ page thriller, Jennica Murphy seeks to solve the mystery of her father’s gruesome death, while coming to know her aunt’s family by marriage and the strange and horrific legacy they left behind. Stories of the “pumpkin man” have left the small, Northern California town where Jennica is staying (at her aunt’s house which she inherited) on edge. Twenty years ago a man known for his incredible pumpkin carvings was accused of killing children and summarily lynched by the townsfolk. He was Jennica’s aunt’s husband. Now the murders are occurring again, each victim horribly dismembered and with pieces of pumpkin left at the scene of each crime. Using her aunt’s substantial library on the occult and magic, will Jenn solve the mystery of who is the killer before the pumpkin man gets her?
Well, I had my highs and lows on this book. For one thing, I kept reading because I wanted to know who was the murderer and why (though I had pretty much figured it out correctly). Also, so many people got whacked in this book that I kept wondering if the heroine was going to make it to the end! Also I of course love books that occur in Northern Cal as that’s where I’m from. And I like a strong female protagonist. It was creepy and scary and I can imagine it making a great made-for-tv movie around Halloween time. Those are all the good points.
That said, I had some things in this book that didn’t work for me. For instance, near the beginning, after her father’s murder (where pumpkin pieces had been found at the scene of the crime), Jennica finds pumpkin pieces in her bedroom left by an intruder. She doesn’t bother to tell not only the police, but her roommate (!) until much later. Also, as people start disappearing or turning up dead (beheaded, gutted, etc.) or bones/skeletons/skulls/jars of eyeballs are found in the basement, Jenn and her roommate and the two new boyfriends they picked up in a bar in San Francisco discuss several times how they shouldn’t call the police because, after all, who would believe them?? Finally, they involve the police, and figure out that the murders all tie into the family’s weird past and a whole series of subterranean passages, tombs, rooms, shrines, etc. located under the aunt’s house, that may just rival the catacombs of Paris.
Everson’s writing was inconsistent at times in my opinion. At times it was solid. At other times word choice or sentence construction pulled me out of reading or even made me laugh. The murder scenes were graphic and gory, which I personally never enjoy reading. I have to say, though, I kept reading to the end!
Thanks to Net Galley and the publishers at DP for my free kindle galley copy!
