JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

Seven Lies by Elizabeth Kay

It all started with one little lie . . .

Jane and Marnie have been inseparable since they were eleven years old. They have a lot in common. In their early twenties they both fell in love and married handsome young men.

But Jane never liked Marnie’s husband. He was always so loud and obnoxious, so much larger than life. Which is rather ironic now, of course.

Because if Jane had been honest – if she hadn’t lied – then perhaps her best friend’s husband might still be alive . . .

This is Jane’s opportunity to tell the truth, the question is: Do you believe her?

Elizabeth Kay’s Seven Lies is a mystery thriller novel exploring two women and their incredibly complex bond. One woman’s desire to maintain their friendship quickly turns into a deadly, unpredictable obsession with frightening consequences.

Seven Lies explores jealousy, love and grief, and the thin line between devotion and obsession. The book is written from Jane’s perspective, who is an unreliable protagonist — she’s a compulsive liar and she twists events to make herself look better, so the reader is never really sure what’s true.

There is a frequent amount of foreshadowing in the novel, which successfully builds tension and anxiety and plants this seed of dread with the reader that just keeps on growing with every passing chapter. Honourable mention goes to the ending of every chapter — there’s always some plot progression or stylistic manipulation to keep the reader engaged and desperate to keep going.

“I had discovered the ring a few months earlier. Marnie and Charles were about to go on a holiday for a week. They were going to the Seychelles, I think — or perhaps it was Mauritius — and we were due to have a heatwave in London.”

Slowly, Elizabeth moves the plot towards present day so we come to understand all about Jane’s friendship with Marnie — their history — and Marnie’s marriage to the insufferable Charles.

The further we progress through the story, the more unhinged and dangerous Jane seems. But she’ll never know it. She’s conceited and self-centred, always making excuses for her behaviour. She lets her emotions control her, and she can never seem to understand her actions or what causes them.

Seven Lies is the kind of book you devour on a plane or on the beach, when you have a dedicated length of time and you’re in the right space to be sucked into a really great mystery. Is the story flawless? No, a couple of the secondary characters — including Marnie — feel like cardboard cut-outs and there’s an anorexia storyline that seems to heighten just for dramatic effect.

But Seven Lies will draw in a wide readership, and keep them hooked. Jane and Marnie don’t have a lot in common, but both of their husbands are dead. And that alone will make you want to know more.

“It had always been that way. I was loved too little and she was loved too much, and it might surprise you to know that both are equally unbearable. She was often seeking space, suffocated by being the favourite. I became her ally, her safe place.”

Jane is unapologetic. If she were an animal, I’d imagine her as a shark or a killer whale — intelligent, ruthless and quick. She thinks ahead and she plans, and she’s not about to trip up and derail all that she’s worked hard to build.

We see other characters through Jane’s perspective, so it’s hard to know if she’s giving us the entire picture. Is Charles as awful as Jane makes him out to be? Is Marnie really as naive as Jane thinks she is? Elizabeth Kay crafts a storyline and a protagonist that really forces us to doubt what we’re reading. What is the truth, and will we ever find out?

“I let myself into their flat that evening and stood again in the dark hallway. This would be my home now — just for the week, but my home nonetheless. I turned on all the lights — exactly how Marnie liked it — and made up their bed with my own sheets and pillowcases.”

Stylistically, the novel moves between past and present frequently and it’s often a little clunky. Chunks of prose will take you out of the present and to a time in Jane’s life from years earlier. And then just as quickly as we left the present, we’re back. The transitions were rarely seamless.

Additionally, and without giving too much away, I felt the ending and final climax was a little brief. The pacing of the novel is quite slow — careful, full of anticipation — but those final couple of chapters move through at speed. It’s unexpected, and doesn’t feel like a natural conclusion.

An impressive, whirlwind debut. Recommended for fans of crime, thriller and mystery novels.

Thank you to the publisher for mailing me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Seven Lies
Elizabeth Kay
April 2020
Hachette Book Publishers

Deep Water by Sarah Epstein

A gripping mystery about a missing boy and a group of teenagers, one of whom knows something but isn’t telling.

HENRY WEAVER IS MISSING
Three months ago, thirteen-year-old Henry disappeared from The Shallows during a violent storm, leaving behind his muddy mountain bike at the train station.

MASON WEAVER IS TRAPPED
While Mason doesn’t know who he is or what he’s capable of, he knows the one thing binding him to this suffocating small town is his younger brother, Henry.

CHLOE BAXTER WANTS ANSWERS
Why would Henry run away without telling her? One of Chloe’s friends knows something and she’s determined to find out the truth.

As Chloe wades into dangerous waters and Mason’s past emerges, a chilling question ripples to the surface: how far would you go to keep a secret?

Sarah Epstein’s Deep Water is a young adult thriller novel set within a small town in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. The residents are reticent, the past is full of secrets, and the truth about a young boy’s disappearance is about to come out.

Deep Water captures a claustrophobic setting. Set in The Shallows NSW, the atmosphere of this small town is incredibly crowded and confined, making you feel like you’re trapped along with the characters. Stylistically, this helps build tension throughout the book, because there is nothing you can do but wait for secrets to reveal themselves.

Structurally, the book shifts between character POVs but also between ‘before’ Henry went missing, and the present. Over time, we come to understand just how hard life was — and is — for Mason and his younger brother. Their mother Ivy is an alcoholic, and she’s often violent, and Mason is left to pick up the pieces.

Deep Water illustrates the notion that you never really know what’s happening behind closed doors. People suspect, but no one in The Shallows really knows how violent Ivy is when she’s alone with Mason and Henry.

“Where the hell was Henry? Surely he’d heard their mother throwing her guts up. Would it kill him to attempt the clean-up himself for once? It’s not like he hadn’t watched Mason do it a hundred times.”

When I compare this with Sarah’s previous novel, YA thriller Small Spaces, I recognise an incredible difference in how Sarah reveals clues and red herrings. When reading Small Spaces, I felt there was too much foreshadowing and the plot was a bit predictable, but with Deep Water, I felt surprised and expectant the entire length of the novel. I had theories that all turned out wrong, I had suspicions that weren’t plausible, and when I came to the ending I genuinely felt satisfied with how the storyline was wrapped up.

Sarah implements the unreliable narrator incredibly well in her novels, particularly in Deep Water with the characters Mason and Chloe. Both are very different — Mason is the rebellious, misunderstood brother of Henry who Chloe suspects might’ve had something to do with Henry’s disappearance. Chloe is stubborn, relentless and refuses to let the mystery fade from people’s minds. Truthfully, she’s kind of annoying, but she’s meant to be. She doesn’t want Henry’s disappearance to remain unsolved for any longer. She hunts down clues until she discovers the truth about what happened the night that Henry went missing.

“Both of Tom’s parents were still around back then, before the court case and his dad’s prison sentence, before his mum fled to Queensland, promising to move her son up with her when she was in a position to do so. That never happened.”

The storm, and the constant mention of water, is symbolic of the pacing in the novel. Everything happens fast, quick and without pause. As the reader, you almost feel like you’ve been taken on a ride and there’s no chance of getting off before the end.

Identity and purpose are strong themes in the book. How well do these teenagers really know their friends, or even themselves? Some of them feel stuck in The Shallows, with no way out of the town. Some feel indebted to others, forced to stay to help their family or their friends. Each character has to learn to understand where they want their life to lead, and that can be a really hard thing to do when you’re also trying to solve a disappearance.

“Henry confided in me. I knew all about the accidents and the arguments, the lean weeks when they could barely afford milk and bread. I was aware of the smashed glassware and missed birthdays, how their power was cut the same week Ivy bought a fancy display cabinet for her collectable plates.”

Admittedly, there are a lot of characters to keep up with in this town. And it’s not just the characters, but their families and their relations and as the truth starts to unravel and you realise just how people are connected to the truth, I’ll admit it got a little confusing. Sometimes it felt like there should’ve been a smaller core cast of characters to allow for a more cohesive plot.

Gripping, suspenseful, engrossing and chilling, Deep Water will have you hooked from the first chapter. Recommended for readers aged 14+

Thank you to the publisher for mailing me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Deep Water
Sarah Epstein
April 2020
Allen and Unwin Book Publishers

Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin

Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister Alison vanishes from the luxury resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X on the last night of her family’s vacation. Several days later Alison’s naked body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men, employees at the resort, are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. It’s national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved, but for Claire’s family there is only the sad return home to broken lives.

Years later, riding in a New York City taxicab, Claire recognizes the name on the cabbie’s licence, Clive Richardson – her driver is one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. The fateful encounter sets her on an obsessive pursuit of the truth, not only what happened on the night of Alison’s death, but the no less elusive question of exactly who was this sister she was barely old enough to know: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation. As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will uncover the truth, an unlikely intimacy develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by a tragedy.

Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin is a haunting crime novel about a young girl’s mysterious death and how the unsolved case still torments her sister eighteen years later. The book explores grief, family, sisterhood, and illustrates how our perceptions of someone — or our understanding of them — can be inherently misguided.

Claire was seven years old when her sister Alison died on a family holiday to the Caribbean. Her body was found in a nearby cay, but the crime remains unsolved. She’s haunted by the mystery, and she soon becomes obsessed with who her sister was, and what happened to her on that final night of their family holiday.

“The island is turned upside down with searching. Members of the civil service are given days off to join the search. Prop planes loaned from a larger island nearby scan the shallow seas. The lagoon into which, mere days ago, Alison watched the blond boy hit golf balls is trawled to no avail.”

Saint X plays with the concept of voyeurism. Claire thinks she knows her sister — she thinks she understands her. Until she dies, and she realises she never really knew her at all. When she’s older, she starts reading Alison’s diary from the time she died and Claire realises how complex and complicated her sister was.

The novel is multi-layered; it’s not just about Alison’s death. It’s also about social dynamics and human relationships.

Saint X explores Claire’s obsession with her dead sister, and how oblivious she is to her own obsession. The book also explores white privilege and wealth, because the two men who were suspected of killing her were both men of colour. We come to understand how their lives were affected after they were falsely accused of murdering Alison. Life was not kind to them in the wake of their interactions with Alison.

“The eleven-year gap between Alison and me is notable, and requires some explanation. I was not an accident, nor had my parents been trying for years to conceive again…those were her exact words: ‘We decided to have you.’ As if they had known, when they chose to have another child, that the child would be me.”

The pace of the novel is incredibly slow — snail’s pace. Claire weaves in and out of stories really abruptly, but also over-explains and indulges the reader in excessive description. Most of the time, this felt unnecessary and it just felt like Alexis was trying to prolong the story. It’s actually kind of incredible how there’ll be a chapter where nothing really happens and Alexis has managed to draw that out over thousands of words.

Saint X does a fantastic job of highlighting the media and the general public’s obsession with true crime and the murder of young women. After Alison’s death, the media feed off the mystery and there is even a true-crime documentary series created about the mystery. It doesn’t help Claire’s family cope with the tragedy and it doesn’t help the two men suspected of her murder move on with their lives.

“At some point, my father must have taken the rolls of film from our vacation to be developed, because a few months after our move to Pasadena I found the photographs in his home office, in the back of his desk drawer.”

Whilst engrossing at first, Saint X flounders throughout. Truthfully, I don’t think that the ending to this novel is explosive or thrilling enough to warrant such a slow-paced story. If I’m being perfectly honest, I thought this book was okay, but not amazing.

Crime readers will be disappointed with this. Literary readers will probably love the deep characterisation and the slow burn of the plot. I’m not sure any reader will feel satisfied with the ending.

Thank you to the publisher for mailing me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Saint X
Alexis Schaitkin
March 2020
Pan Macmillan Publishers

The Holdout by Graham Moore

One juror changed the verdict. What if she was wrong? ‘Ten years ago we made a decision together…’

Fifteen-year-old Jessica Silver, heiress to a billion-dollar fortune, vanishes on her way home from school. Her teacher, Bobby Nock, is the prime suspect. It’s an open and shut case for the prosecution, and a quick conviction seems all but guaranteed.

Until Maya Seale, a young woman on the jury, persuades the rest of the jurors to vote not guilty: a controversial decision that will change all of their lives forever.

Ten years later, one of the jurors is found dead, and Maya is the prime suspect.

The real killer could be any of the other ten jurors. Is Maya being forced to pay the price for her decision all those years ago?

The Holdout by Graham Moore is a legal thriller that moves between two storylines and two different time periods — present day, and 2009.

Eleven years ago, Maya Seale convinced the rest of the people on her jury that the man accused of killing fifteen-year-old Jessica Silver — African-American high school teacher Bobby Nock — was actually innocent. When they let him go free, what resulted was ten years of targeted hate, disbelief and shock from the public.

In the present day storyline, one of the jurors — Rick — brings all of the jurors back together for a Netflix true crime television show. He says he has new evidence that will prove the man they thought was innocent actually did kill Jessica Silver. Maya starts to doubt the decisions she made in 2009.

“Nineteen years old at the time of the trial, Lila Rosales had been the youngest member of the jury. She had been in beauty school back then, and Maya had once marvelled at how much effort it must have taken to prepare her immaculately made-up face every morning. Now, Lila looked worn.”

Wrapped in legal investigations, The Holdout is gripping and keeps hold of its reader until the very end. It explores the U.S justice system and racism in America, building tension with each passing chapter.

Structurally, the book soars above its competition. The flashbacks are placed at opportune moments to ensure the pacing or the tension never wavers, and the plotting allows for an engaged and entertained reader. The Holdout will please all readers.

The chapters move between different characters, allowing readers to get a full glimpse at the past events that defined them all, and how their ‘not guilty’ verdict changed the course of each of their futures.

“She knew that he was looking for anything in her appearance — an unexplained bruise, a tear in her blouse — that could be of use later. There wasn’t much for him to work with. Maya was disappointingly presentable.”

Media scrutiny is a huge element to this book. After Maya and her fellow jurors help release Bobby Nock, they’re subjected to the wrath of the disbelieving public and media. Some of them struggle to find work, and even one decade later, Maya’s name is recognisable to strangers.

The characterisation for each of the core cast is multi-layered and complex. Maya, who is now a criminal defence lawyer, has moments of doubt over her decisions a decade earlier, but ultimately, she still feels confident that Bobby Nock is an innocent man and somebody else is responsible for the disappearance of Jessica Silver.

Each character is flawed, so when Rick ends up dead in Maya’s hotel room, all of them could’ve done it. Quite a few of the jury had things to gain from Rick’s death.

“Lined by tall bushes and lit only by infrequent street-lamps, the hidden staircase to the next hill provided decent cover. She could see a bigger, better-lit street up ahead, at the top. She wasn’t being followed. What roaming camera crew had found her car, they could stake it out for weeks.”

With sharp, unexpected twists and unforeseen secrets revealed throughout the book, The Holdout is unique enough to entertain even the most disinterested of audiences.

Recommended for readers of crime, thriller and mystery novels. The premise is unique and the characters three-dimensional — the crimes themselves will have you guessing until the final chapter.

Thank you to the publisher for mailing me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

The Holdout
Graham Moore
March 2020
Hachette Book Publishers

The Museum of Desire by Jonathan Kellerman

ONE WILD PARTY. FOUR COUNTS OF MURDER.

A mansion in Beverly Hills is leased out to host an event wild enough to herald the end of days.

The next day there isn’t a living soul to be seen.

But in the driveway sits a super-stretch limo, unlocked, with four bodies inside it. Nothing links the victims together. Each has been killed in a different way.

Now it’s up to brilliant psychologist Alex Delware and LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis to begin their grisliest and most baffling case yet.

As they struggle to make sense of the mass slaying, they will be forced to confront a level of evil that nothing can prepare them for.

The Museum of Desire by Jonathan Kellerman is complex crime fiction that investigates five victims found in a chauffeur car in the backyard of a rental mansion, with no solid connection between any of them.

Jonathan Kellerman is skilled at presenting a unique premise and crime scene, and drawing the reader in without giving too much away. I was swept up in the misery and truly couldn’t guess the killer; I found myself surprised by the twists of the novel. There are enough clues laid down that make the killer plausible, but not too many that you can guess the character. That’s really hard to accomplish in crime fiction.

There were many layers to the crime — the five victims who, in the first instance, don’t seem to have a connection with each other, and also the significance of the Beverley Hills rental property where their bodies were found. Kellerman weaves through each complexity with appropriate pacing and attention, so the reader doesn’t feel too overwhelmed with how quickly the plot is moving.

“Mary Jane Huralnik, fifty-nine years old. Much younger than I’d thought. She’d looked elderly for a decade of progressively sadder mug shots. No felony arrests but plenty of misdemeanours up and down the state over a thirty-year period.”

Whilst the premise and the crime are intriguing and will interest readers, there are too many players involved for the storyline to be succinct and easy to follow.

Firstly, there are two main detectives and five victims. After the first few chapters, I started mistaking the victims for each other and couldn’t keep track of who was who. And for each victim, there was a family member or two being interviewed, a suspect or two, and then eventually we get to a convoluted conclusion regarding the culprit.

Whilst I found the conclusion surprising and satisfying, it was also very complex and messy and hard to understand, even for a seasoned crime reader.

“Nothing remotely nasty in either woman’s background. Perfect driving record for McGann’s five-year-old Nissan Sentra, Bauer had gotten a few speeding tickets in her Porsche Panamera GTS. The 101 North. Heading home in a hurry.”

What lets this book down is its complete lack of prose or internal monologue. The book is 99% dialogue, and even in a crime book that’s too much. I got no real sense of the detectives’ personalities or their state of mind, particularly the protagonist Alex Delaware.

The book is written in first person, and yet, there was no voice. There were no emotions or thoughts, it was just dialogue and action and when there are five victims, even that gets confusing at times. Truthfully, I felt the writing was really weak. The crime is interesting, and the pacing is well down, but the writing lacks any voice or characterisation. Kellerman just moves through the motions of a crime story without any real depth or care for the characters and their development.

“Nothing on knife-attack victim Contessa Welles but the computer was more than happy to tell me who owned the house on Clearwater.”

People who read crime novels and only crime novels? They’ll love this. It’s all about the plot and procedure and plot and procedure, and, more plot. But people who dip in and out of crime like me? People who are also looking for some depth to the characters? Maybe skip this one.

Thank you to the publisher for mailing me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

The Museum of Desire
Jonathan Kellerman
February 2020
Penguin Random House Publishers