JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

Crackenback by Lee Christine

Detective Sergeant Pierce Ryder of the Sydney Homicide Squad is on the hunt for notorious fugitive Gavin Hutton.

After months of dead-ends, the breakthrough Ryder has been hoping for leads him back to the New South Wales Snowy Mountains on the trail of the suspected killer.

Meanwhile, when an injured man bursts into the remote Thredbo lodge managed by Eva Bell, her first instinct is to protect her daughter, Poppy. The terrifying arrival of Jack Walker turns Eva’s world upside down as the consequences of Jack’s presence become clear.

With a killer on the loose, Jack Walker and Ryder are tangled in the same treacherous web – spun across the perilously beautiful Crackenback Range.

Suspense novelist Lee Christine returns with her latest novel set in the Snowy Mountains — Crackenback. Split between two storylines and written in third person POV, the hunt is on for an escaped murderer deep in icy terrain.

Half of the book focuses on Thredbo lodge manager Eva, whose life is upended when former lover Jack Walker turns up on her doorstep — injured, anxious, and forcing Eva and their daughter Poppy into hiding. Notorious killer Gavin Hutton is on the lease, and Eva and Poppy are his targets.

The other chapters in the book focus on Detective Sergeant Pierce Ryder, who is hunting Gavin. As the novel flicks back and forth between these two settings, events happen concurrently and Pierce and Eva’s lives inevitably collide as Gavin Hutton draws near.

“Eva squinted harder. What was it she could see down there? It was then she realised that it was a set of footprints, partially obscured by the fresh snowfall. They were leading from her front verandah to the trail to the Willy Wagtail. Or was it the other way round?”

Strengths lie in the police procedural aspect of the book, and Ryder’s collection of evidence. We follow Pierce as he interviews witnesses and close contacts, desperately trying to piece together Gavin’s whereabouts. It’s clear that great research has gone into this aspect of the novel to ensure authenticity.

Another strength is characterisation — Christine crafts characters we grow to love. We sympathise when they struggle, and we keep reading to find out how their stories will end. Quieter moments in the book allow for the characters to face unresolved conflict, adding a layer of depth to the book.

Once again, we finds ourselves deep within an icy, cold setting. It’s the perfect read to accompany a glass of red wine. I could feel the biting temperatures and I could picture the blocked, snowy doorways. I could sense the danger lurking beyond the dark, misty outdoors.

“Eva locked the door with a violent shiver. When guests were staying, she would leave it unlocked twenty-four-seven so they had unlimited access to the mountain bikes, skis and snowboards stowed in the equipment room next to the laundry.”

The only aspect of the novel that I didn’t love was the slow pace of the Eva/Jack storyline. He bursts into her home and their setting doesn’t change much for majority of the novel. It’s really just them hiding out, and whilst it was interesting at first, I did find myself getting a little impatient — perhaps a little bored. Even Poppy doesn’t really provide much of an obstacle for their safety, and sometimes I forgot she was even in the house.

I felt like the author was trying to establish more of a romance than a thriller in this setting, and I think there was definitely capacity for both. I would’ve liked it if Gavin reared his ugly head a little earlier on the novel, pushed them out of their hiding place sooner.

“In the lobby, she watched as Jack dug in his pocket for the key and unlocked the drawer. Poppy had gone from spinning the bear in circles to wheeling the chair around the lobby like a pram. How was it that their lives had changed so much in an instant? One minute, she’d been looking forward to the snow season and happily chatting to Bede about his son’s wedding, and the next…”

High stakes and a cracking mystery right until the end, Crackenback is recommended for fans of crime and thriller, but only if you’re also interested in romance. If romance isn’t for you, then this isn’t the series for you. Fans of Christine’s previous novel, Charlotte’s Pass, will be excited to see the return of a few familiar characters.

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

Crackenback
Lee Christine
February 2021
Allen & Unwin Book Publishers

Shiver by Allie Reynolds

In this propulsive locked-room thriller, a reunion weekend in the French Alps turns deadly when five friends discover someone has deliberately stranded them in a deserted mountaintop resort.

When Milla is invited to a reunion in the tiny resort that saw the peak of her snowboarding career, she drops everything to go. While she would rather forget the events of that winter, the invitation comes from Curtis, the one person she can’t seem to let go.

The five friends haven’t seen each other for ten years, since the disappearance of the beautiful and enigmatic Saskia. But when an icebreaker game turns menacing, they realise they don’t know who has really gathered them there and how far they will go to find the truth. In an isolated lodge high up a mountain, amid a looming snowstorm, the secrets of the past are about to come to light.

Allie Reynolds’ Shiver is a compulsive, break-neck thriller set in the freezing and claustrophobic confines of the French Alps. Ten years earlier, the beautiful but bewildering Saskia went missing somewhere near the ski resort. Now, someone has brought five of Saskia’s closest friends together to find out what really happened to her.

Firstly, kudos must be given to Allie for crafting a setting that allows for so much plot within such little footprint. I love a claustrophobic setting, such as a college dormitory, or a summer holiday. It makes you feel like you’ve been squeezed in together with these characters, observing the fallout of long-repressed secrets. And in Shiver, these five characters are stuck together in this resort — no way out — until the person who brought them together finds out what happened to Saskia all those years ago.

“Saskia has her arm around me like I’m her new best friend. She smells of perfume, heady and exotic, though she wears no make-up apart from violet eyeliner that makes her eyes look even bluer.”

Each of the characters are so different, it allows for a seamless reading experience. There were a couple of times in the very beginning where I got Dale and Brent confused with each other, but once the flashbacks start refining their personalities and their backstories, the characters separate from each other as a group and become far more unique.

The book switches between present day and ten years ago, slowly revealing how Milla’s life became so entangled with Saskia’s, and ultimately, what happened the day she went missing. In the present, we’re taken on a frantic goose chase throughout the resort as someone starts forcing the five to reveal their secrets. And there are a lot of them!

“Athletes are physical people. We have all this energy and sometimes there’s some left at the end of the day. So it doesn’t surprise me that the boys did that. And I like how they did it. There was nothing leery or threatening about it; they simply put out the offer for me to take or leave.”

A lot of experience has gone into this novel. There’s considerable insight into the life of a professional athlete, and how important winning is to each of them. As a former snowboarder, Allie’s knowledge of snow and the mountains, the dangers they present, have informed the entirety of this book. There’s a lot of detail into the competitions surrounding snowboarding — the routines. But don’t let this deter you. Readers don’t need to be familiar with snowboarding, or even like it, to read this book. You’ll find yourself absorbed in the pages from the very first chapter.

I will admit that there were elements of the ending that I found predictable. Spoiler: due to the logistics of everyone’s whereabouts, and how they tended to stick together most of the time, it became clear quite quickly that none of the five were responsible for the botched reunion. It had to be someone else. From there, it was quite easy to figure out who was behind everything.

But despite that, I ripped through the pages in one day, desperate to get to the end. Shiver is intoxicating and enthralling, an instant favourite.

“When I was fourteen I got a Saturday job at the local dry slope, so I switched to snowboarding because I could ride for free. I got where I am without help from anyone. It’s part of what drives me. My way of giving Dad the finger.”

Recommended for readers of mystery, thriller and crime. Agatha Christie set in the French Alps.

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

Shiver
Allie Reynolds
February 2021
Hachette Book Publishers

The Last Thing to Burn by Will Dean

He is her husband. She is his captive.
Her husband calls her Jane. That is not her name.

She lives in a small farm cottage, surrounded by vast, open fields. Everywhere she looks, there is space. But she is trapped. No one knows how she got to the UK: no one knows she is there. Visitors rarely come to the farm; if they do, she is never seen.

Her husband records her every movement during the day. If he doesn’t like what he sees, she is punished.

For a long time, escape seemed impossible. But now, something has changed. She has a reason to live and a reason to fight. Now, she is watching him, and waiting …

The perfect thriller to devour this Summer, Will Dean’s The Last Thing to Burn follows a kidnapped woman and her desperate plea to save herself, her baby, and her captor’s latest victim. The novel charges forward at a roaring pace, exploring the evils of human trafficking.

Set in rural United Kingdom on an isolated pig-farm, the novel clocks in at just under 250 pages and is hard to put down once you’ve started. Will Dean does a masterful job of keeping tension bubbling under the surface, filling the reader with dread. Like the main character, a trafficked Vietnamese woman, we can sense how much control her ‘husband’ has over her, the danger she’s in.

The mental image of her mangled, broken angle and how it sits at 90 degrees will haunt me for some time. This injury is enough to know why she’s still there — why she can’t run. It’s enough to realise the danger her captor poses, the damage he could still do. I found myself pulling my feet close to me whenever I was reading, my anxiety growing.

“I want more pills to dull my life, but then I’ll never get out of this place and he’ll do whatever he wants. Whenever he wants. It’s a horrific balance. Numb enough to carry on but not too numb that I lose control.”

At the beginning of the novel, we come to understand that with each indiscretion that the main character commits, she has to choose one personal item to be destroyed. When we meet her in chapter one, attempting to escape her prison, she does not have many personal items left. She is down to the final few cherished items, and departing with any of them strips her of her identity, forcing her into a depressive state.

Dialogue is lean in the book, which I’m sure is a deliberate structural technique. Without too much dialogue, Will is able to establish this incredibly tense, moody setting — claustrophobic — and we’re forced to deduce elements of this woman’s story without her explicitly telling us. And for her captor, the less he says, the more terrifying he is because you don’t know what he’s thinking.

“I drink a sip of water and try to stand. My ankle has the colour and ripeness of some long-forgotten soft fruit. It feels less cohesive than usual after my walk yesterday, my failed not even halfway walk. It feels like it might crumble and fall apart if I put any weight on it.”

Written in first person, hope keeps the reader enthralled in the story. But there’s admittedly so little of it throughout the novel. She’s alone and rescue is not coming — her ‘husband’ makes sure of that. She’s secluded and it’s been so long since she’s seen family, she’s been brainwashed into thinking her actions may have consequences for her sister, who is apparently working off her debt in Manchester.

Spoiler: I wish there was more time explored on the outside of the house — the epilogue skimmed over what would’ve been a really tense escape away from the burning house and I felt a little cheated we didn’t get to experience some of that.

“And I’ll reread the letters in three weeks’ time when I get to sleep in my own room again, not mine, his, but my air, at least when he’s not barging in to watch me undress for bed or watch me sleep or watch me brush my hair with his mother’s brush.”

Recommended for readers of thriller and mystery. Room by Emma Donoghue is a good comparison title, although The Last Thing to Burn is far more violent.

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

The Last Thing to Burn
Will Dean
January 2021
Hachette Book Publishers

Tell Me Lies by J.P Pomare

Psychologist Margot Scott has a picture-perfect life: a nice house in the suburbs, a husband, two children and a successful career.

On a warm spring morning Margot approaches one of her clients on a busy train platform. He is looking down at his phone, with his duffel bag in hand as the train approaches. That’s when she slams into his back and he falls in front of the train.

Margot’s clients all lie to her, but one lie cost her family and freedom.

J.P Pomare’s Tell Me Lies is a fast-paced, high-intensity psychological thriller about a seemingly perfect psychologist, her shameful secret, and the client determined to ruin her life and expose her.

The story begins when someone deliberately sets fire to Margot’s house — what ensues is a series of deliberate attempts to unravel her life. The prose and dialogue is sleek and enticing, drawing the reader in with flawed characters, delectable mysteries and cloaked pasts, all bubbling to the surface.

The real strength of the story is plot, as it should be when writing in this genre. Readers will find themselves ripping through the chapters with eagerness, desperate to find out more. What is Margot hiding? What are her client’s hiding? With each new clue and twist in the story, the stakes rise higher and higher, threatening everything Margot has worked so hard to build.

“We’re all on the curb, one officer is talking to me, another is talking to Gabe. The children are nearby but they’ve separated us to gather statements. The window to my home office was smashed and fire fighters, I’m certain, will confirm the blaze started there. Someone threw something through the window and it set the house on fire.”

Tell Me Lies plays with structure to engage the reader. In the prologue, Margot approaches one of her clients on a Melbourne train station platform — we don’t know which client — where she deliberately pushes him onto the track, instantly killing him. Then, we’re thrust back one month to the start of the story.

Interwoven throughout the novel are media reports and interview transcripts between an unnamed prosecutor and Detective Simms, the man investigating the fire that destroyed Margot’s home. These structural elements are commonly found in thrillers and crime novels, but are a useful tactic. We’re able to find out important events within a short space of time, and interview transcripts allow us to get a glimpse into the future — we get a brief moment to try and uncover where our protagonist might end up.

“A knot appeared at his jaw, I could see a decision being made. Sparks of metal on metal behind his eyes as two opposing ideas clashed: he knew he couldn’t just wait it out, but he also knew he couldn’t risk me or anyone else getting hurt.”

Margot is an unstable character, that much is easy to spot from the outset. She’s intelligent and determined, but she’s also easily deceived. She thinks she’s sly — like sitting in a coffee shop for hours and thinking the barista won’t notice her — but she’s actually a little hopeless. She pesters the detective with her theories, to the point where she comes across as paranoid (even if her theories are right).

When she crosses ethical lines in her job, which happens a few times throughout the novel, she comes across as unlikeable, which I think might taint some readers’ opinions of her. She does get lost a little in the novel — we’re thrust into such a heavy plot, I never really felt like I grew to understand Margot. She felt a little underdeveloped for me, which made the twist at the end of the novel less impactful than perhaps intended.

“I’m engrossed, his story has taken me away from my own problems. Childhood trauma shapes so much of our adult biases; it forms the people we become. Cormac is reckless but brilliant. He’s resentful of wealth and the powers that be. I’m seeing a pattern emerging.”

Recommended for fans of crime, thriller and mystery novels. A great gift for a relative, that person in your family who rarely reads, but perhaps will read on holiday. A safe bet.

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

Tell Me Lies
J.P Pomare
December 2020
Hachette Book Publishers

The Two Lost Mountains by Matthew Reilly

Against all the odds, Jack West Jr found the Three Secret Cities but at a heartbreaking cost. His beloved daughter Lily, it appeared, was slaughtered by Sphinx in a cruel ancient ritual.

With his rivals far ahead of him, Jack must now get to one of the five iron mountains – two of which have never been found – and perform a mysterious feat known only as ‘The Fall’.

Although what is this object on the moon that is connected to it?

Amid all this, Jack will discover that a new player has entered the race, a general so feared by the four legendary kingdoms they had him locked away in their deepest dungeon.

Only now this general has escaped and he has a horrifying plan of his own…

Matthew Reilly’s The Two Lost Mountains is the sixth and second-last novel in the Jack West series, a rollicking, fast-paced, energised adventure series for adults.

In The Two Lost Mountains, the penultimate book in the series, Captain Jack West undertakes tasks and quests to hunt the labyrinth. Additionally, when the villain Sphinx steals the Siren bells that have disastrous effect on locals, Jack West races against the clock to defeat an unstoppable enemy force.

This latest installment will please loyal fans of the series. You’ll once again meet the familiar cast of characters you’ve come to love in the previous five books, and once again Matthew Reilly has thrust them into a high-intensity environment that tests their resolve.

“Jack wanted to retrieve some ancient texts and files he kept in a bio-secure vault there. In particular, he was after a collection of documents related to his very first mission with Lily, the one involving the Great Pyramid at Giza and the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.”

Readers will find themselves enthralled by the well-researched, rich history of the story, as well as the unpredictable twists on ancient mythology.

Stylistically, the plot maintains the interest of the reader. The dialogue is consistently realistic and relatable, the surprises unforeseen, and with each passing chapter the reader will find themselves enraptured by the storytelling.

“Moving quickly by the light of a small flashlight, he wended his way down several dark passageways, moving ever deeper into the ancient prison until at last he came to the innermost dungeon of the whole ghastly place.”

Admittedly, the pacing in The Two Lost Mountains could’ve benefited from being slower at times. A lot of scenes are truncated and punchy, and everything races along so fast that there’s not always enough description or details. You don’t always need this, but the novel would’ve helped to have a bit more of this embedded within.

“Lily saw the reactions immediately. A garbage truck beneath her veered off the road and slammed into a building. Cars collided on the ring road. The buses on the boulevards crashed into light poles, traffic lights and shopfronts. Lily watched in helpless horror.”

Fans of this series will be satisfied with the last installment. Now all we have to do is wait for the final one.

Recommended for fans of thriller, mystery, action and adventure. Readership skews male 14+.

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

The Two Lost Mountains
Matthew Reilly
October 2020
Pan Macmillan Publishers