I never really think of December as a spooky time of year, but author Cassandra Parkin manages to change that with her book The Winter's Child. This suspenseful novel is full of twists and turns, ghostly premonitions and ghastly visions as main character Susannah waits for her long-lost -- and possibly deceased-- son to return to her on Christmas Eve. Susannah's a frustrating main character. She's clearly grieving and needs mental help, but...
The Last Commandment, which is the first book in the Austin Grant of Scotland Yard series by Scott Shepherd, has a really great premise: a serial killer running across two continents, leaving behind murder victims who correspond to The Ten Commandments. If you're a Dan Brown fan -- all about the murder mystery mixed with Christian religious themes -- I'm going to say this one is for you, even though I've never actually read a Dan Brown novel....
I love discovering new authors in supernatural fiction, and The Voices falls perfectly into this genre. This story starts off like most haunted house novels -- a happy couple moves into a too-good-to-be-true lovely old house that turns out to be creepyAF. But that's where anything expected in The Voices ends. Right away, an unsettling feeling grows in your gut that this isn’t going to be your typical haunted house – you know, ghosts moving...
I can't believe I'm saying this, but Mexican Gothic is the latest bestseller to fall into the DNF pit. Let me start off this book review by saying that I'm not only disappointed by how much I didn't enjoy this Gothic suspense -- but I'm very surprised by it. Mexican Gothic made HUGE waves last year among bookstagrammers and book bloggers, for its book cover alone! Which is, admittedly, gorgeous. A creepy, crumbling Victorian mansion in a remote...
I uttered "What the fuck?" an unprecedented number of times while reading Bunny. That’s pretty much the only reaction you can have to this novel by Mona Awad. It's a complete What the actual eff??? ride from beginning to end. Bunny takes place at a prestigious art school. There’s a pack of hoity-toity, grad school women there who behave like middle schoolers; they roam around in a pack, affectionately calling each other “Bunny” like...
A blogger friend recommended The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires to me during one of my reading slumps. I jumped on it since I’m a big fan of author Grady Hendrix’s previous novel, Horrorstor. Also, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight enthusiast (don’t judge), I have a thing for vampires. So, I figured this Hendrix story was worth a shot.
What is The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires about? This...
Heads up, Tartlets: I tore through the The Maidens in about three days. I hadn't read author Alex Michaelides' previous novel, the mega-bestseller The Silent Patient, but when an unrequested ARC of The Maidens showed up in my mailbox, I was like, Hey, a free book. Let’s try it. This twisty, edgy psychological thriller is bound together with threads of Greek mythology and tragedy, deception and lies, and some pretty skeevy teacher-student...
The Dead Girls Club is a pretty morbid book title -- so, naturally, I was immediately drawn to it. The synopsis promised a mix of psychological thriller and supernatural suspense, so I was all "Yup, yup, that's my kind of book!" I'm not usually a fan of books that blur the line between "is this a haunting or a pyschotic break?," with a very few exceptions. However, author Damien Angelica Walters did a good job with this one. Normally, I'm all...
House of Salt and Sorrows is aptly named: there's a heck of a lot of Salt, and there's way more sorrow than necessary plaguing the Thaumas family. The more you read, the more you're like, Sheesh, hasn't this family been through enough??? Despite having more money than Pontus, the one thing they don't have is the ability to keep their women out of harm's way: in the past few years, Annaleigh Thaumas has lost her mother and four -- four! --...
Dixie Wheeler, the main character of Theme Music, is a little odd. She gets a pass, though. You would, too, if your whole family was brutally slaughtered in front of your eyes. You heard me. The prologue of this debut novel by T. Marie Vandelly is an incredibly graphic replay of when Dixie’s father pulled a Lizzie Borden on his family, taking an axe and chopping them into pieces one Thanksgiving morning. Reader, be warned. This lil' intro is...
