It comes as no great revelation that when it comes to psychological domestic thrillers, it's all about THE BIG TWISTS THAT SHOULD LEAVE YOU SPEECHLESS......OR AT LEAST ABLE TO SCREAM OUT, "WHAT THE **** DID I JUST READ?!!"
Here's a brand new new one fresh off the presses, and one that's been around for awhile......
A Slow Fire Burning (2021) is Paula Hawkins' eagerly awaited new nail-biter after she set the thriller lists on fire with "The Girl On The Train"......
This one features a small cast of suspicious characters who may or may not have something to do with the brutal murder of an obnoxious young guy living on a houseboat.
Principal among this gang is Laura, a young trainwreck damaged both physically and emotionally.....(but like the woman in "The Girl On The Train", you can't help but root for her......)
Therefore we turn our attention to the less appetizing of the suspects......Carla, the dead guy's niece with a strange tragic backstory of her own and Miriam, the busybody neighbor pokin' her nose in everybody's beeswax.......(and you'd better believe Miriam's holding on to even sicker secrets than the other two women.
So whodunit and why? Of course, that's for you to figure out, dear reader.......and if you gravitate to this kind of thriller, it's convoluted and twisty enough, with enough surprises sprinkled through it to keep you turning the pages.
For us, the book lacked that immediate Hitchcock-like vibe of "The Girl On The Train" that riveted readers and sent it to the top of charts and and a movie deal. We found this one just...uh...okay at best, a 3 star (***) time passer if you're stuck on a long plane flight.
The Other Woman by Sandie Jones (2018) was strictly an impulse grab off the library shelves we wandered through on a lazy, rainy afternoon.
Maybe we snagged it because its premise, compared to the labyrinthine plots of other thrillers, sounded incredibly simple and direct.......
Girl meets new Hot Boyfriend.......Girl Fall For Hot Boyfriend.......Girl falls afoul of Hot Boyfriend's Mother-From-Hell.......Mother-From-Hell gaslights Girl but Hot Boyfriend won't believe his Mum's a Mother-From-Hell.
And that's basically the book, with very few detours, unless you count the Girl's forbidden flirtation with the Hot Boyfriend's kinder, gentler brother.
The major problem in hooking a reader here is our poor gal Emily, who spends the entire book enduring a whole lot of duplicitous crap from the Mother-From-Hell, as well as nasty temper flareups from the Hot Boyfriend she's supposedly head over heels in love with.....
Which leaves us wondering why she doesn't kick both the awful Mom and her not-so-hot son to the curb long before the story lurches to its climax......(never a good look when an author's trying to generate sympathy for her....)
But hold on the the very end, because author Sandie Jones delivers an outrageous whopper of a 'YOU GOTT BE ****IN' ME' TWIST.
We're still not entirely sure that twist is in any way believable for a minute, but we stood properly awed by the sheer audacity of it........and shook our head in laughing admiration.
It's also a much faster and overall more entertaining read than the grim "A Slow Fire Burning", so we'd say it's a better recommendation for that long plane flight, (or a few cozy Fall nights at some.....4 stars (****).
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