The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware

A friend loaned me this book because it has a tarot reader as a main character, and I'd just recently started reading tarot cards professionally, after having spent 25 years learning them quite thoroughly. The tarot reading is not a huge part of this book, which is mostly a thriller, and not a bad one at that. As it pertained to tarot, I thought it was perhaps unfortunate the exact take Ware decided to take, but it's not an unreasonable one. It's all about expectations from tarot reading, really.

The main character, Hal, lost her mother recently, and in order to make ends meet, has taken up her mother's role as a tarot reader on the pier of an English seaside town. She's in debt with usurious interest, and it's coming due, and her legs and life have been threatened. So, when a letter arrives about a grandmother that can't possibly be hers leaving her a bequest, she decides to see if she can con her way into a small amount of money.

Of course, when she shows up at the funeral and reading of the will, it's not a small bequest at all. It's the entire house, quite a large country estate. So Hal is caught by her lies as family secrets swirl around her, and she has to keep her own secrets while others are definitely keeping theirs - and worse, she starts to like some of the people she's conning.

Hal's a good character, by far and large. It's just too bad that she views her job, and tarot as a whole, as a con. She doesn't believe she can tell the future, so she relies on cold reading. And sure, absolutely, you can read that way. I don't think it's ethical at all, and so yeah, if that's what she's doing, there are issues. (I am terrible at knowing exactly what people are feeling while I'm reading tarot cards. I realized long ago, as a tour guide, that I often mistake deep concentration for disbelief. But then, I also tell people that I'm not psychic before I start their reading, and that I'm not there to wow them with what I know, or to tell them what their futures hold. I'm there to help them reflect on their present)

It gets strange because what Hal seems to think about tarot cards is not that far off what I think. There's no reason for her to run this like a scam. Be up front, tell people you're providing a mirror for their lives, a way to recognize patterns and understand personal stories, but that they'll be doing most of the work fitting what they know to what you're saying. But she thinks she can't say that, and so she runs it like a scam, which is frustrating, upset with herself when she pretends she can tell the future. (Also, the author tries to have it go both ways by having tarot cards whenever they come up, be uncannily accurate about situations.)

But really, that's not the focus of the book. The focus is the family Hal finds herself sort-of part of, the interactions between the three brothers who are her theoretical uncles. Hal discovers a picture fairly quickly of them as young people, with her mother there - a cousin of the family with a similar name to a daughter who disappeared many years ago. So, she's related, but not necessarily the way the lawyer's letter and the will describe. There are concerns about the money, but also about justice, and all three brothers are understandably very interested in whatever happened to their long-lost sister.

And some people don't want the truth to come to light, about the sister, about Hal, about the cousin. Some of the twists seemed a little telegraphed, but all in all, this holds together as a competent thriller set in a spooky old house in England. I'll say mystery too, because it does have some good central mysteries to be uncovered.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid

*Spoilers! Lots of Spoilers!*

I did not like this book. Nope, nope, nope. There were a few moments of genuine creepiness, but the ending squanders them all, and there are so many problems that at the end I was less intimidated by its subtle brilliance as I was angry at the book, the author, and the publisher.

It's trying to be some kind of riff on Gone Girl - not the plot specifically, but the thriller with a TWIST at the END and lots of AMBIGUITY along the way, with a WOMAN in DANGER who ends up not being in danger after all. I don't know why I felt the need to put those words in all caps, except that it feels like this was a book that was written with those as keywords and not a hell the lot else.

So, what is this book about? It's about a girl going with her boyfriend to meet his parents, all the while thinking about ending the relationship. Right? I mean, RIGHT?  Of course, the end of the book will reveal that none of this has really happened, so who the fuck cares? I certainly don't.

There are also mysterious phone calls she gets FROM HER OWN NUMBER leading up to the trip and during it. These will amount to absolutely nothing at all. Neither will the vaguely creepy parents, although there is a little more to them. But also nothing will be done with the stacked sheep carcasses by the side of the barn that left everyone who'd ever been on a farm howling with screams of "that would never happen!"  Nothing will also be done with the janitor in the creepy high school and the moment where he drops to the ground and wriggles away.

At the end, it turns out this is all nothing, a fiction written by said janitor as he (possibly high on varnish fumes), kills himself. And this is where my largest problem comes in. It is a two-fold problem.

ONE. This is not the first book where it turns out a male character in a novel with a first-person female narrator has actually been writing the story for her the whole time. The fact that I can point it out as A Thing (although Ian McEwan did it better), is getting to be annoying.

TWO. For this to work, there would have to be a damned point to the story. A pressing reason why this is the story that must be told, something at the end that makes the reader think "of course. He couldn't have written any story but this one, because this was the one that burned in his belly and needed to come out."  That is not the case. Even taken into account that the janitor is obviously deteriorating mentally, and has been for years, this is not the case. There's a difference between urgency, and trying to write like you're losing your mind without a sense of direction, or anything for the reader to latch on to.

Sure, he writes about a girl he said hi to in a bar twenty years earlier, but that is not enough to make this an urgent story! What was it about that girl (he doesn't even give her a name, or much of a personality) that makes her, in his mind, his last chance at connection, destroyed when even his fictional character rejects him? Why her, why this story, why now, why do things play out the way they do? The "rejection" also never actually happens and is pretty mild leading up to never happening.

This is more like the author throwing stuff randomly at the wall with the excuse of "crazy main character!" for why none of it ever pans out. And that's cheap, and it's cheating. Even within psychosis, there is something that matters to the person, even if it doesn't reflect reality. This is not something.

And don't get me started on all the small errors in the book that drove me absolutely fucking batty. I don't buy the excuse that these mistakes are a reflection of the guy losing it. If he was the brother he tells a story about, he did have grad-level science education, and there's no particular reason he'd lose track of a detail like telling the girl impressively that he once saw Venus without a telescope. (So has everyone, dumbass, as long as they've looked up at the night sky.) Or that you don't do a postdoc and thesis at the same time. I don't find these convincing evidence of losing one's mind. I do find them irritating mistakes that made me angry at this book on more than one occasion.

Again, if they're supposed to be signs of the character's mental decline, instead of sloppy fact-checking, what do they mean? Why are they just left there with nothing made of them? Oh wait, this is the book where nothing that happens ever really pays off.

So, yeah. I really, really, really disliked this book.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

This was touted as the "new Gone Girl" when it came out a couple of years ago. It seemed to have the same kind of popularity as a thriller that hit the mainstream hard, twisty and yet able to appeal to many readers, not just the hardcore mystery lovers. I read Gone Girl a couple of years ago, and liked it well enough, without ever falling in love with it. So then I sat down to read A Girl on the Train, and the verdict is...yeah. It's very, very much like Gone Girl.

It's a mystery/thriller with unreliable narrators and enough twists and turns to satisfy most readers. That is to say, I didn't like it more than Gone Girl, but neither did I like it any less. It's a very competent thriller. The unstable narrative voices add a nice bit of complexity, and the characters are written well enough to hang this plot on.


It's not a complaint to say that there isn't really anything more to it than that - this is written to be a mainstream best seller, and a mainstream best seller it is. It does not transcend the genre, but it is a good example of it, and I can't imagine anyone who wants to read something like this being disappointed by what they find. (I heard that the movie wasn't that good, but that's neither here nor there.)

If you read this book while it was at its peak, unlike me, a plot synopsis is probably unnecessary, but here goes anyway: Rachel is an alcoholic, despondent after the breakdown of her marriage, fired from her job, who hides this from her roommate by riding the train into London and back every day. As she passes by the house she used to live, where her former husband and his new wife still live, she concocts a fairy tale for another couple a few houses down, giving them the imaginary life she always wanted.

She also at least once gets off at her old stop, in a drunken array of intentions, and gets back on a few hours later with a wound across her forehead and a large blank spot where her memory should be, but it's not the first time she's drunk to blackout and next-day loss of memory. That also ends up being the evening when the woman she's been creating a fantasy good life for disappears.  Rachel is sure there are things she saw that are relevant, but she can't remember them all.

Then a good portion of the book is her trying to do the right thing, but cocking it all up, partially through drink, partially through trying to hide her issues from the police and suspects alike. We get to follow along as she makes assumptions about what has happened and who has done what, and I, for one, winced at a number of them, even as they made perfect sense for that character in that moment.

Of course, it turns out she does know more than she realizes, even if it's not the things she thinks she knows. Did that sentence make any sense? We whirl around this small street, through sordid affairs and bleak pasts and worrisome futures, and at the end, there are twists upon twists and the tale rockets to a conclusion.

The Girl on the Train does what it says on the back of the box. It's a very competent thriller, an easy read, a book that would be excellent for summer reading when you're looking for something you can breeze through quickly. That it does not have any great insights deeper than that is not necessarily a problem, although it will likely not last as a book of great merit.

61 Hours by Lee Child

Let's get this straight - this isn't deep. It's not literary. But when I wanted a light read at my in-laws over Christmas, this was just about perfect. It's not taxing, but neither is it the incredibly short chapters and no-mystery-at-all of a James Patterson book. In fact, Child pulled off the difficult trick of making me think that my first instinct about the bad guy was wrong, and then having it be true after all. That's a good move - the staple of J.K. Rowling, when it came to Snape.

And the misleading was subtly done. I was quite appreciative when things became more clear.

So yeah, solid thriller/mystery. Jack Reacher gets marooned in a small Midwestern town in the midst of a terrible winter, just a new prison has been built, and a local witness is under threat from a faraway drug lord. Also, there's a mystery military bunker outside of town that the bikers have set up shop outside of. Reacher ends up pulled into the world of the local police to protect retired librarian Janet Salter, whilst trying to figure out what the military built that has been so utterly forgotten, and what possible importance it could have to those occupying it now.

And again, I didn't see either of those two answers coming, but they were satisfactory when they came.

Reacher is an interesting character, and the people who populated the small town were well-written and distinct. The notion of a travelling hero is an intriguing one, and I think it worked very well in this book, although I have no idea if it's getting a bit repetitive.

I've now read the first Jack Reacher book and this one. I'll probably delve into reading more - not with any haste, but if they come my way, I'm more than happy to pick them up and devour them. Unlike James Patterson books, which have been relegated to the "thanks but no thanks" pile, which is reserved for authors I don't hate, but couldn't care less about.

And of course, the book ends on a cliffhanger, which intrigues me, but doesn't fill me with any sense of urgency to pick up the next book. It's one where the outcome is totally dependent on how the author feels about the series, and I'll probably find out eventually, but in good time. Lee Child sits solidly in the interesting, but not addictive category.

Worth Dying For by Lee Child

I enjoy the Jack Reacher books. I've dipped into the stream here and there, and I'm pretty sure I read the book right before this one, as the events he has just come from sound very familiar. And this is another fine entry. Child writes very enjoyable mystery thrillers. They aren't deep, but they are twisty, and Reacher is an entertaining hero. He gets less character time here than in some of the others, though.

It feels like his personality in this one can be summed up in one word - implacable. He's always been dogged, but it almost gets taken to a new level here - or maybe because there's so little else. Maybe it's always been that way, but it felt more obvious.

In this one, he's rather beat up. More than usual? I'm not sure. But he's hitchhiking his way across the northern Midwest, when he gets let off in a small town entirely under the thumb of one family, who does all the trucking for the farmers in the area, and enforces their will with a matched set of former football players.

Just trying to get a room, he ends up getting involved. (Naturally.) There's a domestic abuse call for the doctor, who has been told not to see to her. Reacher persuades him, and drives him, and then goes and breaks the abusive husband's nose. The abusive husband is one of the powerful family.

He can't leave town now, as the powerful family has put out the word. And everyone obeys. They have since a little girl went missing decades earlier, was never found, and the family was cleared of all suspicion.

So of course this is the kind of situation Reacher can't leave alone. He picks at it, and picks at it, leaving an impressive pile of crippled football players in his wake. He looks at the police work for the cold case. He befriends the locals. And he evades the three sets of errand boys for various mobs who have been dispatched to make sure the next shipment of whatever shady thing it is the powerful family are also shipping, along with the wheat, makes it through.

When what the shady business is is revealed, right at the end, it's difficult. While Reacher books are generally a bit hard-boiled, this one was almost too much. It makes sense with everything that's gone before, but still.

There isn't a damn thing that's new here, but it does what it does well. If you like the series, you'll like this one. If you're looking for something innovative, look elsewhere. But for a straightforward thriller, this is a competent and enjoyable one. Even if it did get a little too serious for me there at the end.