Happy end of 2020, readers, and happy beginning of 2021. Readers, I’ve always thought, are particularly sensitive to beginnings and endings as we encounter them all of the time in our book strewn lives. Thriller writers, too, are scholars of the opening and the denouement, expert plotters who have to ensure readers are satisfied on a practical level. Could this have really happened? What makes it believable?
As we are living in unbelievable times, I’ve chosen a few exotic books for this month—ones that don’t adhere to the girl/woman-in-peril formula. But missing persons are an element several of these books have in common; maybe that common plot device means something different in times when people are disappearing from our lives all the time, becoming less solid the longer we live in isolation from one another.
Liese O’Halloran Schwarz, What Could Be Saved
(Atria)
Schwartz’s novel follows the Preston family during two critical times: in the early 1970s, when they lived in Bangkok. Robert Preston was working for American intelligence, while his wife, Genevieve, tried to give their children an American (read: privileged) childhood, complete with ballet and horseback riding lessons conducted behind the high walls of their house. All of their wealth and position, though, could not help when the real world intruded and one of the three children goes missing. The other timeline is in Washington, DC, in 2019, when a man who claims he was the missing Preston boy suddenly appears, and his sisters are challenged with figuring out this Martin Guerre story.
Paraic O’Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands
(Tin House)
This Victorian-style mystery will make the Baker Street babes and the all-around Holmesians limp with excitement. A seamstress jumps out a high window on a snowy night and everyone is confused as to why. Then there is a message in her skin which further perplexes, as does her connection to other troubled young woman. Our hero, Inspector Cutter, along with his newly-minted sidekick and Cambridge dropout Gideon Bliss, aim to solve this mystery, and do so with considerable wit and charm.
Ashley Audrain, The Push
(Pamela Dorman Books)
Audrain’s psychological thriller about mothering and family is back in familiar territory. Blythe Connor had a cold, unfeeling mother, so she promises herself she will be the opposite with her baby daughter, Violet. But mothering is not all rainbows and unicorns, and Violet is one of those Bad Seed kids who often turn up in these books (see: Baby Teeth, You Were Meant For This, et al). Yet Blythe falls in mother love with her second child, Sam, which leaves both her and Violet surprised, confused, and angry. The Push is not suitable for baby showers or baptisms, but it is for readers who question the domestic arrangements and entanglements of contemporary life.
Una Mannion, A Crooked Tree
(Harper Collins)
Set in Valley Forge, PA, in a family with a single mother. The five Gallagher siblings are in a bickering chorus when their mother pleads for peace. The bearer of maternal anger is 12-year-old Ellen, who she drops off a few miles from home, hoping the walk will teach her a lesson. That act has repercussions way beyond that night, and our narrator, the teenaged Libby Gallagher, is both an astute observer and a sensitive soul who likes hanging out in the woods because they remind her of her dead father, an avid nature lover who gave Libby her prized possession, a guide to the trees of North America. A Crooked Tree is the debut novel of Una Mannon, and she writes a believable teenage protagonist, sharp enough to notice important details but not arrogant or insecure.
Cherie Jones, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House
(Little Brown)
As one reader trapped in the Canadian winter said, “I really, really want to read a book where people go to the beach.” I am that reader, and One-Armed Sister was the book I needed: warm, funny, a little scary, but always warm. Lala lives on Baxter Beach with her petty criminal husband, Adan, whose attempt to rob one of the mansions overlooking the beach does not exactly go as planned. There is a gunshot; and, later, the body of a pregnant woman is found on the beach. Lala, too, is struggling with her own secrets, mainly what her grandmother told her about using the tunnels and the caves to run away if the ever needs to. Is it that time?
