Title: Beside Myself

Author: Ann Morgan

Genre: Psychological Thriller

Age Group: Adult (18+)

Rating: DNF

Purchase: Amazon

Review copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Beside Myself is a literary thriller about identical twins, Ellie and Helen, who swap places aged six. At first it is just a game, but then Ellie refuses to swap back. Forced into her new identity, Helen develops a host of behavioural problems, delinquency and chronic instability. With their lives diverging sharply, one twin headed for stardom and the other locked in a spiral of addiction and mental illness, how will the deception ever be uncovered? Exploring questions of identity, selfhood, and how other people’s expectations affect human behaviour, this novel is as gripping as it is psychologically complex.

Beside Myself is my first DNF in… probably forever. Usually I struggle through a book, no matter what, and I keep on going. But here, I just couldn’t. Several things worked against this book, and I’ll list them all below. I did read the ending just to see where it would lead (I had half-expected that end) but I quit after fifty pages.

Let’s start with the good. The plot is unique, and original. Two twin sisters, one the leader, the other the follower, and they switch positions. Helen becomes Ellie and Ellie becomes Helen. Except when the joke is over, Ellie doesn’t want to switch back, and Helen is stuck taking on the role of Ellie, who everyone laughs at, who is slow, who Mom is always angry at. With Mom’s new boyfriend coming into play, things don’t get easier for Helen either, and no one seems to have a clue that they switched places. Even when she tells them, no one believes her.

The book alternates between present and past. In the past, we see Helen and Ellie as they grow up. In the present, Smudge, as Helen has started calling herself, lives the life of an addict. Everything she knows has fallen apart. Meanwhile, Ellie – posing as Helen – has become quite famous.

A lot of people loved this book, and I understand why. The plot is unique, and the author’s writing is descriptive and lyrical. It’s just not for me.

On to the bad. First of all, the writing style. I’ve seen descriptions that run several paragraphs long in this book and before I figured out what the author was trying to say, I was almost a page further. It’s page after page filled with these descriptions that are beautiful writing but significantly slow down the narrative. I had to skim pages just to find the plot, it was hidden under so many descriptions.

Next up, the story. It annoyed me to no end. I had to stop reading primarily because of this – my heart beat was going way too high, and I was ready to pull my hair out. I was so annoyed at EVERYONE in this book. At the mother figure in particular. How can you not tell your own children apart? And then, with that ending, I hated her even more. I was annoyed with the way everyone treated Ellie and later Helen. If a child, part of a twin set you can’t keep apart, keeps saying she’s not the twin you think they are, then someone, at least one adult, will grow concerned. It would be so easy to fix this! Blood testing. DNA. Handprints. Or if Ellie is really so slow as the book wants us to believe, have them both do a test and see how the scores work – in that scenario, Helen would’ve done a lot better than Ellie.

Poor Helen. I felt so sorry for her. She was so helpeless, and this annoyed me so much. I was going to freak out if I kept on reading, because the scenario made no sense. Not even Helen’s friends recognize her? Some friends they are. It’s very hard to believe no one will figure it out.

Also, a thriller? I don’t really see any thriller aspects in the book. It’s mostly about mental health, and Helen’s struggle.

Ultimately, a lot of people liked this book (just check the Goodreads reviews, lost of 4 and 5 stars) but I couldn’t finish it. It annoyed me too much, and I don’t want to waste my time reading a book that annoys me to no end.

Title: From The Cradle

Author: Louise Voss and Mark Edwards

Genre: Thriller, Mystery

Age Group: Adult (18+)

Rating: 2 stars

Purchase: Amazon

Review copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

The first child was taken from her house.
The second from his mother’s car.
The third from her own bedroom…
When Helen and Sean Philips go out for the evening, leaving their teenage daughter babysitting little Frankie, they have no idea that they are about to face every parent’s greatest fear.
Detective Inspector Patrick Lennon is hopeful that the three children who have been abducted in this patch of south-west London will be returned safe and well. But when a body is found in a local park, Lennon realizes that time is running out—and that nothing in this case is as it seems…
Blending police procedural with psychological thriller, From the Cradle will have every parent checking that their children are safe in their beds…then checking again.

I’ve never read anything by this author duo before, nor, do I believe, from any of the authors seperately. I went in with an open mind, not expecting much, which ended up being a good thing because the book really doesn’t offer that much either. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good mystery, but the writing is so-so and there are too many coincidences, I knew who was the culprit from close to the start, and I just couldn’t really connect with the characters.

First thing’s first, the plot. Three little kids get abducted within a week. Helen and Sean Philips, the parents of the latest abducted child, Frankie, had left their toddler in their teenage daughter’s care while they went out for dinner. When they came back, the toddler had vanished. Now it’s up to DI Patrick Lennon and his team to find out who kidnapped the children, if the kidnappings are connected, and to, hopefully, bring the kids back to their parents alive and well.

When you say psychological thriller, I hope a book will be scary. Or at least slightly unnerving. With kids going missing, you’d think it would be a no-brainer that it would be frightening, or at least a little chilling…It’s not. And I blame most of that on the story and the characters. The story is all right, but it relies too much on coincidences. The teenagers are cliché too, and in such a way that they don’t come across as realistic anymore, especially Alice’s friends and Jérome. The adults don’t fare much better. The book is told from the POV of a lot of different characters, which makes it almost impossible to connect to any of them. We switch from Helen’s POV (mother of the abducted kid) to DI Lennon’s POV, and if it would’ve stayed with that, maybe it would’ve worked. But then we also get the POV of DI Winkler (the worst cop in history), and some other POVs thrown in (Jeromes, Larry’s at some point) and it just doesn’t add up. All those characters, and not a single one I could connect with.

Then there’s the plot. It’s all kinds of unbelievable and over the top, and it’s way too coincidental. I’m willing to believe a few coincidences, but this? No thanks.

Also, the writing style annoyed me. It focused on trivial matters way too often when heart-breaking, emotional events were going on. Some of the descriptions are so irrelevant I think they should’ve been cut. They slow down the pacing immensly too.

I wouldn’t recommend this book. I read it to the end more to satisfy my curiosity than anything else, but it’s a dissapointing read. The only good thing about it was DI Lennon, who seems a deent enough cop.

Title: The Killing Lessons
Author: Saul Black
Genre: Thriller, Suspense
Age Group: Adult
Rating: 3 stars
Purchase: Amazon
Review copy provided by hte publisher in exchange for an honest review.

When the two strangers turn up at Rowena Cooper’s isolated Colorado farmhouse, she knows instantly that it’s the end of everything. For the two haunted and driven men, on the other hand, it’s just another stop on a long and bloody journey. And they still have many miles to go, and victims to sacrifice, before their work is done.

For San Francisco homicide detective Valerie Hart, their trail of corpses – women abducted, tortured and left with a seemingly random series of objects inside them – has brought her from obsession to the edge of physical and psychological destruction. And she’s losing hope of making a breakthrough before that happens.

But the slaughter at the Cooper farmhouse didn’t quite go according to plan. There was a survivor, Rowena’s 10-year-old daughter Nell, who now holds the key to the killings. Injured, half-frozen, terrified, Nell has only one place to go. And that place could be even more terrifying than what she’s running from.

In The Killing Lessons, detective Valerie Hart is on the trail of a serial killer, who leaves a series of corpses behind with seemingly random objects inside them. There’s no apparent connection, but Valerie is certain the same perpetrator is at work. Even though her social life suffers a lot from her career, and she’s obsessed with solving cases, even on the brink of destroying herself in order to save potential victims, she’s determined to catch this killer and put an end to him.

At the same time, a second storyline is going on, focused on Nell, a child who manages to escape from the farmhouse where aforementioned serial killer just butchered her mom and brother. Nell manages to hide in the woods, where she gets help from a stranger who lets her into his cabin. But with a snow storm raging overhead, and having a disability, he can’t be of much help to Nell, who wants nothing more than to go back and save her mom. But when the killer hears she might be still alive, he goes on a quest to find her…

I find the synopsis of the book slightly misleading. Based from “and that place could be even more terrifying than what she’s running from”, I thought the cabin she’d end up in would be the place where the real horror would start. Add in the title, and I thought maybe she’d run into an even more depraved serial killer, who would then teach her how to inflict damage upon the person who killed her mother. But alas, the cabin is anything but terrifying, and the man living inside is kind and generous, and although suffering from illness, he does everything he can to help Nell.

The book is fast-paced, for the most part. Valerie Hart, our detective, makes for an interesting character. She’s on the brink of being destroyed by her career, almost completely swallowed up by the cases she works on. While the connection between the objects and the murderer was quite clever, it always was quite predictable.

The writing is excellent, and parts of the book are truly horrifying. I thought the first half had the most impact – for the last part, I already figured how it would play out, so it didn’t have quite the punch at the beginning had. However, it’s still highly enjoyable, and if you love thrillers, you’ll like this one too. I would’ve rated it higher if I hadn’t found it so predictable.

Title: Normal
Author: Graeme Cameron
Genre: Thriller, Psychological Thriller
Age Group: Adult
Rating: 2 stars

Purchase: Amazon
Review copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

This is a love story. No, really.
He lives in your community, in a nice house with a well-tended garden. He shops in your grocery store, bumping shoulders with you as you pass him and apologizing with a smile. He drives beside you on the highway, politely waving to let you into the lane ahead of him.
What you don’t know is that he has an elaborate cage built into a secret basement under his garage. And the food that he’s carefully shopping for is to feed a young woman he’s holding there against her will–one in a string of many, unaware of the fate that awaits her.
This is how it’s been for a long time. It’s normal…and it works. Perfectly.
Then he meets the checkout girl from the 24-hour grocery. And now the plan, the hunts, the room…the others. He doesn’t need any of them anymore. He needs only her. One small problem–he still has someone trapped in his garage.
Discovering his humanity couldn’t have come at a worse time.

I’ll be honest. I’m not sure what to think of Normal. Usually, when that happens, I browse through other reviews to find points I can relate to, and things I see differently. But with this book, the opinions are so divided I still don’t know whether I like it, or I hate it.

At its core, Normal is a book about a serial killer who blends in completely with his surroundings. However, he’s adept at kidnapping young girls, putting them in a cage and eventually killing him. So he’s a monster, in a way. But when this serial killer, who doesn’t get a name during the book – which works surprisingly well – meets a girl at the checkout from the 24-hour grocery and falls in love with her. He doesn’t want to kill anymore, he doesn’t want to hunt people anymore, all he wants to do is love this girl. But he has a few problems. Like the girl he has hidden in his basement. The girl he just killed. The police right on his heels.

So, I like the premise. A serial killer who suddenly doesn’t want to kill anymore. I like it, but I’m not buying it. Especially not the way it’s written here, with the whole falling in love thing (which happens way too fast, and is unrealistic). The book reminded me of the final seasons of Dexter, when he falls in love with this female murderer. Things went downhill fast after that storyline was introduced, and the same thing happens in this book. The plot sets out for an excellent psychological thriller on the first few pages, but then turns into a laughable chase between the killer and the police, and him suddenly befriending not one but two women, and then having a third seemingly attracted to him as well. I’m sorry, but finding so many people attracted to a serial killer is almost impossible. And then the way the police handles things? That was laugh out loud hilarious. I’m all for dark humor, but it needs to be realistic, and that’s what this book is lacking.

We also never get a back story into the killer’s mind. Why does he kill these women? Why hold them in a cage for so long? Nothing is ever explained, and since we spent the entire book firmly in the killer’s mind, we should get an explanation as to why he does the things he does.

The characters are dull. Their behavior is erratic. The women never reach beyond the personality of a cardboard figure, especially not the love interest. The behavior of the characters kept contradicting itself, which was just plain annoying.

On the other hand, I did enjoy the writing style, and I felt like, although we got no back story, I got a good impression of what went on in the killer’s mind. However, the story was just too unrealistic and the characters’ behavior too out of place for me to truly enjoy it.