Review: Never Look Back

Y'all, this ARC has been in my TBR pile since 2019 and I could just kick myself in the teeth for not reading it sooner.  Never Look Back is a riveting read that didn't have me coming up for air. I basically lost an entire Saturday reading it and hashtag no regrets. I'm ready to follow Alison Gaylin off a cliff.

For nearly two weeks in 1976, two teenagers, Gabriel LeRoy and April Cooper went on a killing spree, killing a dozen people before dying in a fire at a cult's compound in the middle of the southern California desert. Forty years later, journalist Quentin Garrison is working on a podcast about the murders tentatively titled "Closure." His husband, and even his producer Summer, think it's a great idea. Quentin has a connection to the murders. His aunt, just a young girl at the time, was gunned down by LeRoy and Cooper at a local gas station. Her death set off a chain of events that included his mother's spiraling drug addiction and an estrangement from his grandfather. Now Quentin has uncovered a lead. A man who saw an interview about movies online and he swears on his life that one of the women in that interview is none other than April Cooper.

Robin Diamond is a film columnist living in New York City and her life is starting to unravel. Her husband is hiding something from her, and she's convinced he's having an affair.  On top of that her latest column has generated a predictable amount of hate from Internet trolls.  The one solid in her life, the one thing she can count on, are her parents. Her mother, the perfect homemaker. Her father, a retired criminal psychologist who now has a small, private practice. Her parents are solid. Her parents have the perfect marriage. Her parents love her.  And then she gets a call from Quentin Garrison who tells her he thinks her Mom is the notorious, not dead after all, serial killer April Cooper. 

The story is told from multiple points of view (primarily Quentin and Robin) and different timelines (1976 and present day).  The 1976 timeline is told from April's perspective, in the form of a school assignment she received from her favorite teacher right before Gabriel LeRoy murdered her stepfather and kidnapped her.  That assignment is to write a letter to her future child, which April does. Those letters become her diary, as she details her life on the run with Gabriel and the bodies left in their wake.

This book is a ride, and Gaylin keeps the reader guessing by taking forks in the road.  I didn't see the forks coming and once on that stretch of road, I had no idea where the driver was taking me. Not all of them are shocking twists, but they're twists all the same, the story winding and curving, keeping me on my toes and unable to look away.

The compelling theme behind the story is that everybody has secrets - even your parents. What do any of us truly know about our parents? They had lives before they had kids. They had tragedies, triumphs, made good and bad choices.  That's what drives this narrative. What does Robin truly know about her mother? For that matter, what does her father know and how much? At first Quentin seems completely off the rails, but then there's the little things - the cracks that start appearing. The coincidences that are just too amazing to be actual coincidences. As Robin starts her journey towards the truth, the 1976 storyline careens to it's fiery epic conclusion at the cult's desert compound.

I'll also say that I loved the settings of this story, which takes place between southern California and the suburban enclaves outside of New York City.  Los Angeles tends to get a fair amount of attention as a setting for suspense stories, but this story tickled me for featuring such Los Angeles County cities as Duarte, Claremont, and even a brief mention of Pico Rivera.

Truly, it's an excellent read that I could not get enough of. As soon as I get through some more long neglected suspense ARCs on my Kindle, I need to drop my life and go on an Alison Gaylin reading tear.

Final Grade = A

Review: The Collective

Part of my bid to clean out neglected (see: old) ARCs from my Kindle - I recently bookmarked some of the suspense titles I had languishing where I can score audiobook copies via one of my library cards.  Next up on the hit parade of this challenge is The Collective by Alison Gaylin, a book I was very excited to read when it was released back in 2021 and...here we are.  Holy crap y'all, this book was a RIDE!

Camille Gardner is a woman spiraling. Four years ago her 15-year-old daughter, Emily, went to a frat party with a boy and was found barely alive, raped, abandoned on a cold night in the woods near the exclusive private college. On her deathbed Emily tells her mother that the boy, Harris Blanchard, is the one who did this to her. When Emily dies there's a trial and Blanchard's white, privileged, monied parents buy their son's innocence by smearing Emily's name. 

Camille's marriage disintegrates, therapy gets her nowhere, and Harris Blanchard continues to live his best life, even receiving a prestigious humanitarian award from his university.  Camille attends the event and, naturally, there's a wee bit of a kerfuffle.  It's after that very public meltdown that a mysterious woman passes Camille a business card - a private Facebook support group where women share their grief and rage over the death of their children.  It's from that group that Camille gains entry into The Collective, a splinter group on the dark web who spill out their darkest fantasies against the people they feel are responsible for the death of their children. Camille thinks it's role playing, a twisted form of therapy that is actually helping her get out of bed in the morning - and then she comes to the terrifying realization that The Collective is not mere role playing.  The Collective are vigilantes.  A truth that Camille is realizing far too late...

This is most definitely a book you need to prepare yourself for prior to reading because Gaylin practically holds the reader's head under the water that is Camille's grief and rage.  It drips off the page. It's in the crevices between the sentences and smeared in the margins. You wonder how Camille is getting through her days, only to realize that it's her grief and rage that are propping her up.  It's smothering to the point of suffocation and one of the more emotional stories I've ever read.  It's just that the emotion here is blind hatred and rage.

Stories about vigilantes seldom have any heroes, and that's certainly the case here.  As the bodies start dropping it's hard to feel sorry for the victims who definitely get what they deserve in an eye-for-an-eye sort of way.  The people you do feel sorry for are the ones who make the mistake of crossing The Collective. People who step out of line and threaten the group's ability to exist and operate in the shadows.  This makes Camille an eventual problem because while, in the beginning, she does follow assignments and instructions with blind obedience, her curiosity gets the better of her. That's when she discovers how much danger she truly is in.

I'll be honest and say I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the ending.  What I do recognize is that it pushes the book firmly into thriller territory and it also features one hell of a twist. Y'all the twist is SO. GOOD!  Is it a happy, sunshine ending?  Honestly? No. But it's not like the author was making promises that there was going to be one. The raw emotion in this story, the depiction of rage, grief and hatred - to expect skipping through a wildflower strewn meadow at the end and Camille finding some peace would be unrealistic for the story the author is telling. Gaylin lays zero groundwork for this kind of thing, so it's not like I felt that I, as the reader, was being lied to, manipulated, or that a promise was broken.

It's a dark, and in many ways, challenging read.  There's a lot of unpack in this one, landing it on my short-list for thrillers that would make a dynamite book club read.

Final Grade = A

Review: What Remains Of Me

I get my audio listens exclusively from work.  My habit is to go diving through our Overdrive collection and "wish-list" any audiobooks that happen to catch my eye.  Then when I need something new to listen to, I see what's available on my wishlist and run with the one that tickles my fancy at the moment.  I was in the mood for something suspenseful and What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin is set in Hollywood - with all the glitz, glamor and seediness one expects when reading a suspense novel set in Hollywood.  Should the author's agent or any entertainment types be reading my humble little blog - this book is tailor-made for one of those limited-run television series.  Get on that, will you?

On June 28, 1980, Kelly Michelle Lund pumped three bullets into Oscar-nominated director, John McFadden during a wrap party for his latest film.  What follows is the trial of the century that continues to fascinate 30-years after Kelly manages to get released from prison.  Why would a 17-year-old girl, albeit stoned on marijuana and high on cocaine, basically "a nobody," kill John McFadden?  What's the motive?  Kelly is tight-lipped and now out of prison for five years, isn't talking.  She's mostly living a quiet life in Joshua Tree when one morning she gets the news that her father-in-law, Sterling Marshall, has been found dead, shot in his home in the same manner as his BFF, John McFadden.  And naturally, Kelly is the prime suspect.

The story floats back and forth between 1980 and 2010 and shifts points-of-view between a handful of characters.  In 1980 Kelly is living with her single-mother, a former make-up artist who sells cosmetics at a high end department store.  Kelly's twin-sister, Katherine, a wild child wannabe starlet has been dead for two years - her body found at the bottom of a cliff and ruled a suicide.  Kelly is a loner, and outsider, at Hollywood High until she is befriended by Bellamy Marshall, the daughter of a Hollywood legend and a girl her mother wants her to stay away from.  But Bellamy is intoxicating to Kelly, her first real friend.  Ditching school, drugs, and Hollywood parties inevitably follow, until it all blows up on June 28, 1980.

2010 finds Kelly living in Joshua Tree, writing copy for a seedy cheater's web site (think Ashley Madison) and married to Shane Marshall (yes, Bellamy's little brother and Sterling Marshall's son - stay with me folks!).  They married while she was still in prison.  Their relationship is more that of roommates.  They sleep in separate rooms.  They had a sexual relationship early on, but that has since stopped.  Kelly has zero contact with his family.  They spend their lives in Joshua Tree until Sterling Marshall's death pulls both of them back in.

This book is all about secrets and I'm not exaggerating when I say everyone in this story is keeping a secret.  Every single secret in this story builds and builds until it manages to hurt every single player in this tale.  Everyone pays a price, all because of those secrets.  I'll admit, I coasted along with this story with a "yeah, yeah I know where this is going, get on with it!" attitude because for the first half or so I thought I had it all figured out.  Oh silly Wendy.  I had about 1/3 of it figured out.  Some things I spotted right off, but Gaylin peppers in so many twists and WTF-just-happened turns that this one kept me on the edge of my seat right to the end.

Since this blog is predominantly read by romance readers, let me state that this is a suspense novel although the relationships between all the characters is what drives the story.  I would not call this story overly graphic, but there are two murders and spoiler: mentions of statutory rape which are not graphically depicted in the story (end spoiler).  

The descriptions got a little flowery at times for me (this could be a product of consuming this book on audio though), but it's a story I ended up enjoying tremendously.  I liked how the author twisted her story around shattering my holier-than-thou attitude that I had it "all figured out."  She ties it all up in the end, reveals all the secrets, and blows the door open on the whodunit.  A solid suspense read with well-formed characters and a touch of soap opera seediness to sleaze it up.

Final Grade = B+