Mini-Reviews: Darling Girls and Wild Women

Two books that couldn't be more different, other than I liked them both and don't have a ton to say about them - so it's time for another round of mini-reviews!

First up is Wild Women and the Blues by Denny S. Bryce, a dual timeline historical fiction, with romantic elements, novel set in 1925 and 2015. 1925 Chicago is flowing with bootleg liquor, mobsters, and hot jazz clubs. Honoree Dalcour is a former sharecropper's daughter from Louisiana, having been in Chicago since she was a child. Her parents are both now gone (father dead, mother basically took off) which means Honoree has been left to make her own way in the world, as a dancer. Her life's ambition, to work at the classiest black-and-tan club in town, The Dreamland Café, is about to come true - until a ghost from her past waltzes through the door at her current job. The boy she desperately loved and coughed up her virginity to. The boy from a respectable wealthy Black family. The boy who ghosted her three-years ago and she assumed was dead.

In 2015 Chicago, film student Sawyer Hayes is hoping to finally finish his overdue doctoral thesis. He discovered a hidden box in his grandmother's attic containing photographs and a film cannister he thinks contains a long-lost film by the legendary Black filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux. He needs to get the film restored and talk to the last living link to Micheaux, a former dancer who appears in some of his grandmother's found photographs, Honoree Dalcour. Yes, she's over 100, still alive, and living in a nursing home in Chicago. Unfortunately she's stubborn and extracting her secrets is taking precious time Sawyer doesn't have.

This was an entertaining story with a lot of good historical color and flavor. The 1925 portion of the story is more richly drawn and while the book cover is bright and vibrant, the story itself is a bit darker around the edges with the plot leaning heavily on bootlegging, mobsters and the numbers racket. It's one of those plots where something good happens, immediately followed by something bad - so it definitely kept the pages turning. The 2015 storyline was interesting because it's chock-full of family secrets waiting to be uncovered, although I felt like Sawyer's personal baggage is largely left adrift. Also, while I'm a sucker for secrets, Honoree's Big Secret was a bit of a head scratcher for me - I mean why?! What was the point exactly? I'm not sure it entirely works. That being said, I did like the story overall and will read more of Bryce.

Grade = B

Sally Hepworth writes the type of suspense that's great for folks who like suspense but don't want to wade through a bunch of violence. She also knows her way around writing tension. The kind of tension that suffocates the reader from the first page to the last. Darling Girls tells the story of Jessica, Norah and Alicia, three women who were rescued from family tragedies and raised in foster care by Miss Fairchild, who owns an idyllic farm out in the country. Things, of course, are not what they seem. The girls, now grown, are called back "home" when construction workers, tearing down the house to build a new development, uncover the skeletal remains of a small child.  The "sisters" are now called back as potential witnesses (or possibly suspects) and none of them are all that ready or willing to revisit the past.

Out of the gate, all the trigger warnings for childhood trauma and abuse (psychological and emotional).  Miss Fairchild is one of those evil adult characters whose milk and cookies image is hiding a monster underneath. It's very hard to read and unsurprisingly all that childhood trauma has manifested itself in unhealthy ways now that the girls are adults. 

Told in a dual timeline between past and present, the suspense is very slow burn (hence that suffocating feeling) and doesn't truly begin to cook until the final third, when I could not tear myself away.  There's a twist at the end that had me gasping out loud, but also took off a bit of shine. It moves this book firmly from suspense to the thriller category - meaning it leaves a door open more than a crack and I'm not convinced the person how needs to be punished (mightily!) truly will be. However, all three women do end up in a better place by the end of the story, which goes a long way in making me feel less annoyed. While I'm assigning this the same grade, The Soulmate edges this one out for me, but it sure as heck is still plenty riveting.

Final Grade = B+

Library Loot Mini-Reviews: To Gore or Not To Gore

I saw a mention of Dead of Winter by Darcy Coates somewhere and even though my only previous experience with this author was a rather workmanlike Gothic, I was all in from the jump. What we have here folks is straight-up cotemporary horror suspense and I inhaled every gruesome word of it.

Christa is heading to a secluded lodge in the Rocky Mountains at the behest of her boyfriend with a small tour group when disaster strikes.  When their bus gets stuck on the road thanks to a downed tree, the boyfriend convinces Christa to go to a nearby lookout point. She thinks he's going to propose, what really happens is the weather kicks up, they get lost, they get separated and Christa eventually finds herself taking shelter in a hunting cabin. That's where the rest of the tour group finds her.  She thinks they're safe. They just need to wait out the epic snow storm.  Um, yeah - not so much.

What we have here is part locked-room and part survival story.  Then the bodies start dropping and the paranoia sets in.  I'm a sucker for suspense stories with survival, man vs. elements plots and this one is compulsively readable.  It's also fairly gory.  I have a high tolerance for gore but for those of you who don't two words: multiple decapitations.  I had the whodunit pegged early on, but the motive kept me guessing and Coates does a good job with misdirection and red herrings.  

A couple of things of note however: 1) this book desperately needed an epilogue.  There's some loose threads regarding a couple of characters I wanted tied up.  Also 2) Coates is Australian, which fine. I can read things like tyres instead of tires.  What wasn't fine?  Christa is American (OK, US'ian) and the story is set in the Rocky Mountains. When Christa is sizing up a secondary character she would not gauge his weight in kilos.  Unless they're a transplant from somewhere that the metric system is the standard unit of measure - nobody in the US thinks in kilos in terms of weight.  Yes, I'm nitpicking - but let me tell you how much that yanked me right out of the story and had me Googling to see where the author was from.

Final Grade = B+

It's thanks to the SoCalBloggers (waving to Nikki!) that I picked up The Soulmate by Sally Hepworth.  If you like suspense, but aren't a fan of gore, this one may be more in your wheelhouse.  It's domestic suspense but without an unreliable narrator or gaslighting!  A dang unicorn!

Pippa and Gabe have an idyllic marriage.  Blissfully in love, two beautiful daughters, and a picturesque home on a beach cliffside they couldn't believe they were lucky enough to afford.  It was after they moved in that they realized why they could afford it.  Unbeknownst to them, there's a portion of the cliff that is a "favorite" spot for people contemplating suicide. With the first person they see, Gabe goes out to talk to them. Charming and disarming Gabe has so far talked down seven people from the cliff.  Then, there's number eight, which is where the book opens.  This woman jumps.  And Pippa was watching from the window.  It sure looked like that Gabe may have...pushed her? No, that can't be right. 

What follows is a story told in alternating points of view between Pippa and the dead woman, Amanda.  Yes, a dead woman is one of the narrators. I know it sounds cheesy, but it actually works.  What also works is how the author ultimately ends up weaving their stories together - it's pretty clever actually.

I kept expecting this story to take a sinister, Machiavellian turn, but it never does.  This is what I call "disquieting suspense." Also, mental illness plays a fairly healthy role in this story - the sort of mental illness that many readers may have experience with in their daily lives.  This will either be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view.  It worked for me, but I'm also not living with mental illness directly in my day-to-day personal life so....mileage is going to vary here.

A quick, engaging listen on audiobook and it's the book that helped pull me out of the dreadful slump I went through in June/July - so bravo!

Final Grade = B+