The new psychological thriller is getting great reviews.

It’s an “unreliable narrator” piece.

Sadly, it didn’t work for me. The plot is interesting, but was too painfully drawn out for too long.

Not one of the main characters held any appeal.

Emma is quickly approaching her 40th birthday — the same age her mother was when she began having trouble sleeping.

As she struggles with intergenerational trauma and balancing 10 hour days as a successful lawyer with life with her family life, Emma’s situation spirals into a dangerous and intense tale.

Without sleep, is Emma hallucinating? Or is she going mad?

On the other hand, if you liked all the other psychological thrillers — Girl on a Train, for example — you’ll likely enjoy this one, as well.

A cute idea.

Queen Elizabeth II secretly solves crimes while carrying out her royal duties.

It is the early spring of 2016 and Queen Elizabeth is at Windsor Castle in advance of her 90th birthday celebrations. But the preparations are interrupted by the shocking and untimely death of a guest in one of the Castle bedrooms. The scene leads some to think the young Russian pianist strangled himself, yet a badly tied knot leads MI5 to suspect foul play.

When they begin to question the Household’s most loyal servants, Her Majesty knows they’re looking in the wrong place. …

Away from the public eye and unbeknownst to her closest friends and advisers, she has the most brilliant skill for solving crimes. …

Amazon

Adrian McKinty is an excellent author, under appreciated until his 2019 hit book The Chain.

An Uber driver at the time, the film option earned McKinty $1.5 million

The Island (2022) is intense.

Hulu has acquired the rights to develop The Island as a limited TV series.

After moving from a small country town to Seattle, Heather Baxter marries Tom, a widowed doctor with a young son and teenage daughter. …

When they discover remote Dutch Island, off-limits to outside visitors, the family talks their way onto the ferry, taking a chance on an adventure far from the reach of iPhones and Instagram.

But as soon as they set foot on the island, which is run by a tightly knit clan of locals, everything feels wrong. Then a shocking accident propels the Baxters from an unsettling situation into an absolute nightmare. …

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Book #2 of the English translations of his Detective Galileo series.

Police are frustrated trying to solve the murder of a businessman in his own home.

Poison.

Was the mistress? Or the rejected wife? Or someone else.

Finally they call in a genius — Manabu Yukawa, a university physics professor who’s something like a Japanese Sherlock Holmes. His nickname is Detective Galileo.

Slow paced, like book #1 in the series – Devotion of Suspect X.

Yet I was never bored in either book. The professor is a fascinating character. And the slow burn feels authentically Japanese.

Here’s how Yukawa was cast in one TV adaptation.

Kaoru Utsumi, a rookie female detective, is wonderful too.

The Prodigal Daughter by Jeffrey Archer (1982) is the story of Florentyna Rosnovski, the daughter of Abel Rosnovski of Archer’s Kane and Abel.

Florentyna becomes the first female president of the USA in this book.

Archer got the inspiration for Florentyna’s political life from the elections of Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi.

A good story. One of Archer’s most popular.

Click PLAY or watch the author introduce the book on YouTube.

This one didn’t work for me.

The plot thread with the Brit celebrity didn’t add anything to the story.

Many big fans of Joe Pickett weren’t impressed with the 2018 book.

Wyoming’s new governor isn’t sure what to make of Joe Pickett, but he has a job for him that is extremely delicate. A prominent British businesswoman never came home from the high-end guest ranch she was visiting, and the British Embassy is pressing hard. …

At the same time, his friend Nate Romanowski has asked Joe to intervene with the feds on behalf of an issue passionately felt by falconers, but inexplicably being blocked. It seems like a matter of lesser importance to Joe right now, but the more he digs into both cases, the more someone is trying to stop him. Is it because of the missing woman or the falconers? Or are they somehow connected?

CJBox.net

This one is quite good — even if the plot is farfetched. 😀

… a man camping in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness goes missing.

As the official search ends with no recovery in sight, Cork is asked by the man’s family to stay on the case. Although the wedding (his daughter’s) is fast approaching and the weather looks threatening, he accepts and returns to that vast wilderness.

As the sky darkens and the days pass, Cork’s family anxiously awaits his return. Finally certain that something has gone terribly wrong, they fly by floatplane to the lake where the missing man was last seen. Locating Cork’s campsite, they find no sign of him. They do find blood, however. A lot of it. …

williamkentkrueger.com

Scalzi is the author of the great 2005 book Old Man’s War.

The Dispatcher — a 2016 novella — was commissioned by Audible (Amazon) as audio first.

I’d call it SciFi young adult.

The plot is bizarre and fascinating.

In the wake of an unexplained phenomenon worldwide — when people are deliberately killed, they disappear from their site of death and reappear, reset to several hours earlier, in a safe place — the profession of “Dispatcher” evolves. Dispatchers euthanize mortally-injured people before their natural deaths, enabling them to reset.

Tony Valdez is a Dispatcher recruited by the police to assist in investigating the disappearance of another Dispatcher.

wikipedia

Murder by Other Means is a 2020 sequel novella. Equally good.

Murder would now seem to be impossible. Anyone you kill will simply transport back to their home, waking up naked.

Yet there is a way.

Tony Valdez gets caught up in the plot where people start inexplicably committing suicide.

… Or were they murdered by other means?

related – How writing an audio-first novella changed John Scalzi’s writing process

Easily her most complicated plot, through to 1934.

An impossible murder. Everyone could be involved.

Hercule Poirot travels back to England on the midday flight from Le Bourget Airfield in Paris to Croydon Airport in London. He is one of eleven passengers …

 As the plane is close to landing, a wasp is spotted flying around the rear compartment before a steward finds that Giselle is dead.

Poirot, who has slept through most of the flight, dismisses the belief she died from a wasp sting. Instead, he points out a dart on the floor, which is found to have a poisoned tip: Giselle was stung in the neck with it. The question remains how she was murdered without anyone noticing. …

Death in the Clouds