thriller

Book Review: Red

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Red
The Circle #2
by Ted Dekker

My rating: 5 / 5
Genre: Christian fantasy thriller

Spoiler notice: The following review may contain some spoilers for the first book in the series, Black.

Fifteen years after the events of the previous book, Thomas of Hunter is the leader of an army of forest dwellers, called the Forest Guard, in a perpetual battle against the desert dwellers, the Horde. He hasn’t dreamed once in those fifteen years, but when he gets into a pinch in battle, he realizes that the answers could be found in his dreams. When he wakes up in the other reality, mere hours have passed and the danger of the Raison Strain virus is ramping up. Both realities need him, and both are on the edge of destruction.

I have to admit that with the way that the previous book ended, I wasn’t all that enthusiastic starting into this book. I’ve never really enjoyed war, battles, fighting, etc. in books, and the endless war between Thomas’s Forest Guard and the Horde (aka Scabs) wasn’t a huge draw for me at the outset. Fortunately, it quickly becomes more than that, especially when Thomas intentionally dreams for the first time in order to glean information he can use to aid the fight. It’s interesting that Thomas has aged 15 years in that reality but is still a younger man in the “real” world. Waking up after dreaming of 15 years going by is hard to imagine, but I liked that some of the people that know him best can see a difference in how he acts and even how he looks (mostly his eyes).

The urgency of the Raison Strain, even though it’s been carried on past the first book, is still there. The world moves on to a new stage as the secret of the virus threatens to be exposed, and though normally I’d feel it’s a mistake to drag something like this on for so long, it works here, thanks to the addition of the parallel reality. Some major revelations are shown involving the connected realities in this book, too, that brought my engagement level even higher. The forest/desert world, which has always displayed a very literal view of good vs. evil and has been the main vehicle for development and change in this series, brings some emotional moments at the end of this book that made me consider diving right into the third book. I won’t, but I also will not be waiting very long to read it. 

I understand even more now why 20-something-year-old me read this series as a parallel to Christianity. It’s not as direct a parallel as I must have expected/wanted it to be, but it’s certainly allegorical. Though the ways the allegory fell short (or even fell apart) bothered me when I was younger, I’m able to enjoy the story for what it is this time around. And I’m glad for that, because I’m enjoying it a lot!

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Book Review: Dead Fake

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Dead Fake
Bleak Haven #1
by Vincent Ralph

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: YA horror thriller

When a new trend takes over Ava’s school that lets students Swipe to Die, Ava seems to be the only one who wants nothing to do with it. It’s been ten years since her uncle murdered three people before dying himself, so death isn’t a game to her. Then fake videos of students being murdered start to appear, and Ava is appalled at how excited her fellow students are over the pretend tragedies. But when a student dies for real, in the same way he did in his fake video, Ava can’t help but look for patterns and answers, even if it means dredging up the not-so-buried past.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and was caught up in the slasher elements enough to have a hard time putting it down in the last third or so. It took a little bit to get going, but even early on, the hints about not only Ava’s uncle, but apparently quite a few mass murderers or serial killers in this town’s past intrigued me. There’s clearly a whole background here that I wanted to know more of. (There are 3 more books either already released or planned that are set in this same town, so maybe more of the town’s bloody history will be explored.) Some tropes of this genre were subverted in ways that I appreciated, like the town’s sheriff actually giving credence to Ava’s thoughts and discoveries.

I have to admit that the reveal of the killer was a little bit of a letdown for me, at least partly because there were some clues peppered here and there that seemed to be leading one way…only for them to be completely unrelated. Red herrings are one thing, but this felt a bit too deliberate. Plus, the killer’s revealed motivations and actions taken over time are either underwhelming or unrealistic. But even with these things, the story was overall pretty good, and I am definitely going to read more of this series. There is a little bit of language, including the f-word several times, but not nearly as much as I’ve read in other books in the same genre. And there is no sexual content that I can recall, beyond the mention of the MC’s friend and her new boyfriend making out a lot. Also incredibly light for the genre, which I appreciate. I’d recommend this for people who enjoy slasher fiction or thrillers in the teen/YA age range.

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing me a copy of this book to review.

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Book Review: Black

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Black
The Circle #1
by Ted Dekker

My rating: 4.5 / 5
Genre: Christian fantasy thriller

After an encounter with a dangerous loan shark, Thomas Hunter dreams of a world where evil is completely contained and humans live in happiness and harmony. The dream is so vivid that while he’s dreaming, he’s certain the world with the loan shark is the dream. Then the worlds begin to bleed together when he learns about some events that are still future to the “Earth” side and are expected to wipe out most of life on Earth. Knowledge from each world becomes useful in the other, and before long, both worlds are in jeopardy.

I read this book, and the entire trilogy, for the first time back around when it came out. I remember finding it a bit strange, confusing, and not particularly enjoyable. My husband read the series more recently and said he thought I’d like it…so I gave it another chance. I have come to understand that, when I was a young adult, I read this book as a direct parallel to Christianity. Though it certainly has an analogous angle to it, I needed to read it more as fantasy and let it be what it was, not what I assumed it should be. Doing that made this second reading experience far better than the first. I was hooked early on, enjoying the fast pace of the “Earth” reality and the world building of the “green forest” reality alongside it. Though the green forest side was slow in comparison to the Earth side, I skimmed a few scenes when Thomas had a very real, yet at the same time kind of abstract, communion with Elyon, the undisputed Creator of the green forest reality. I get the inclusion of those scenes, but I didn’t feel the need to read them thoroughly.

As the Earth reality gained speed toward the pending disaster, the green forest takes a turn that is sad and unexpected (though, at the same time, unsurprising), and I was really curious to see where that side of the story was going to go next. I remember snippets from the trilogy, but fortunately, it’s mostly all new. The last few pages are a bit bizarre but, at the same time, intriguing. And the book ends on a cliffhanger, which I normally dislike, but it really worked here. And now I’m excited to continue reading, which I didn’t expect to be!

I am aware that I’m at the beginning of a long, twisty mess of a book franchise. Some are directly connected and others are more peripherally so, and apparently there’s no specified order in which to read the books. I have read one of those books in the past and part of another one, and I found both bizarre and unsettling, coincidentally enough. I currently don’t have a lot of desire to read much more than the main trilogy, but I’ll see how I feel when I’m done with the first 3 books, and maybe the prequel.

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Book Review: Brother Odd

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Brother Odd
Odd Thomas #3
by Dean Koontz
Read by David Aaron Baker

My rating: 4.5 / 5
Genre: Paranormal thriller

While living in a guest house at a monastery in order to simplify his life, Odd comes across something completely new, even with his penchant for seeing ghosts and other paranormal connections. The bizarre creature seemingly made of bones, combined with the Bodachs that have appeared around the area, leads Odd to believe something bad is about to happen.

This was my favorite book in the series so far. There are a lot of amusing moments in the book, from Odd’s interactions with Elvis to his banter with the suspicious Russian man also staying at the monastery. I continue to enjoy Odd as a character—kind and modest almost to a fault with a strong desire to protect those who are weak. The mystery kept me engaged, though I have to admit that the reveal was a little confusing, even convoluted. But that was really my only issue with the book. I was sad about a chapter that closed at the end of the book, but I look forward to seeing where the series goes. Sadly, I’ll have to fit the rest into my normal reading schedule, because the rest of the audiobooks don’t seem to be available from any of the library services available to me. But I enjoyed this third book enough to be willing to continue on my own.

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Book Review: Forever Odd

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Forever Odd
Odd Thomas #2
by Dean Koontz
Read by David Aaron Baker

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Paranormal thriller

When Odd’s best friend’s recently deceased (like, super recently) father visits him, Odd starts off on a mission to find his friend and save him from whoever seems to have abducted him and killed his father.

After finding the first book in the series interesting but a bit slow, this book is just as slow and less interesting. I still like Odd himself as a character. He’s very different from what you normally see in fiction in a lot of ways, a kind of throwback to a different time. Some reviewers seem to see this as a fault with the book, but I appreciate that his gifts have led him to live a simpler life—he has no real ambition, no need for vices, and in fact, what most people would see as a minor complication would throw his life out of whack completely. However, the first book really felt like a stand-alone. There’s usually a very different feel to a book that is the intentional first in a series compared to a book that was written to be a one-off, and though plenty of times a sequel or two may come after an original stand-alone, to me, this just didn’t work as a sequel. The main thing that I felt was seriously lacking in this book was the use of Odd’s gifts. His psychic magnetism gets plenty of play (and a new angle, unless I’m just forgetting something being mentioned in the first book), and he does see a few ghosts, but it seemed like a huge chunk of the book was just trying to escape from, hide from, and outwit the bad guys. It dragged down what was already a fairly slow read for me. Good thing I listened to the audiobook, or it might have taken me a really long time to get through this book. As for recommendations, if you haven’t read the first book, you probably shouldn’t start here, since it definitely references back and spoils some things. If you have and liked it, you may or may not like this one, depending a lot on which aspects of the first book you particularly liked or didn’t. That’s all I can really say.

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Book Review: Odd Thomas

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Odd Thomas
Book #1
by Dean Koontz
Read by David Aaron Baker

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Paranormal thriller

Odd Thomas can see dead people, but he can also see dark shade-like creatures that tend to congregate at sites of future disaster. Between these two things, Odd is drawn to help bring justice for victims and prevent future tragedies. He works as a short order cook in a small town in California, and when he sees a large congregation of these creatures, which he calls bodachs, interested in a particular customer, he does his best to investigate so he can try to stop whatever future catastrophe might have drawn so many bodachs.

Leaving aside the paranormal aspects, this book is a thriller mystery and a race against time to stop a massacre. Adding the paranormal aspects back in, and the overall story here is engaging and inventive. Odd himself is a sympathetic hero, if maybe a little too naïve and Gary Stu-ish. He tends to draw people to himself by being a nice, quiet guy and has more than one mentor-type character. The background Koontz shows us for Odd make me happy for him that he has these other people in his life to counter-balance some truly awful parents.

I’ve only read one Koontz before this, and I loved it, but this time, I found that his tendency to describe things in way more detail than necessary slowed the story way down. There was also a lot of focus on sex and references to body parts for a book with a main character that isn’t sleeping with his girlfriend. And a couple of the major side characters I did not particularly care for. They were just over the top in their personalities. I listened to the audiobook, and I don’t know if it would have been better to read it, so I could skim some of the descriptions or worse, because then I would have struggled to get through some of it and taken a lot longer to read it. Either way, I enjoyed the book more than not and was actually kind of annoyed with myself for not clocking the slight twist at the end before it happened. Also, I am very glad that I had already read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie before reading this book, because Koontz full-on spoils it! Overall, I like the world Koontz has set up here and Odd Thomas himself enough to continue the series. I think most people who enjoy paranormal thrillers would enjoy it, but just keep in mind the slowness.

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Book Review: Very Dangerous Things

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Very Dangerous Things
by Lauren Muñoz

My rating: 2 / 5
Genre: YA mystery thriller

When a murder game at a private school specializing in criminology is preempted by the real murder of a high school student, the victim’s ex-girlfriend is the prime suspect. But Sierra insists she didn’t do it and tries to enlist her ex-best friend Dulce in clearing her name. Dulce may be intrigued, but it’ll take more than the pleas of the girl she now considers her nemesis to get her involved.

The idea of a real crime being committed during a murder mystery game at a school for people studying criminology (though I really can’t say how realistic a school like this is) greatly intrigued me. And in some aspects, the mystery was good. There are a lot of clues, many of which are unrelated to the case, and the author throws in a lot of herrings to keep the reader guessing. (Other reviewers say the culprit was obvious from the beginning, but I did not guess it until close to the reveal.)

However, in many other aspects, the plot, mystery, and characters fell flat for me. The book had very strong Veronica Mars vibes to me, even before the show was outright mentioned, and I don’t know how intentional that was. From the horrible, corrupt sheriff, to the whole town turning against Dulce and her dad, to Dulce and Co. breaking into all sorts of places they shouldn’t be, it brought the show to my mind a lot. Everyone in this story is lying to everyone all the time. And the absolute worst of it comes from Dulce’s (current) best friend Emi who does whatever she wants, no matter who she might upset, lies to her best friend constantly, and then has the gall to accuse Dulce of being a bad friend because she resisted helping with the case for a long time. And that’s just one example of the terrible people in this book making stupid decisions.

There are background flashbacks peppered throughout the story, which aren’t really a bad way to introduce extra information, except that the bulk of the story is written in 1st-person, present tense from Dulce’s POV, and most of the flashbacks are 3rd-person, past tense (unless the person the flashback is about is Dulce, then they’re 1st-person, past tense). It’s a little jarring. What really threw me off, though, was when, in one of these flashbacks, Dulce is stated to be 13 and is making out with a high school guy and drinking alcohol. At 13! But it’s for a case for a detective agency that she and her then-best friend ran together (at 13!), so it’s okay. Then I realized that the flashback was said to be 2 years previous to the rest of the book, which meant that Dulce is still only 15 when the rest of the book happens, as would be most of the other major characters (maybe early 16), which still just feels so young to me, considering what these kids are already into. But to be fair, I’m pretty old-fashioned, so pretty much any age in high school feels too young for what these kids are into, something that is probably worth noting for anyone reading this review.

That brings me to the rest of what bothers me, which I know won’t bother everyone, but I also know that some people who read my reviews will probably be happy to know about this kind of content: multiple on- or off-screen characters are LGBT, and there is mention of religious people who are against this kind of behavior in a negative way (how dare they pray for them!). It made me consider DNFing the book. But since I don’t give a star rating when I don’t finish a book, feeling like it’s not really fair to the book or the author, and I had an ARC of this book and can’t really not give it a rating, I kept going. And in the end, it’s actually overall fairly tame compared to other anti-Christian/religious views in this area (though it’s interesting to note that the religious people actually came around to be okay with the LGBT behavior, so there’s that).

I think this story had huge potential, and the author writes well (minus the jarring POV and tense changes). But it’s pretty clear to me that I was never going to be the right audience for this book or probably for this author. I don’t personally recommend this book to anyone, but please do consider looking into it more if you’re interested.

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Young Readers Group for providing me a copy of this book to review.

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Book Review: Nightfall

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Nightfall
by Jake Halpern & Peter Kujawinski

My rating: 3.5 / 5
Genre: YA fantasy thriller

When the sun sets on the island of Bliss, it won’t return for 14 years. At the same time, the tide also rolls out for miles, making it impossible to leave the island, which will turn into a cold, icy, inhospitable place. So the people living on the island have a small window of time to leave, sailing south, where they’ll live in the Desert Lands during the 14 years of night and return at dawn. During that small window, Marin and her twin brother Kana try to track down their friend who has gone missing and make it back before the ships leave the island.

The synopsis of this book intrigued me so much that I bought it despite the fairly low rating it has online. And for at least 2/3 of the book, my intrigue level remained high. The set-up and foreshadowing kept me hooked, even on the edge of my seat at times. The authors did a great job with the setting—the darkness building as the sun makes its final descent into the horizon, foreign noises in the forest, bizarre rituals that the islanders must attend to before they leave the island. I admit it—I was a little creeped out. I had some predictions about what was going on, and therein lies the downturn for me.

Not only were my predictions true, there was very little variation from it in the last third or so of the book. Once it’s revealed to us what is going on, there’s not really anymore suspense or intrigue. I wish the authors had held a little bit back somehow, saved a little bit of suspense for those last chapters. There were a couple of minor things that happened that may have been meant as twists or at least that I didn’t predict, but none of them were terribly exciting. And while I don’t fault the authors for ending the book where they did, I think there were definitely some things about the situation on the island that should have been explained, because otherwise, they just leave one scratching their head (not saying more due to spoilers).

Overall, I’m really glad I read this book. It’s a great example of an atmospheric read; it just falls short in the climax and conclusion. But I enjoyed it enough to be excited to see the the authors wrote a 2nd novel in the same world, which I have now added to my TBR. My 14-year-old daughter also enjoyed this book, which I think is just as important, since she’s actually the target audience for the book (and I am definitely not). I do recommend it to anyone of any age who enjoys darker fantasies written for teens.

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Book Review: Monster

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Monster
by Frank Peretti

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Christian thriller

When Reed Shelton’s wife Beck disappears at the start of a survival weekend, many people from the nearby area band together to try to track her in the wilderness. But strange things are happening in the woods, and soon Beck isn’t the only victim. Finding her alive becomes more and more uncertain, and the monster in the woods may not be what anyone thinks.

This book took multiple turns from what I expected, starting with actually following Beck during much of her disappearance. As Reed and Beck’s friends try to get to the truth of what is going on in the woods, there are various twists and suspenseful moments. Just what I expect from a Peretti novel, right down to the search for truth. My only real issue is how Reed treats his wife. She has some fairly severe anxieties, and he wants to get her out of the house and into the woods, thinking it will help her, and he may be right, but he’s pretty pushy and not always very nice.

I put off reading this novel for a long time, even though Peretti has been my favorite author for years. Maybe it was because I didn’t think anything could live up to The Oath, my favorite Peretti novel, or maybe it was because my husband’s super-brief summary of the book made it sound uninteresting. It didn’t unseat my favorites, but I should have trusted my favorite author and read this book a long time ago. Though the main characters in the book are Christian and Peretti definitely questions evolution in this novel, it’s not preachy at all. If you enjoy thriller novels with a little bit of science involved, you might consider giving this one a try.

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Book Review: A Dream within a Dream

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A Dream within a Dream
Coffey & Hill #3
by Mike Nappa

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Thriller/suspense, Christian

Private investigator Trudi Coffey and her ex-husband, ex-CIA agent, ex-private investigator, now Atlanta cop, Samuel Hill are separately pointed to a man known as Dream, who has knowledge highly prized by multiple different agencies. His well-being is in danger, possibly his life, and he is suffering from PTSD that has left him with holes in his memory.

This book delivers excitement, suspense, and intrigue like the other two in the series. The trend of involving writings of Edgar Allen Poe also continues, including another character in need who is named after a Poe work, this time the troubled and much sought-after Dream. He provides the first-person, present-tense perspective throughout this story as he relates to us various different events from his past that led to him being in his current predicament. The issue, though, is that these different events are jumbled together in the telling. This is indicative of the way he is processing his past and current events that bring up difficult memories, but I kept waiting for things to clear up and make more sense, and they never completely did.

Trudi and Samuel provide the other perspectives (3rd person, past tense), and while Trudi’s is familiar and provides the clearest narrative, Samuel’s is the other main reason I didn’t like this as much as I did the previous 2 books in the series. There’s just too much going on. The storyline about Dream and some stolen artwork was complex enough, to my mind, that adding a family from the Middle East coming after Samuel because he was involved in the death of one of their own was unnecessary. In the end, it seemed to only be in there to give us a particular ending, which wasn’t really my favorite kind of ending anyway. It doesn’t really leave it open for more books in this series, though some feel that it does and I’d certainly love to see more Coffey & Hill someday.

This book may not have quite held up to the high standard set by the previous 2 books in the series, but I still enjoyed it overall. And I am so glad I found this series in general, as it’s a new favorite for me. I definitely recommend it to fans of suspense and thriller novels, especially with a Christian leaning, and you don’t necessarily need to read them in order.

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