“A Step Past Darkness”

By Vera Kurian

 

Vera Kurian’s first novel “Never Saw Me Coming” was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 2022. Her follow up is even better with surprising twists which include a horror element, a dangerous cult, and a group of students who find out that secrets cannot always be kept.

 

The gripping danger stems from an incident in 1995 in a lovely, suburban town when a group of high school students decide to throw a party in an abandoned coal mine. Obviously, nothing can possibly go wrong with that idea!  But since humans seem to be very good at making terrible decisions, the party goes on and disaster ensues for six classmates who witness a shocking event that they keep secret for 20 years. They go so far as to agree to never speak of the crime that happened and to leave town and never speak to each other.

The six are Maddy, a devout member of the local megachurch; Kelly, the bookworm next door; James, a cynical burnout; Casey, a loveable football player; Padma, the shy straight-A student and Jia, who is starting to see visions she can’t explain. While 20 years have passed, Jia’s visions and the murder of Maddy drives Jia to break the pact by calling everyone originally involved back to Wesley Falls to end what is beginning to tear the town apart.

Much of the novel deals with the group of six teens. They are all well-developed characters and interact to each other in positive ways. Events from the 90s come up to orientate us to the time which this was taking place. Eventually they find that many of the town’s problems seem to swirl around the town’s megachurch called “Golden Praise.” The church has a dangerous cult-like hold on the citizens to the point that the church’s leaders are those townspeople with the most influence. Others in town who are not in the church are called burnouts. The elite high school girls are called the “Circle Girls” and wear necklaces with small gems that relate to a church hierarchy that Jia and her friends must uncover.

Many modern novels jump back and forth between characters and this novel does that with all six of its main characters as we get to know them as teens in the 90s. That takes up a lot of time and thus it takes a while to really jump into what is going on in the town itself. Once everyone is back in Wesley Falls, the novel jumps into high gear and becomes a top rate thriller. I love the idea of a coal mine being a major setting since I can really imagine that kids in the town would be intrigued with exploring something that they are told to stay away from. The social interactions of the residents of the town are of importance and controlled by the church’s influence. The book has many twists and turns and surprises. Just read it and don’t read the many reviews that I feel give away far too much. Just read this triller and enjoy the ride.

 

“Only If You’re Lucky”

by Stacy Willingham

It’s interesting that I managed to read two books in a row about friendship. Perhaps we all need to think about our friendships and what brings us to develop the friendships we have and what keeps those friendships healthy. I’m pretty sure that at some time in everyone’s life they develop a friendship that is unhealthy. A friendship that perhaps brings out the worst in us. That occurrence isn’t just about the other person. It’s about both people. Very often we try to heal our lives through others. We expect others to be our strength or to fill up the hole that loss or pain from childhood has left us with.  In the case of this book, Margot goes to college and replaces her dead friend from high school with a girl whose hold on her is life changing.

Margot is drawn to Lucy in what becomes an unhealthy and life altering friendship. The book goes back and forth between “before” and “after” a certain big event that everything is leading to. That event changes everyone and everything.

Margot starts out her college life as a shy, young, damaged girl from a small town only to meet Lucy who is always the center of attention, exciting, and dynamic. Margot becomes part of Lucy’s group of friends and ends up moving off campus with them in a rental house. While Lucy’s influence would probably be enough to change Margot’s life, the fraternity boys from the house next door complicate her life even more.

Margot finds herself changing. But there are things happening that keep her from totally embracing Lucy’s influence. Sometimes it seems that her past and present are coming together in disturbing ways. When a young man whom she suspected of injuring her dead high school best friend joins the freshman class at her college and moves next door, her life truly starts spinning out of control. The unhealthy relationships and holds the characters have on each other leads not just to pain for many of the characters, but to the death of some as well.

I love books that drive me to read as fast as possible to find out where the plot is going and what is the motivation behind the actions of each of the characters. This was a really fun and fascinating read.

Willingham has only written two other books, both good reads to go back to if you haven’t already read them. They are "A Flicker in the Dark" and "All the Dangerous Things."

The next book on my reading list is “A Step Past Darkness” by Vera Kurian.

 

 

Pretty Little Wife (2020)

The Replacement Wife (2021)

The Last Invitation (2022)

  

Darby Kane may not be destined to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature so don’t start reading her books with that expectation. (Although you never know.) What you can rely on when you read one of her books is that her books are just fun to read. Her domestic fiction is personal filled with betrayal by those who should love you the most and whom you should love without reservation. Anyone could be plotting against you from your wife to a husband, to family members, to friends. Many of her characters lack a moral compass to say the least. You may read her books and say this is too complex or too over the top and think that no one would act the way her characters act. At that point you turn on the news and some father just left his baby locked in a car while he went in to work for 8 hours. Or a women killed her kids because they were just too much trouble. Thousands of people gamble away their futures every day while living in a dream that they will get rich with this behavior. Let’s face it, people do crazy well in real life and Darby Kane does crazy well in her books (which is a lot less damaging).

The Engagement Party (2023)

I’ve read all of her books and enjoyed her form of domestic fiction with twisty plots and crazy actions. I hadn’t gotten around to her last book “The Engagement Party” and finally picked it up and got caught up in the crazy. Honestly who doesn’t know that when you go somewhere on vacation that only has one entrance and exit which is covered by water half the time that nothing good is going to come of that?

The vacation is organized as an engagement party where a group of old friends can get back together to celebrate one of their own getting engaged. The friends knew each other in college and experienced the horror of having on graduation weekend a student (Emily Hunt) go missing only to be found floating in a river. The police decide that the death was linked to another student who died by suicide and close the case.

Immediately you get the idea that these so-called friends are tied together by the secrets they have held and the lies they’ve told to hide those secrets since that incident in college. Even though 12 years have passed, the guilt and shame have not. It seems that more than one person wants this group to reveal the truth about Emily’s death and the trap is set on this isolated vacation hide out. Finding the truth isn’t easy and has to be forced out through threats, violence and death.

As tension ramps up in the book, the group finds a dead man in the trunk of a car with a note that says, “Time to tell the truth.” Of course, a storm covers the only road out with water leaving them stranded and wondering who will be the next to die and which one of them was driven to kill.

This book is just fun. There is a ton of tension and a constant desire to know exactly what is really going on. The characters are a mess of guilt and fear. They all have their own secrets and have told lies for so long that it seems impossible to tell the truth. On the surface, they see themselves as friends, but none of them really are friends.

There is no way the book couldn’t make you think about friendship and those we call friends. Many of our friends develop from shared experiences: we work together, we went to college together, we lived next door to each other, and so on. We may have a shared past, shared interests, shared experiences. We hope that our friends are people who love us and would have our backs in difficult times. Unfortunately, we have all been let down by friends and have let friends down. Friendship is complicated like all relationships. I would advise that if you have the kind of friends the people in this book have that you move across the county and block their number.

 

 What the Wife Knew (2024)

Darby Kane’s next book comes out December 10, 2024, and pre-pub reviews make it seem that this may be her best book so far.

 

Reading right now:

“Spirits and Sourdough” is the tenth book in the Magical Bakery Mystery series by Bailey Cates. If you need a break from domestic thrillers, you might want to read this cozy series featuring witchy bakery owner Katie Lightfoot in Savannah. This well-done light murder mystery series has supernatural elements and an excellent reoccurring cast. In this most recent installment, Katie goes on a ghost tour of Savannah only to have a newly dead ghost turn up demanding that her murder be solved.

On hold right now:

There are so many bestselling mystery authors coming out with new books in March that you better start putting holds on all your favorites right now. Harlan Coben’s “The Match” is his second book in the Wilde series. C. J. Box’s “Shadows Reel” is his 22^nd book in the Joe Pickett series. Stuart Woods has “A Safe House” coming out which is his 61^st Stone Barrington mystery novel. “What Happened to the Benefits” is Lisa Scottoline’s latest standalone novel. Janet Evanovich launch’s a new series with “The Recovery Agent” featuring Gabriela Rose as a recovery agent. Jude Deveraux’s fourth book in her Medlar Mystery series is “A Relative Murder.” Fern Michaels latest domestic thriller is “Fear Thy Neighbor.” Phillip Margolin’s fifth book in his Robin Lockwood series is “The Darkest Place.” Jacqueline Winspear’s 17^th novel in the Maisie Dobbs series is “A Sunlit Weapon.” If that isn’t enough for you, April brings two of our biggest mystery authors David Baldacci and John Sandford coming out with new books which no one will want to miss. Baldacci’s “Dream Team” is the third in his Aloysius Archer series. Sandford starts a new series with Letty Davenport.

 

With another New Year here, it’s a good time to mention an author that you may have missed that you simply don’t want to miss. If you didn’t read Darby Kane’s “Pretty Little Wife,” you need to make sure you do so right now. The book is a domestic suspense novel with so many twists and turns that you will stay up all night and call in sick the next day to see what is going to happen next. Now to top it all off, her second book “The Replacement Wife” just came out last month. Which means when you finish the first, you’ll have another great book to look forward to.

 

Reading right now:

“Everything We Didn’t Say” by Nicole Baart is a family drama with a mystery in the background. When Juniper Baker fled from Jericho, Iowa, she left behind a daughter to be raised by her parents and a murdered local couple.  She returns to make amends with her now teenage daughter and to solve the murder of her brutally murdered neighbors. Juniper has been holding a secret, but doesn’t know if releasing her knowledge will help her start again or destroy any hope of starting over.

 

On hold right now:

It’s been five years since Joanne Harris added a book to the St. Oswald series called “A Narrow Door.” It seems the time has come for this boy’s prep school to open it’s doors to girls and to a headmistress. The new headmistress, Rebecca Buckfast, is ruthlessly ambitious. It seems she killed to get the job and may have to kill again to keep her secrets buried.

Noah Hawley’s “Anthem” takes the world’s current insanity to a whole new level. Starting with a pandemic of teen suicide, he makes it personal by following a young man who is trying to recover from his sister’s death and finds himself on a quest to end the pandemic which is somehow tied to a man known as the Wizard. This book is an adventure thriller which goes down the road to redemption. It is more thriller than mystery, but is worth mentioning here because of the times we live in and the impact it is having on reviewers.

In “Find Me” by Alafair Burke, Hope Miller reinvented her life after being in a terrible car accident. She gives herself a name and settles into life in a small town in New Jersey for 15 years. Suddenly her best friend discovers that she has vanished leaving behind only a drop of blood where she was last seen. Her DNA sample matches a blood sample connected to a notorious Kansas murder. Now the hunt is on to find Hope and the truth about what she knows.

Other Mysterious Things:

So many books are being turned into movies or series these days that you cannot even begin to keep up. The 1957 Patricia Highsmith novel “Deep Water” is coming out as a movie with Ben Affleck. Kenneth Branagh is working on turning another Agatha Christie novel into a movie (“Death on the Nile”). Hugh Laurie is directing a limited series from another Agatha Christie called “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” A new book called “Argylle” by Ellie Conway is already being turned into a movie.  “Luckiest Girl Alive” by Jessica Knoll will star Mila Kunis is set to come out this year. It looks like there will be so many that this list will grow and grow so enjoy a great mystery book and let’s hope some of the movies are worth watching.

One of Sherlock Holmes most famous quotes is about the evil lurking in the English countryside ("They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside"). Many of the books I am featuring today fit right in with that belief. Small towns have their own secrets, hidden knowledge, vile coverups, anger, and finally revenge. Interestingly enough, it seems that it doesn’t matter where you go in the world, small towns are all the same as you can see from these books from Australia, Sweden, the UK, and Russia.

Reading right now:

As the western United States “drys” up, it might be a good time to read “The Dry” by Jane Harper. Harper was born in England, but now lives in Australia and her side details about the ravages of the drought hitting Australia may strike a little close to home while adding a disquieting urgency to the novel which centers around the murder of a young family by the father who proceeds to kill himself. His childhood friend is now a policeman and is struck by several oddities which seem to point to murder by someone other than his old friend. This novel first came out in 2017 and was followed up by another mystery with the same hero (Policeman Aaron Falk). If you missed this series, it is time to go back and catch up.

 

On hold right now:

Swedish mystery author, Kjell Eriksson’s ninth book in his Ann Lindell series (“The Deathwatch Beetle”) was just released. This time around Lindell finds herself investigating the cold case of a young woman (Cecilia Karlsson) who disappeared from the island where Lindell is living. Lindell receives a tip that Cecilia has been spotted alive. When she attempts to uncover the truth about the case, she finds an old love interest of Cecilia’s who carries a large secret while someone else is hiding on the island waiting for revenge.

C. J. Farrington’s first book in the Olga Pushkin mystery series called “Death on the Trans-Siberian Express” came out earlier this year and the second is set to come out sometime in 2022. Pushkin is a Railway Engineer in the quiet, small town of Roslazny in Russia, but is striving to be a bestselling author. It doesn’t take long for Pushkin to become involved in drama and secrets which include Poison-pen letters, a small-town crime wave, rumors of a murderous witch, and finally an American tourist who falls from the Trans-Siberian train right on top of Pushkin.

UK author Ross Greenwood just released the fourth book in his Detective Inspector Barton series called “The Cold Killer.” After a prisoner dies in jail, Barton investigates but finds nothing suspicious until the dead man’s house is burgled and there is a suspicious fire. Everyone he tries to interview about the death disappears and it doesn’t take long until he starts receiving threats.

 Reading right now:

English author Alice Feeney’s “Rock Paper Scissors” is the latest in her stand-along novels which seem to all be dark and unsettling. Supposedly her 2020 book “His & Hers” is being adapted as a TV series. Her latest is about a couple who are trying to save their marriage with a trip to Scotland for their anniversary. Unfortunately for them there is someone in their background who doesn’t want them to stay alive to celebrate.

                  

On hold right now:

Tess Little’s second stand-alone novel is “The Last Guest.” Elspeth Bell makes the mistake of attending her ex-husband’s, Richard Bryant, birthday party, she is only one of eight guests. When Richard ends up dead, the guests find themselves having an Agatha Christie moment while each examine their memories of Richard and try to determine who might have killed him. This would make a great movie especially since Richard has a very unusual pet – an octopus who shares the spotlight with the dinner guests (think of “My Octopus Teacher”).

Other Mysterious Things:

The extremely popular Amor Towles’ latest is “The Lincoln Highway.” While perhaps not a traditional mystery, there are certainly elements that could very well make this popular with those who enjoy close cousins to the mystery novel. It takes place in 1954 when young Emmett Watson returns home from the juvenile work farm that he served 15 months for involuntary manslaughter. The warden from the work farm offers to drop Emmett off where he can pick up his young brother with the plan that they will move to California. Unfortunately, two friends from the work farm have escaped and are hiding in the back of the warden’s car.