Eliza Nellums
In 3 new thrillers, women confront past wrongs
Among summer’s best in the genre are these novels by Janelle Brown, Riley Sager and Ashley Flowers with Alex Kiester.
In three new thrillers, young women grapple with the horrific events of their childhoods, many years after the fact. But no amount of time is enough to escape the betrayals of family.
‘What Kind of Paradise’ by Janelle Brown
The protagonist of Janelle Brown’s absorbing and well-crafted seventh novel goes by more than one name. She’s narrating the story some 20 years after she fled an isolated life in rural Montana with her father, Saul, an anti-tech, Unabomber-like figure. She is still haunted by her own failures as well as her love for him. Having escaped to start a new life in San Francisco at the vividly depicted onset of the dot-com boom, Jane, also called Esme, navigates friendship and romantic love for the first time. Meanwhile, her father hunts down his former tech industry colleagues one by one. The mutual betrayals of father and daughter are the thread between them as the narrator reflects on the shocking pace of the social changes that accompanied the rise of Silicon Valley. (Random House)
‘With a Vengeance’ by Riley Sager
In Riley Sager’s new novel, Anna Matheson is still reeling 12 years after losing her entire family in 1940s Philadelphia. Conspiracy and sabotage painted her father a war criminal, and he was convicted of sending a train full of soldiers to their deaths. Anna’s brother was on the train, and her mother took her own life in the aftermath. Now, armed with evidence to prove the complicity of the six people responsible, Anna sets out on a preposterous plan: to trap everyone on an overnight train, for which she’s bought every ticket, and confront them with the knowledge that they will all be arrested as soon as they arrive in Chicago.
She expects them to live with their guilt the same way she’s had to live with the pain — except they don’t; they start dying, one by one. With its obvious allusions to Agatha Christie, the best-selling Sager’s latest works better as a thriller than a historical novel, but he knows how to keep us briskly moving between theories of the case, with alliances forming and breaking apart in a whirl of multiple points of view. Complications pile up — the wrong person boards, a stray passenger mysteriously appears, guns and knives and poisons are lost and found — as Anna twists between her desire for revenge and the need for justice. Sager knows how to tell a good story that keeps us guessing. The book occasionally gives us whiplash but ultimately drives on to a satisfying if complex solution. (Dutton)
‘The Missing Half’ by Ashley Flowers with Alex Kiester
Flowers and Kiester give us a less neatly resolved conclusion but more artfully drawn characters. The novel starts out as a reflection on lost girlhood in the Rust Belt between Michigan and Indiana. Nic Monroe has been struggling ever since her sister mysteriously disappeared seven years ago — her car found abandoned, purse and phone on the front seat — two weeks after the similar abduction of another young woman. The authors capture the tragedy of a life suspended in amber. When Jenna, the sister of the other victim, seeks Nic out, the two team up to see if they can uncover any motive the investigators missed. Nic has a lot to learn and Jenna has a lot to teach as they pore through the secrets of their sisters’ cut-short lives.
Flowers, a true-crime aficionado who hosts the massively popular podcast “Crime Junkie” and is building the production company Audiochuck around it, uses her expertise as the amateur sleuths put together puzzle pieces that the professionals couldn’t make fit. One thrill of true crime comes equally from believing yourself singularly positioned to solve the case — exceptional, anointed — while simultaneously knowing you could just as easily have been the victim. Although there’s no shortage of novels with a similar theme, Flowers and Keister distinguish this one with their eye for mingled nostalgia and grief, as Nic picks at her past like a scab and confronts her own failings. Some truly unexpected revelations in the obligatory final twists make this the kind of book you go back to the beginning to reread. (Bantam)
Each of these three novels shows a young woman nearly buried under the weight of her past. But as they dig into that past, the weight shifts from old treacheries to the betrayals they’ve committed themselves in the long struggle to break free.
Eliza Nellums is the author of “All That’s Bright and Gone” and “The Bone Cay.”