I almost did after reading the opening pages of this terrific novel. That’s how strong the opener is, and explains why I kept flipping pages long after the light should have gone out…
I’ve been a huge fan of the Poe and Bradshaw series from Day 1 and follow them avidly. Each of the previous books have genius plotting, really well-done characterizations, and an ironic humor that contrasts nicely to some of the darker bits. Because there are darker bits.
But the stakes are raised in this one. A sniper had been shooting individuals with no apparent pattern. Then a bride is killed on her wedding day, and her influential father aids Poe’s investigation in a rare way, desperate to find his daughter’s killer.
The pressure on Poe and Tilly is sharp and relentless, and it doesn’t help that Poe is due to be married shortly. There will be sleight of hand, psychological reasonings, and above all, Tilly’s uncanny ability with maths to bring them closer to an invisible killer.
A thrilling read, this is an extraordinary book, perhaps Craven’s finest, from someone who’s loved them all.
From time to time, Auntie M likes to let you in what she’s been reading, not for review, but for her own personal choice. These are some of my favorites, the ones I reach for again and again for a satisfying read:
Steve Cavanagh knocks it out of the park with his new Eddie Flynn legal thriller, Two Kinds of Stranger, which may be his most perfectly twisted plot yet, and he’s a master at it. Eddie is a conman turned lawyer who won’t hesitate to step outside the law to bring justice.
This case comes too close to home when a stalker client threatens his daughter, ex-wife and her new lawyer husband. At the same time, he and his team have taken on the case of a young woman whose life had been about espousing random acts of kindness. In an ironic twist, that same instinct has led to her being poisoned, while her cheating husband and his lover are also poisoned. While the duo die, Ellie Parker manages to survive but is soon charged with their murders, as no one can find the stranger she says she helped who poisoned her, a sociopath working behind the scenes to manipulate her life.
No one except Eddie Flynn. And then his ex-wife’s stalker is killed, and his daughter’s mother and her husband are on trial for that murder. His team is managing two serious trials at the same time, and lines will be crossed with life-changing outcomes. At times you can’t see how he can pull this one off, and Eddie isn’t certain he can, either.
There’s a final extra ending twist that makes it all come full circle—you won’t be able to put this one down. Cavanagh gets NYC and its environs perfectly, which is all the more surprising when you learn he and his family live in Belfast, Ireland. Don’t miss this brilliantly layered novel.
The Marlow Murder Club is currently showing on my Masterpiece Mystery, and Auntie M snapped up the newest installment, a locked room (boat) mystery that weaves a killing around the Marlow Amateur Dramatic Society in Murder on the Marlow Belle.
Verity Beresford enlists Judith Potts and her friends to track down her missing husband after the drama society had hired The Marlow Belle for an evening on the river. But no one remembers seeing Oliver Beresford leave the boat.
Then Oliver’s body, complete with bullet holes, washes up downriver, and the three women amateur sleuths are on the hunt. Soon they are knee-deep in the personal lives of the main players, whose secrets they must unearth, as it seems Oliver had a host of enemies.
Cosy mystery crime at its finest with a returning ensemble we’ve grown to love.
Queen Camilla let it be known that Peter James is her favorite author, and so his October book, The Hawk is Dead, has scenes at Buckingham Palace. But One of Us is Dead is out now, so readers who follow Brighton Superintendent Roy Grace can gratefully indulge.
Grace and his familiar team are investigating a series of murders that appear unrelated, but Grace has a that twitch of instinct that tells him they are, despite mushroom poisoning and accidents that may not be what they seem.
At a local funeral, a man enters the church late to see a fellow a few rows ahead of him he knows to be dead–because he gave that man’s eulogy. What these disparate incidents have in common becomes the latest chase to find a canny killer.
Grace’s respect and detail of police procedures is at full mast here, as is his frustration at being behind the desk too much. Another great installment in a long-running series that never disappoints.
I had fears that SJ Bennett’s series featuring Queen Elizabeth would come to an end with the passing of the monarch, but Bennett’s Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series continues with A Death in Diamonds by heading back in time to 1957 with a young Queen finding her voice. And now she’s opened up a host of years to pull from as the series continues.
When two people are murdered and the Queen finds herself used as the alibi for one of the murders, all the while trying to learn her job and her nation’s place in a modern world, it seems that the very advisors she must trust may not always have her best interests at heart.
Her ally becomes Joan McGraw, an ex-Bletchley Park code breaker, discreet and loyal to the Queen, and soon this dynamic duo are running their own investigation. A clever and intriguing way to continue this series, Bennett gets the personalities of the royals involved down pat with nice asides we can well imagine might really have been said. A jewel~
Skelton’s well-plotted series featuring investigative reporter Rebecca Connolly continues with The Hollow Mountain.
Filled with the kind of ironic humor Auntie M enjoys, Rebecca is challenged by Alice Larkin, a dying millionaire and former reporter, to unearth what really happened when her lover died while working as a tunnel tiger on the Hollow Mountain project years ago.
With Alice parsing out her story, Rebecca must use her talents and those of her colleagues to unearth the truth of the hazardous construction as the workers blasted through mountains, under rivers, to create a pass, but she soon finds herself in jeopardy when the secrets she is finding threaten the reputations of those left behind.
Skelton’s series at highly atmospheric in their Scottish settings and the entire series comprise great reads.
Nita Prose’s maid Molly Gray is a wonderful character with a unique take on life whom Prose first debuted in The Maid. Now planing her wedding to chef Juan Manual, she’s been promoted to Head Maid and Special Events Manager at the Regency Grand Hotel, a delightful setting for much of the action of the series.
In The Maid’s Secret, the antiquities show Hidden Treasures is filming an episode at the Regency Grand when a decorated egg Molly brings in to be valued is found to be an antique treasure. At the same time as the television world and Molly’s life is turned upside down, excerpts from her grandmother’s diary explain how the egg came to be in her possession. And then the egg goes missing . . .
It’s a nice device that alternates with the madcap part of the auction process and gives a glimpse–and surprising information–to Molly. As usual, there is a sense of a heartfelt lesson being told.
Laury Egan will capture your attention from page one of her psychological suspense novel, a tale of two teenaged youths, but it’s not as simple a premise as it seems, for both of these teens inhabit the same mind and body, with a devastating outcome.
Afflicted with Dissociative Identity Disorder, long known as Multiple Personality Disorder, Egan illustrates how Jack’s early childhood abandonment followed by a series of foster home abuses led to the host Jack being “occupied” at times by another Jack whose actions lead to truancy, stalking, promiscuity–and that’s the tip of the iceberg. Worst of all, perhaps, is that host Jack often has amnesia to the actions of his alter ego. Scenes of host Jack waking and finding himself in a different place or situation from where he started out are particularly harrowing.
It’s a recipe for disaster as the ‘two Jacks’ struggle for dominance. Along the way Egan clearly illustrates, with growing horror, how Jack must learn to cope with the actions of someone who is his moral opposite to the point of causing him legal troubles. The reader identifies with host Jack’s heartbreaking attempts to carry on a semblance of normal life.
The depth that Egan uses to illustrate Jack’s early abuse explains why his “other” takes over at times and how that developed. Psychologists and therapists who understand this complex disease help to explain it to Jack, and thus to the reader, as he tries to find an inner strength to combat the torment of his daily life and overcome the hopeless feeling he has to find a road to a semblance of a normal life.
At once a terrific character study of both Jacks, it’s also a primer on this form of mental illness. With grace and compassion, Egan has created a suspenseful novel that shines a light on a harrowing disease.
Laury A. Egan is the author of thirteen novels, including The Black Leopard’s Kiss & The Writer Remembers;The Psychologist’s Shadow; Once, Upon an Island; The Firefly; Doublecrosses; and Jenny Kidd. as well as a collection, Fog and Other Stories, and four volumes of poetry. She lives on the northern coast of New Jersey. Visit Laury at: www.lauryaegan.com.
Please welcome Laury A. Egan, who will describe her journey with her new thriller, The Psychologist’s Shadow:
The Psychologist’s Shadow by Laury A. Egan
From the Beginning
The Psychologist’s Shadow is a portrait of Dr. Ellen Haskell, a compassionate, introspective therapist who finds herself in a dangerous struggle with an unknown stalker. The novel is a simmering suspense, one in which tension accumulates as the reader gains insights during sessions with clients—one of whom may be the psychologist’s shadow—and through the stalker’s journal entries, which serve as a discordant counterpoint.
The inspiration for the novel originated in my college interest in psychology. During my later years at Carnegie Mellon University, I selected all of my course electives in that field. Upon graduation, the head of the university’s counseling center, who had been one of my professors, urged me to embark on a career as a therapist. I was tempted but didn’t go that route, yet I continued to read books and to follow changes in psychology. When I began this manuscript in 1992 (a second novel), my goal was to meld my interest with my writing, depicting how a psychologist would react in sessions and what her thoughts would be during them as well as later, when she was alone and in private.
In other words, the story let me travel down the road I hadn’t taken, to try on the career I hadn’t chosen.
The novel is a semi-cozy suspense/mystery, set primarily in the counselor’s office in Princeton, New Jersey, and in her home on a forested property northwest of town—places I know well because I worked in Princeton and lived in a similar house. In addition to the familiar setting and my fascination with psychology, I was also attracted to the idea of writing about a light/dark dichotomy: the psychologist versus the disturbed, obsessive follower whose identity is unknown. Both are narrated in first person, thus allowing the reader (and me) to plunge into their minds, with a more in-depth concentration on Ellen Haskell.
Because one of my greatest pleasures as a writer is creating characters, the plot of The Psychologist’s Shadow allowed me rich opportunities to compose a sampler of diverse clients; to imagine their histories, personalities, and problems; how they would speak, behave, and dress, a process which was similar to writing case studies at university. I was also able to don a psychologist’s hat to “treat” each person, which provides the reader a voyeuristic perch from which to observe, analyze, and search for clues during therapeutic conversations. Wrapping Ellen’s story around her clients’ lives and interspersing the enigmatic journal entries by the stalker, was like being granted a chance to perform all the roles in a drama.
Throughout the years, I continued to revise the manuscript—almost forty times—and then, after publishing a number of other novels, I rolled up my sleeves, sharpened my red pencil, and attacked the manuscript with fervor, finally finishing the project. It now joins eleven other books on my shelf, several of which are in the suspense genre: A Bittersweet Tale, Doublecrossed, Jenny Kidd, and The Ungodly Hour.
However, unlike most authors, who usually concentrate on one genre, I tend to write whatever alights in my consciousness. This sometimes happens in a kind of channeling process when a character “comes through” while I’m sitting on my deck, looking out to sea, for example, or because a setting or “what-if” situation has inspired me. I’ve even tackled comedy: Fabulous! An Opera Buffa and young adult fiction, The Outcast Oracle and Turnabout. Perhaps I’m versatile or perhaps I love being all kinds of people, in all kinds of situations and places.
The Psychologist’s Shadow stayed with me for a long time, but it was ultimately a very satisfying creation. For those who have been in therapy or are therapists, for those who love solving mysteries, I hope this psychological suspense will be an intriguing read!
Published November 18, 2023 by Enigma Books, an imprint of Spectrum Books, UK
Laury A. Egan is the author of twelve novels, most recently The Firefly and Once, Upon an Island; a collection, Fog and Other Stories; four volumes of poetry; and numerous short fiction published in literary journals and anthologies. She lives on the northern coast of New Jersey. Website: www.lauryaegan.com
Alexandra Burt brings a different kind of psychological thriller to the page with Shadow Garden.
She tells the story of the Pryor family and the glossy, extravagant life they live.
There’s plastic surgeon Edward, whose hands build the family’s wealth; mother Donna, whose obsessive love for their only child, Penelope, allows her oversee her dysfunction while she looks for new ways to spend Edward’s money; and Penelope, who has managed to get away with more than any young woman should by the time she’s grown.
It’s a study in family dynamics when Donna finds herself ensconced in a beautiful condo with a housekeeper after a fall that has broken her hip. She gets her therapy as her hip heals. But where is Edward, and most of all, why hasn’t Donna heard from Penelope recently?
Donna is befriended by a woman who keeps a journal, but soon becomes suspicious of everyone around here. Who is really on her side? Who can she trust?
A character study with a twist, Shadow Garden shows what can happen when a family will go to any lengths to keep their secrets from the outside world.
Margaret Murphy has a strong history in writing chilling psychological novels. Known for the Clara Pascal, and Rickman and Foster series, Murphy has also written as AD Garrett, and with a partner as Ashley Dyer. All of her books feature realistic characters and chilling plots that will have readers leaving the lights on long after they should have been asleep.
Now she brings DC Cassie Rowan to the page in a complex psychological novel that is tightly woven in Before He Kills Again.
Starting from its powerful opening, readers will be hooked immediately with the powerful image Murphy creates.
There’s a sadist on the loose named the Furman, who targets prostitutes and pretty young woman, terrorizing them then raping and beating them before leaving the victims to be found. DC Cassie Rowan spends her evenings undercover, trying to get picked up by this maniac.
And one night she almost succeeds in catching him, where it not for the incompetence of two of her team members. All the while, she juggles being the responsible adult for her teenaged brother after the death of their parents.
Then someone who’s become a friend is savaged by the Furman. Frustrated, Cassie becomes even more determined to bring this maniac to justice, despite at times feeling sabotaged by her own team.
Alan Palmer is a psychologist with his own fraught home situation. Separated from his wife, trying to mend fences to have access to his young daughter, he has private and NHS patients he’s trying to help, but one in particular has caught his attention. Could this young man be the Furman?
Then someone dies, and all bets are off for Rowan and Palmer, all the while bringing the danger closer to home than they would like to believe. The incidents ratchet up in intensity; someone is losing it, and Cassie and Alan are at the heart of it all.
How these two professionals lives intersect forms the basis for a quick-paced psychological thriller, part police-procedural, all parts skillfully written, that heralds the start of a complex new series from this accomplished author.
Mary Torjussen’s suspense thrillers have all been hailed as suspense-filled (Gone Without a Trace; The Girl I Used to Be) and her newest, The Closer You Get, continues to deliver a nicely twisted psychological suspense novel.
She introduces readers to Ruby, who had fallen in love with her boss, Harry. Her marriage with the controlling Tom has long been over and it’s taken her a while to understand that he’s made her miserable. After a secret affair with Harry, Ruby prepared to leave Tom and Harry to leave his wife, Emily.
Their plan is to meet up at a pre-arranged hotel on a certain Friday night after telling their spouses they are leaving. Ruby girds herself, packs her car with those belongings she can fit in it, and waits for Tom to return from work. She announces she’s leaving him, and while he lets her go, she can’t believe it was that easy.
She waits at the hotel for Harry…and waits…and waits. Harry never shows up. Devastated, she finds on Monday she’s been fired from her job. Now she has no home, no job, and no self-esteem.
While she will eventually find out why Harry never showed, it does little to soften the blow or her situation. Renting a tacky apartment, Ruby takes a temp job and tries to pull herself together. That’s when she gets the distinct feeling someone has been in her apartment, which is strengthened when someone starts following her.
Is Ruby losing her mind? Or is there someone really out there menacing her. Ruby and Emily are finely drawn, and while each woman has her own point of view, the twists Torjussen builds into her plot will take unlikely turns.
An intense look at a torn marriage, an affair gone wrong, and tension that ratchets up and up as readers flip the page.
At once a gothic mystery and a kind of ghost story, Louise Beech’s I Am Dust incorporates all of the elements of both, along with the kind of astute look into the human psyche that has become her hallmark.
Twenty years after the first mounting of a musical called Dust, it’s due to return to the same theatre that hosted its debut.
The musical is the stuff of lore, as its lead actress, Morgan Miller, was murdered a few performances in, and is said to haunt the Dean Wilson Theatre. Is there any truth to the curse surrounding this place and this play?
Working as a theatre usher is Chloe Dee, whose career choices have been affected by the original musical, and who is scarred by life in many ways. A teen who has her own relationship with theatre, Chloe is surprised to find the woman taking on Morgan Miller’s role is someone she knows, and knows well.
With the story told in alternating time periods of Chloe’s life, the mounting tension encapsulates all of the yearning undercurrent of a young woman’s heart. When Chloe starts to hear staticky messages on her work radio, coupled with seeing flashes of movement, is she hallucinating?
The tone of the backstage workers, the backstabbing theatre community, and the workers who make it all happen add perfect layers of verisimilitude of that life.
Beech’s lyrical prose, not a word out of place, creates just the right atmosphere to in this twisty plot to suck you in and make you stay up far too late to finish this emotional and surprising read.
Matthew Quirk brings a former Secret Service agent on the run in the fast-paced thriller Hour of the Assassin.
Nick Averose has a most unusual job. He fiction as a ‘red teamer’, someone who tests the security used around high officials and those in the limelight at risk. Looking for holes in the security, he’s a mock killer, and part of his job is to try to slip past the elaborate defense already in place.
His newest assignment finds him trying to infiltrate security at the Washington DC home of the former CIA director. Suddenly Nick finds himself convincingly framed, and as he runs from the very people he is supposed to protect, he must figure out who is framing him to clear his name.
It’s a high-octane tale of power and corruption; of secrets held and exposed. And Nick is at the center of it all.
Inspired by real-life assassins Quirk knew in his former career as a DC reporter that insider knowledge lends tremendous credibility and reality to the novel.
Auntie M reads about three crime novels a week. So when an author who writes great books keeps getting consistently better, she takes notice. Without repeating herself, CJ Tudor has done just that, bringing out her fourth, The Other People. And as much as the first three were loved and exalted, this one just may be her best.
It’s the stuff of nightmares. Driving home one night, stuck in traffic, the face of a young girl appears in the back window of the car in front of Gabe. It’s his daughter’s face.
He races home only to find police there with unthinkable news: his wife and daughter, Izzy, have been killed by an apparent intruder. How could this happen?
And how could he have seen his daughter in a car in front of him when she’s already dead?
In the intervening three years, Gabe has become a ghost of his former self. Living in a van, he drives up and down the highway, looking for the rusted old car that took his daughter away. For he’s convinced he saw her that night, and that she can’t be dead.
What’s going on here is not a ghost story, not really. But there are spooky and unbelievable things happening, and they center around The Other People, a group who have taken the awfulness that’s happened to them as individuals and dealt with it not by forgetting but by exacting revenge in a way that can’t lead back to them.
It’s a total and complete new world Gabe finds himself in. Forced to confront his own secrets, too, he must figure out what’s really happening, and finds an accomplice in an unlikely place.
Lee Child says: “Some writers have it, and CJ Tudor has it big time.” Creepy and atmospheric, yet a satisfying read, this one completely earns the tag Highly Recommended.
Auntiemwrites Crime-Mystery Author M K Graff 