Suspenseful and bleak
927871
Will the narcissistic boor get his comeuppance?  Watch.
2598319
This a a bit of a different take on the post-apocalyptic novel; it's somewhat more of a thinking-person's pa novel than most of the genre.  It is bleak, but there is beauty in the bleakness, as opposed to something like The Road, which, while beautifully written, takes bleak to a whole 'nother level.  It brought tears to my eyes and put me in a funk for most of a day, but it does leave some room for optimism in the end.  Heller's writing style is sort of quasi-stream of consciousness, and can be hard to follow at times; this is definitely not a "white noise for the brain" kind of novel.  You must pay attention and work for what you get, but it's worth it.  I don't normally give plot summaries when I do a review, and I'm not going to do that now; I think that's taken care of above.  What I will say is that if you enjoy works within this genre but perhaps find most of them somewhat lacking in eloquence, give this one a try.
702830
Bleak. This book starts in a bleak world where all the characters are guilt ridden, angry, and/or depressed. No good things happen, several bad things happen, there is a short gratuitous sex scene (not romance, but you're better than a rock so let's have sex, sex scene), and then the books ends in a tragedy.  I don't normally write reviews, but I purchased this book because it was suggested as a great read for Ilona Andrews fans. I have to say- nope. Don't get me wrong. It is very well written, the world is well thought out, and the plot flows, but it is a very dark book, without a hint of lightheartedness or some hope it may work out in the end. I'm sure there is an audience for it, but fans of the HEA- this is probably not for you.
328883
What a melancholy tale! Halfway through the book, I honestly didn't know if I'd be able to finish it-I was too afraid that something even more devastating was going to happen. But Bohjalian's writing compelled me to carry on, and I'm glad I did.
Like life, this novel is not neat and tidy, but bittersweet. Certain loose ends do not get tied. The characters are complex and likeable-even though Terry is cheating on his wife you feel a certain empathy for him. Both he and Laura are just doing what they can in order to deal with the indelible grief that afflicts them.
Ultimately, this is a story about healing, about perservering. If you take the time to work your way through the painful stuff, you will feel rewarded by the end.
1870723
In this bleak novel Elizabeth Gaskell deftly weaves a dark thread of history into her narrative tapestry.  While war hovers on the margins of the novel, no one is left unaffected by its horror.  After a sometimes painfully slow setup of domestic life in the seaside town of Monkshaven in the first third of the book, the sense of doom grows increasingly palpable.  Sylvia, the novel's heroine, is isolated by her supposedly protective domestic sphere, but Gaskell shatters the delicate domestic circle that surrounds her.  While Sylvia is left to bear emotional scars, becoming an impassive, hardened woman, Charley Kinraid, her true love, returns from war a ghost, haunting the margins of Monkshaven to hide his terrible physical scars.  The full realization of the blight on Sylvia's life comes when the novel spirals down to its inevitable conclusion, where even reconciliation and understanding brings a powerful sense of loss.
3899260
What a suspenseful, heartbreaking, dark and difficult read.  These are characters straight out of isolated, rural Vermont.  Frank Roth, PI and ex-cop, helps the police with tough crimes.  As he investigates a friend's missing niece, a twisted tale of young women missing and babies being stolen unravels.  Mr. Rickstad describes a tough, drinking too much, lonely character in Frank who adopted his 7-month-old niece after the brutally violent and vicious deaths of his sister and brother-in-law.  Seventeen years later Frank's PTSD-type symptoms intensify as he delves into the mystery and struggles with his adopted daughter being away at college.  A malevolent serial murderer now up for parole weaves threateningly throughout the plot and adds a surreal noir-like mood to an already moody read.  Five stars for three-dimensional characters and an unfortunately real-day drama.
1729570
Deep in the Maine woods, a tree falls and unearths the remains of a woman, the only mark of her grave a Star of David carved into a nearby tree. Soon, a wave of violence will disrupt the lives of a handful of people as the search for the woman's child ensues, and the book the woman once possessed in the days leading to her demise. Drawn into this is Charlie Parker, a private investigator touched by darkness, and for whom violence surrounds him.

The Woman in the Woods is the 16th entry in John Connolly's Charlie Parker series, and its opening chapters carry with it an unmistakable dread. The threat and promise of death looms large over this series, naturally, but it feels more prominent here, more like a warning. Or, perhaps, more like a preparation. Parker and his associates are growing older, as is the author himself, who recently celebrated his 50th birthday, and who has been writing about Parker for going on 20 years. I can't help but feel like Connolly is beginning to move his pieces closer toward an end game, tightening the narrative threads of particular concepts introduced in previous entries and forcing his characters to reflect on the nature of their demise as a close ally to Parker faces the threat of cancer. Of course, long-time readers will know that not even death can spell the end of a character's story, but it still feels like the noose is tightening around the series and that its finale is soon to be upon us.

As with prior novels, Connolly gives us heartless killers with odd afflictions, detours into the supernatural, and glimpses of an overarching narrative involving the war of good against evil. In The Woman in the Woods, we find evil particularly emboldened. I believe this is the first Parker novel written squarely amidst the turmoil of the Trump presidency, a presidency that has served only to empower white supremacists. Beyond the murderous Quayle and his companion Mors, there is the threat of white supremacy and the burgeoning increase in bigotry and racism as represented by the Stonehursts, the youngest of whom rides around in a truck decorated with Confederate flags. Naturally, Luis takes some issues with this northernmost Confederate idiot, allowing readers to live vicariously in the nitwit's comeuppance. It's interesting to see how the Trump regime has impacted some of my favorite authors and their responses to the creeping nature of this odious moron's hate into their work. In Stephen King's The Outsider, we saw graves desecrated by swastikas, and Nicholas Sansbury Smith's Trackers series has provided a good bit of Neo-Nazi-punching heroics. Sadly, the normalizing of these repugnant attitudes by the right-wing is now common place and hate crimes have been on the rise ever since Trump took office, so it's quite refreshing to see characters like Charlie Parker and Luis taking a stand against this all-too human evil. Their actions and reactions toward the Stonehursts had me smiling rather happily along the way, and I suspect this family of rich racists will be playing a larger role in the books to come.

There are few series that I look forward to with as much anticipation as a new Charlie Parker novel, and The Woman in the Woods delivers on a number of fronts. The characters and dialogue are as sharp as ever, and Connolly infuses the narrative with a sense of creeping dread, one that promises to deliver even more worry and upset in the near future. While I suspect we're finally getting close to the end of Parker's ultimate story, I certainly hope I'm wrong. There's nothing I'd like more than to keep on reading Connolly's series for many, many more years to come, but if the end of near, I believe Parker and company will be going out on a high note, and the end began here, with the discovery of a dead woman lost in the woods.
3069633
Bleak House is a novel of immense drama and, yes, heart-rending bleakness. Too many innocent people are ruined by the desolate pains surrounding the inhabitants of Bleak House, from a list of unavoidable circumstances.

Young Esther Summerson, our heroine, looks upon Mr. Jarndyce as her guardian and protector. As the Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit continues on in Lincoln's Inn Hall year after year, it wrecks many a man involved in British law. Although it is Mr. Jarndyce and his family's business that tangles the infamous lawsuit, his interests do not lie with it. Instead, one of Esther's dearest friends, Richard, takes on the role of lawyer upon his shoulders; although his eager and young mind hopes to settle matters that have remained snarled for decades, he pays a terrible price.

Lady Dedlock is a haunted woman, with her secret always lurking around the corner, ready to be exposed. What she didn't even know was that her child did not die at birth, but has actually been kept alive for all these years since, unbeknownst to her. As her story plays out, the reader finds the moral in not keeping secrets.

Jo, a boy destined merely for the streets, fulfilling the only predetermined path his existence could lead to. Mr. Bucket, the detective who happens to be in just the right place to put the pieces together of a very large event on the whole; a man of whom Sherlock Holmes could approve of. Ada, a blessed girl who finds herself directly in the center of Bleak House's most terrible moments, but provides the friendship that Esther Summerson so needs.

Esther Summerson, who simply aims to do the best she can in her situation, just like us all. Through all the emotion, surprises, and heartbreaking news, she's a trooper, that Dame Durden.

As these lives and more twist together in connective plots that are so intricate, you see what the real of existence of humanity is degraded to, and yet, what we could be.

Personally, Bleak House didn't become my favorite Dickens novel, but it certainly is a well-written piece of Victorian literature.

- - - - - - - - - -

Mr. Jarndyce called me into a small room next his bed-chamber, which I found to be in part a little library of books and papers and in part quite a little museum of his boots and shoes and hat-boxes.

"Sit down, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce. "This, you must know, is the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here."

"You must be here very seldom, sir," said I.

"Oh, you don't know me!" he returned. "When I am deceived or disappointed inthe wind, and it's easterly, I take refuge here. The growlery is the best-used room in the house. You are not aware of half my humours yet...."
1250256
Reaves has once again shown his strength in crafting character, in plotting, and especially in creating creepy pastoral settings in this well-written suspense novel. I became immersed in the small college town and its urgent complex cultural reckoning with 'new' immigrants along with the age-old irritations of town vs gown. The threats to new teacher Abby, who is coping with personal tragedy as well as culture shock, grow more numerous yet more confusing to her as the story unfolds. Her grief over a past relationship and her uneasy adjustment to rural life drag on her, but don't blind her to the multifarious tensions she unleashes as she witnesses, reveals and then tries to solve a gruesome murder. Reaves draws Abby with great sympathy: her urbanity, her competence in math and in teaching, her kindness to a neighborhood Latinx family, and her quick-witted reactions to danger make her a character to really root for. Secondary characters are also vivid: her fellow teachers, a stalker student, her possibly sketchy landlord, and her grim antagonists will all keep readers guessing as they cheer Abby in her quest for justice.
2515921
This is a tough and unyielding novel set in the harsh landscape of northern Sweden in the early 18th century. Maija and her two daughters and her useless husband arrive here from Finland because her husband Paavo has lost the ability to earn a living from the sea. He has been spooked by the ghost of a drowned forebear. A few families eke out a precarious existence on the side of a mountain, Blackason. Paavo is not going to be much help in the forest either.

One of the daughters discovers the body of one of the farmers hideously mutilated. It's clear he's been murdered and not killed by a bear or wolves as others would prefer to believe. Gradually Maija begins to probe the murder and starts to uncover a web of evil and deceit. She's living in a time of superstition when people believed in witchcraft and devils. As well, life on the mountain is unendurably harsh and unforgiving and starvation is never far away.

This book is quite tough to read. The brutality of the setting and the unrelenting threat of evil that hangs over it makes it a hard slog. The author deserves credit for bringing to life such an unusual time and place. But reading the book, one feels a little as if one is living the life. Some readers may not wish to immerse themselves in some of the deepest Nordic gloom that has come along for a while.
2803972
In three suspenseful crime novels set in England between the two wars, South African writer Rennie Airth tells the story of Scotland Yard detective John Madden and his wife, nee Dr. Helen Blackwell. John is a veteran of the Great War, unhinged by his experiences in the bloodbath in France and by the deaths of his wife and daughter. Helen comes into his life just in time to help nurse him back to health.

They meet in the first book, River of Darkness, set in the years following World War I, when John is assigned to an exceptionally brutal murder case in the countryside that taxes his skills and his already questionable emotional stability to the limit.  Through an introduction from Helen, John enlists the help of a noted Viennese psychiatrist who assists him with an early version of what we now know as psychological profiling. The psychiatric insight eventually puts an end to a gruesome series of serial murders, leading John to the killer.

A decade later Germany is in the throes of a Nazi takeover, and England trembles. As we learn at the outset of The Blood-Dimmed Tide, the second book in Airth's trilogy, John Madden is peacefully retired with Helen on a farm far from Scotland Yard. When he chances upon a brutally murdered corpse on a walk through the countryside, his yearning for action comes to life once again. The officer in charge of the investigation, an old friend in a senior post on the force, takes advantage of John's eagerness to become involved again and seeks him out for advice. John circumvents his anxious wife's efforts to keep him out of the investigation and eventually plays a key role in solving the perplexing case.

Set in 1944, a dozen years later, John is drawn into another murder case when a young Polish girl who helps out at his farm is mysteriously murdered as The Dead of Winter commences. The police assigned to the case are reluctant to see more than a chance act of violence, but John uncovers a complex back-story involving an aged German-Jewish neighbor, a French art dealer, Nazi atrocities, and a fortune in stolen diamonds.

Rennie Airth writes with consummate skill, unfolding his complex plots with ease and painting fully three-dimensional portraits of the characters in these three engaging novels. If you're attracted to ably-written crime stories that bear no resemblance to the formulaic drawing-room who-dunits of years past, you'll enjoy these three books. Read them in chronological order, though. The reading experience deepens as you observe the aging protagonists live out their lives.

(From Mal Warwick's Blog on Books)
2081527
I tore through this book. It's very well-written, and grabs you from page one. Although I am not a fan of levity or overly-positive stories, I found this story to be uniquely adept at dragging the reader down. The characters' mindsets for the most part become increasingly trapped and depressed as the tale progresses, which the author does such a good job of conveying I started to feel the same way while reading it. I couldn't put the book down; but I found myself wishing I would because it really started to wear on me. Save Yourself has almost nothing positive in it, and is overall just very bleak. For that reason I'm giving this book 3 stars. The author is however extremely talented and weaves the characters' stories together completely seamlessly, which makes for a particularly dramatic conclusion. The perspectives of the main characters are well-represented and believable, which keeps you hooked. The characters really have staying power, and I've been thinking about the story since I finished reading it. Tl;dr = Superb writing, insightful narratives, highly depressing.
2269949
McMurdo Sound, in Antarctica, is the end of the world. At least, that's how it seems. It's no place for people, that's for sure.

And yet there are people there: isolated, imprisoned by their job, trapped by the weather in one of the bleakest wastelands on the planet.

There are a limited number of things to do to pass the time, playing games and telling stories being the main ones. And when the narrator is befriended by Brian, a man who has already been at McMurdo Sound for two years when he arrives there, he finds himself in the company of a man better at both those things than he is.

For Brian's stories seem real. He makes them come to life.

The story is wonderfully written, a taut, suspenseful piece with not a wasted word. The pace is unhurried, the fear builds steadily and the denouement is as devastating as it is inevitable.

I urge you to take a trip to McMurdo Sound: you will find it to be a truly chilling experience.
174478
This book must have taken an incredible amount of research to write; its bleak tone was perfect for the depressing subject matter.  The author's skillful writing sucked me in, and I found it very hard to put down.  There was a very disturbing account of child rape that bothered me for days--even though it was fictional--because the perpetrator narrated it so nonchalantly.  That just demonstrates the author's talent for switching viewpoints among even the minor characters.

This novel follows 3 members of a family, which can get confusing--especially when it dragged in a few places with too much detail.  Nevertheless, it disturbed me long after I finished it--that's how realistic it was.
4889669
The Harrowing is an apt title this suspense thriller that contains many vivid moments of gut-wrenching gore and nightmarish violence. This is the author's first book, but he already displays a knack for the genre as well as an uncommon talent for scene-setting and description. When private investigator Zoe Flynn notices a distant, darkly cloaked figure everywhere she goes, you can envision the cruel, demented grin hidden just beneath the figures black hat. Heres how the writer describes it:

"Across the rain-shrouded street a figure stood, watching. It was impossible to determine if it was a man or a woman. The clothing was all black and the brim of a large, black fedora obscured the face. A long, black trench coat wrapped the stranger in a veil of indistinctness. The rain had slacked to a misting wall of moisture that danced with wisps of fog and obscured the mysterious face to a wraith-like state."

At 265 pages, Harrowing is a fast-paced, entertaining journey. I had a hard time putting the book down as I tried to figure out what kinds of creatures were tormenting poor Zoe and her family, and why they were doing it. The battle being waged over the detective has many unexpected turns and takes a deeper look at human existence and spirituality than many horror novels. I found The Harrowing to be an engaging, thought-provoking first novel by a promising author. I'm looking forward to Mr. Barber's next book.
569717
'The pursuit of comfort is one of the great evils of our time.'

This suspenseful mystery thriller has a basic set-up, but grabs you by the throat, tightening its grip, until eventually truths start to shake out, and you can gasp an elated breath. Mum and Dad retire from London to a Swedish farm, and several months pass. Dad calls saying Mum is ill, sick in the head. She's got conspiracy theories and dead bodies on her mind. She's on her way back to London to see you. Call a doctor and get her help. Mum shows up with a satchel of evidence, pleading to let her tell you her story. You let her. She details life after moving to the farm, and whips out evidence from her satchel when it's appropriate. Who to believe? Has there been a murderous conspiracy in the small Swedish town, or is Mum losing her grip on reality?
654641
Good descriptive prose in many parts and truly horrifying. However, it is 100% bleak. The ending is not hopeful, but gives the impression that the boy will simply continue to suffer, surviving for the sake of surviving and never knowing what living should be like.