Lori Eshleman's Blog - Posts Tagged "thriller"

Exposure by Helen Dunmore

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The novel Exposure, by British writer Helen Dunmore, is both a Cold-War thriller and a social novel that explores the middle class lives of a husband and wife and their three children living in post-war London. Lily is a Jewish immigrant who escaped Nazi Germany, while Simon, her husband, is a low-level government functionary whose ordinary life masks a secret past. Their lives are turned upside down by a phone call from Simon’s colleague Giles, who has broken his leg and left a top-secret document in a place it is not supposed to be. This phone call causes Simon and Lily’s lives to unravel. Simon ends up in prison, while Lily flees with her children to a remote cottage by the sea in Kent. A refuge less safe than it seems. Dunmore is a master of the small details and atmosphere of daily life: a cup of tea on a rainy day, an apple tart baking in the oven, a childhood game after dark in a rear garden. She draws us into the minds of her characters: their secret fears, their sense of having achieved something good in life and yet their awareness that there could be something different, or something more. For Giles, whose poor health and drinking have left him a shadow of who he once was, Simon is a shining memory from the past. For Simon, Giles represents a part of himself that he has kept discretely buried. Buried secrets, buried identities, buried documents. All risk exposure and bring danger, whether physical or emotional. Dunmore flips back and forth between the characters, building suspense and tension. Through most of the book, I found myself wondering what would happen next--and what happened next was immensely satisfying.



View all my reviews

I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


After hearing a review on NPR of I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh, I was eager to read this British thriller/detective novel. Revolving around the hit-and-run killing of a child, the novel is both suspenseful and wrenching. The Bristol detective duo Ray and Kate make an interesting team, immersed in a growing friendship and attraction, as Ray struggles with a difficult teenage son and a disaffected wife at home; and Kate, much younger, tries to establish her career. The strongest voice in the novel is Jenna Gray, an artist who flees Bristol for a remote cottage on the Welsh coast. Jenna, who is obviously damaged and griefstricken, finds a new form of action-art by drawing and photographing names and phrases in the sand on the beach. This art is continually washed away by the sea, much as Jenna’s life and sense of self have been washed away by waves of tragedy. A rescued dog and a ruggedly attractive veterinarian give new hope to Jenna’s life. But the cottage by the sea devolves from a place of refuge to a place of threat that reaches a climax at the end of the book.

Mackintosh writes in a mixed voice, alternating first and third person narratives. Her choice of the first person for the most dangerous character brings the reader uncomfortably close to the mind of an entitled and manipulative predator. And the author’s manipulation of viewpoint brings a shock that left me with a sense of confusion and broke the flow of the book. That said, I Let You Go is a riveting thriller which is hard to put down.




View all my reviews

Arab Jazz by Karim Miské

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Review of Arab Jazz, by Karim Miské. This thriller plunges the reader into the multi-cultural stew of the 19th arrondissement in Paris, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians rub shoulders. A particularly brutish murder of a cast-out Jehovah’s Witness sets the stage for an unlikely encounter between Ahmed, a reclusive young man of Mauritanian descent, and Rachel, a beautiful Jewish detective. Ahmed, the downstairs neighbor of the murder victim, spends his time reading pulp thrillers which he buys by the pound from a local Armenian book dealer. His neighbor’s murder brings him out of isolation and plunges him back into the kaleidoscopic neighborhood where he lives, as he tries to find the murderer and at the same time prove his own innocence. Meanwhile, Rachel and her partner Jean track down leads that run the gambit from corrupt French police to a Salafist Imam to a Jehovah’s Witness center in Brooklyn.

Arab Jazz is vibrantly and densely written, much like the urban environment where it is set. There are moments of dreamlike introspection alternating with rough brutality and glimpses of pure evil that give it a kind of claustrophobic punch. Of the many characters in the book, a substantial portion are criminals, killers, or wannabes who fantasize about violence. By the novel’s close, the boundaries between guilt and innocence have blurred, and there is little hope that justice will be done. As the chief of police states, “As for the rest, we have done what we can…But there’s no such thing as absolute victory. There is no end to this fight. It has been going on since time immemorial, and it will continue to go on forever” (239). Entangling themes of violence, greed, desire, and religious discord, this novel’s ultimate focus is the human condition.





View all my reviews

Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In Helen Dunmore’s last novel before her death, a young woman named Lizzie is caught between allegiance to her writer-mother, Julia--“Mammie”--and an intense bond with her new husband, John Diner Tredevant, a real estate developer in Bristol. The novel is set in England during the time of the French Revolution, and paints a portrait of the illicit society of radical thinkers in England, who write, publish, and preach for equality, the rights of women and the poor, and against the divine right of kings. The novel is prefaced by the discovery of an 18th century gravestone in a Bristol graveyard, commemorating Julia Fawkes, which intrigues a modern visitor. No writings of hers remain, except for a damaged letter. As Dunmore says in the Afterword, “The question of what is left behind by a life haunts the novel” (405).

The rest of the novel imagines Julia’s life, through her daughter’s eyes. Lizzie herself has no talent for writing, is not particularly interested in radical politics, and has left the family nest for love of her new husband, who goes by his middle name, Diner. Gradually we come to know Diner, through Lizzie’s eyes--and what we learn is ominous and weaves a skein of tension into the narrative. Lizzie and Diner’s half-finished home, among a group of grand houses under construction, overlooks a spectacular gorge and wild forest beyond. As Diner struggles to complete the properties and persuade others to buy into his grand vision, the sense of entropy and ruin grows, against the backdrop of increasingly violent news from France. Throughout the novel, Lizzie shuttles back and forth between her husband’s house and her mother’s home in Bristol, where she becomes more and more caught up in her mother’s health and the well-being of her new-born brother. Her thoughts on the paradoxes of life and death are bleak, brave, and unflinching, and seem to express the author’s own voice. As a character, Lizzie can be frustrating for her stubbornness and naiveté; but she is all the more real for this, and shows her strength as the story hurtles toward a searing climax. Dunmore’s favorite themes of deception, devotion, obsession, and loss come together in this stunning historical narrative—a fitting culmination of the writer’s long career.




View all my reviews

Summerwater by Sarah Moss

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Set at a summer resort in Scotland, this short novel exposes the inner thoughts of the guests in the course of one rain-drenched day. These are the kind of thoughts most people have, but don’t share. The under-belly of relationships between children and parents, lovers, and siblings. Trapped in aging log cabins in the incessant rain, this is no-one’s ideal vacation. An agoraphobic woman stays in the cabin, unable to savor her hour of freedom, while her husband takes the kids to play along the water. A woman goes jogging in the rain to escape her husband and children. A teen kayaks across the loch in a strong wind and turbulent waves. A pair of siblings torment a foreign child on a swing by the water. A young couple make love all day, each with a sense of unmet expectations. A teenage girl is forced to wash the dishes, and channels every ounce of hate into scrubbing a flaking, greasy, non-stick pan; while she plots to visit a silent veteran who camps in the woods. Each of the characters tempts fate in their own way. And the sense that something bad will happen grows. Someone will die -- of murder, drowning, heart attack, suicide…something awful is coming to these log cabins along the loch. Moss carefully crafts our sense of dread; until unexpectedly, near the end of the novel, she gives a twist of hope – things will be alright,…won’t they? But like the twist of a knife, some things can’t be undone.



View all my reviews

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A teenage girl and her parents participate in a historical reenactment of Iron Age life in northern England, led by a professor and his students. Seventeen-year-old Silvie chafes at the rough tunic and thin leather moccasins, the damp sleeping hut, and the labor of cooking for the encampment done mostly by her mum. But her dad, a bus driver, is an ancient history buff who has planned their summer vacation around this Iron Age adventure. Besides daily activities of foraging for food, hunting and skinning rabbits, cooking over a fire, and exploring the surrounding bog and heath, Moss entertains us with bits of history about the Roman Wall, pre-Roman Britain, and Iron Age basket-making. More ominously, we learn about the bog people who were sacrificed by the ancient Britons and preserved for 2000 years, surfacing in today’s museums. Oddly enough, Silvie’s father named her after Sulevia, the “Northumbrian goddess of spring and pools” (18.) As the novel unfolds, so too do the relationships between the mismatched academics and the working-class family. Silvie sneaks off with the students to swim in the sea and sneak candy and ice cream from a shop in a nearby village. Watching Molly, the free-spirited archaeology student, embrace her own sensuality awakens something in Silvie, which draws her father’s ire. Dad is the type of man who orders women around and resents immigrants. His love of Iron Age Britain is a seeking after a more “authentic” Britain, where he imagines he would be in charge. He and the professor hit it off, just as Silvie and Molly’s connection deepens. Gradually the reenactment becomes more daring and sinister as the men build a palisade topped with animal skulls, modeled after the ancient British “ghost wall” -- and begin to drum back the past. Drawn to the nighttime drumming almost despite herself, Silvie seems a willing participant, and the reenactment unwinds toward a frightening climax. By turns tender, pastoral, and savage, this novel is a haunting reflection on life, death, history, and family ties.





View all my reviews