#103 Thrilling
Home is Where the Bodies Are, State of Terror, All The Devils Here, Famous Last Words, The Displacements, and Nightwatching
Quotes & Things
“A thriller becomes great when it carries a feeling of reality and truth” - David Morell
So many heartbreaking events of late — the floods in Texas, the dead and the missing, the passage of the No Good Very Bad Bill that will make life worse for the most vulnerable. And as a friend reminded me last Sunday — the constant struggle of knowing what is mine to do to help and acknowledging the ways that I can’t.
What does this have to do with the Thriller genre? Thrillers often explore worst case scenarios and how to navigate them. And sometimes, weirdly, that is comforting.
Book Reviews
Home is Where the Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose
After Beth’s mother passes away, her two siblings Nicole and Michael return to their small hometown in Wisconsin to say goodbye. As the family go through their mother’s belongings, they nostalgically decide to watch a VHS home video, but what they see changes their view of their parents forever and the siblings have to decide if they want to keep the past behind them or uncover the truth.
This thriller was…fine. Lots of unpleasant bickering between the siblings, and the chapters from the sisters’ points of view are pretty depressing and dark. I figured out “whodunnit” pretty early on, but still enjoyed the denouement, even if I had to suspend a lot of disbelief about how everything went down.
State of Terror by Hilary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny
I love Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery novels, so I had to try out this political thriller she wrote with Hilary Clinton published in 2021. We follow Ellen Adams, the new Secretary of State in an administration that followed a Trump-like presidency that left international relations and networks holding on by a thread. Bombs are going off throughout Europe, and Adams learns that the US is likely next. She has to use all her knowledge, contacts, and savvy to save the US from nuclear destruction and those who would take advantage of the chaos to create a new world order. It is Very! High! Stakes! One that kept me reading because I wanted to find out what would happen next.
Political thrillers usually aren’t my go-to, but I was more interested in this one because Hilary Clinton was actually a Secretary of State, and I found some of the inner workings of how our government interacts with others fascinating. Even though the plot is a bit ridiculous, I did find parts of it plausible. There are clearly real-world parallels for the characters. Ellen Adams is a stand-in for Clinton herself. Her best friend and counselor Betsy is literally patterned off Clinton’s actual best friend of the same name who died a few years before this was published. Former president Dunn is Trump — right down to his compound in Florida. And the Russian President Ivanov is a direct descendant of Putin. We also get a cameo from Inspector Gamache himself.
Some of this read like personal fantasy — Hilary Clinton getting to say to Putin exactly what she thinks of him to his face, and having him acquiesce to her demands. The blame for incompetent decisions clearly laid at Trump’s feet. In the end, all will be well because the levers of government are once again in Democratic hands. But reading this in 2025 after Trump is once again president, makes this book at once more prescient and more disturbing. The likelihood of a scenario like the one in the novel is very slim, but it does remind us that the United States has a lot of power in the world and it can be used for good or for ill.
All The Devils are Here by Louise Penny
Speaking of Inspector Gamache…
Though we usually follow Inspector Gamache around the cozy Quebecois village of Three Pines, this time Penny takes us to the dazzling and romantic Paris. Gamache is in Paris to visit his children, one of whom is about to give birth, but also to visit his godfather Stephen Horowitz. Things start to go wrong when Stephen is nearly killed in a hit-and-run that seems anything but an accident. Gamache and his family start to uncover Stephen’s secrets and race to expose them before the family is put in danger.
I’ve noticed a recent trend in this series: the last few novels have seemed much broader in scope, focusing on crime at a national or near-global level. I think this is a nice change of pace from village murder, but I think the mysteries are always better when they are more personal, so I hope we will return to Three Pines and smaller crimes in the future. So much of what made this novel great wasn’t the mystery (though that was good), but was seeing how the family interacted with each other, especially Gamache and his son Daniel who have always been more distant from each other than he and his daughter Annie. I also loved getting Reine-Marie into the action using her library skills to find vital information. This was a novel more about family than crime, and I loved getting to delve into the Gamache family relationships, understanding how they can both love and hurt each other at the same time.
Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister
This novel has a great premise: Camilla is set to head back to work for the first time since taking maternity leave, but she is surprised to find that her loving husband had already left for the day. What she and the rest of London will soon discover is that he has taken three people hostage in a warehouse, and no one has any clue why.
In alternating chapters between Camilla and the hostage negotiator Niall, we slowly start to discover why her husband perpetrated such an uncharacteristic and violent act. I enjoyed the novel, though I think it dragged in the middle. I am usually all for character development, but I felt the heartbroken love stories of both Camilla and Niall took center stage more than I was prepared for. So if you know going in that midway through the thriller will turn more into a meditation on grief and love, then I think you’ll enjoy it more. When I started this book, I was looking for a high-speed thriller, but this had so many emotions! I think if I had been in a different state of mind, I would have enjoyed this book more, which just goes to show that sometimes it’s not the book that’s off, but us.
The Displacements by Bruce Holsinger
I’ve noticed a trend in recent novels — multiple perspectives combined with other media, usually audio or digital, described in the written word. The Displacements follows this trend by connecting weather reports, a digital map and chronicle of the people displaced by the largest hurricane in American history and the perspectives of a wealthy white family laid low by this tragedy, the FEMA officer in charge of a mega-shelter in Oklahoma, and an insurance salesman turned drug dealer eager to make a killing off the misfortune of others.
I listened on audio to a story that struck just the right chord with me. As an Enneagram 6, sometimes I just want to watch a worst-case scenario play out in front of me, and that’s basically what this was. There were many dark moments, but also moments of resilience and kindness too. The exploration into how whiteness can protect even in dire circumstances was a little preachy, but not wrong. There was a small section at the end that was also a bit didactic about the growing climate crisis, but this is basically an environmental disaster novel, another growing trend in fiction. I liked that Holsinger really tried not to make any one person or faction the bad guy, always humanizing those who make bad choices, but does not shy away from the human impulse to survive even if it costs other people.
Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra
Our unnamed protagonist, a mother of two young children, hears someone inside her house, but there is a blizzard outside and not much time to figure out what to do. The rest of the novel swivels back and forth between her actions of survival and flashbacks to her family life. Those flashbacks become important later on because what Sierra has given us here is not really a simple thriller, but a commentary on how women are viewed in a patriarchal society — not believed, not taken seriously, not good enough. I spent extra time in the car to finish the audiobook because I had to know what happened, but it was also a frustrating listening experience because I hate when women are gaslit and second-guessed, even by ourselves, and that is so much of what happens here. Also, I find it difficult to read about children in peril, so keep all of that in mind when choosing this as your next read. Ultimately, it was a good, thought-provoking thriller that I enjoyed despite the cringe of how nearly everyone interacted with our protagonist.
A Question for You
How are you managing to handle this current moment in time?
Im managing by keeping my nose deep into romcom territory 😂 What can I say, a feel-good makes me feel good. That plus mindfulness and lots and lots of meditation, remembering we are all connected, is the only way I can get through what’s going on. Thanks for the thriller recs, I usually get into the mood for those in fall, so I’m adding a few to my list. 😊