Book Review: HAIRPIN BRIDGE by Taylor Adams

 

Title: HAIRPIN BRIDGE

Author:  Taylor Adams

Publisher:  Joffe Books

Read: June 2021

Expected publication: out now

My Rating: 🌟1/2

 

Book Description:

 

Three months ago, Lena’s estranged twin sister drove to a remote bridge in Montana, exited her car, and jumped two hundred feet to her death. She left behind a vague suicide note and no answers.

Lena suspects murder. Armed with an audio recorder, she travels to that very bridge to interview the highway patrolman who allegedly discovered her sister's body – and catch him in an incriminating lie. But as her twin's fateful last hours come into focus, Lena's search for the truth turns into a harrowing, tooth-and-nail fight for her own survival – and one that will test everything she thought she knew about her sister.

She wants the truth. Even if it costs her life.

 

My musings:

 

Yeah, yeah, I know! Before you comment on the lack of stars in my galaxy, just let me say that this was always most likely going to be a “it’s-not-you-it’s-me” type of read for me, considering I am one of the few readers on here who wasn’t overly enamoured by NO EXIT.

 

I remember a biking holiday on a small Indonesian island a few years ago, where the road was so full of potholes that even going at 10km/hr felt like risking life and limb. We took it as a challenge, but it just wasn’t all that enjoyable. How is this relevant, you ask? Well, I felt a little bit like this here, dodging the plotholes, expecting yet another farfetched twist or stereotype to hit me every time I rounded the corner.

 

HAIRPIN BRIDGE is a story which played out over a few hours, starring only three (almost four – or five, if you count the reptilian kind) characters and one single setting. To fill 320 odd pages with a very minimalist cast was never going to be an easy feat. Not only would the characters have to be very complex and enigmatic to pull the reader in, but they also had to have a multi layered and intriguing backstory. That was a lot of pressure on our main protagonist Lena Nguyen, a young woman investigating the apparent suicide of her estranged twin sister Cambry. Basically, the whole book revolves around Lena’s meeting with the police officer who found her sister’s body, and her multiple theories of what could have happened to Cambry in the days and hours leading up to her death. I give bonus points to the inclusion of blog entries, in which Lena shares her findings and theories with her followers. The rest is one epically long stand-off between Lena and two other characters, which I shall not name because this is the only mystery element you are going to get here!

 

My personal views are that if you have a slightly built female who will turn action hero, sharp shooter and indestructible bionic powerwoman, she needs to have a) a plausible history of what made her this way; b) very powerful motivation; and c) some sort of genetic mutation that makes her immune to assaults on her body that would incapacitate, maim or kill the rest of us mere mortals. Google “action movie tropes” and you will find most of them in the scenes on the bridge (bonus points for the snake, though!). Some stereotypes were so crass that I am surprised no other readers commented on them (the small Asian “girl” turned ninja vs the big ugly brutish badies – pleaaaaseeee! *eye-roll*).

 

Okay, let’s just cut a long rant short by saying that this book was never going to be a good choice for me. If it had not been a buddy read, I would have DNF’d very early on and moved on with my life. As it was, I did a lot of sighing and eye rolling and wishing that I was enjoying it as much as the other readers in the group. However, if you love action movies, car chases, an indestructible badass female lead and badies who are almost caricatures, and aren’t put off by lots of graphic violence and stereotypes, then you will probably love this book (I must admit that the first car chase did ratchet up the tension because who doesn’t love a good car chase?). I can see that for readers attracted to the premise of the story and those able to suspend disbelief, this might be a fast, entertaining and adrenaline fuelled read. Best go and judge for yourself.

 

 

Thank you to Netgalley and Joffe Books for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.

Book Review: WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING by Kathryn Croft

Title: While You Were Sleeping
Author: Kathryn Croft
Publisher: Bookouture
Read: November 2016
Expected publication: 16 November 2016



Synopsis (Goodreads):


You wake up to find the man beside you is dead.

He is not your husband. This is not your bed.
What do you do?

Tara Logan lives a quiet life with her husband, Noah, and two children, teenager Rosie and eleven-year-old Spencer.

But her peace is shattered when she wakes in her neighbour Lee’s bed, with no memory of how she got there or what happened between them.
And worse – he has been stabbed to death.

Convinced she didn’t kill Lee, Tara stays silent, fearing the truth will rip her family apart.

But as her daughter spirals out of control, and her husband becomes increasingly distant, Tara soon realises that someone in her life knows what really happened to Lee. She must get to the truth before they do.

Tara made a mistake … but will one night cost her everything? 

My thoughts:

Looking at my one singular star, you can probably tell that I did not enjoy this book. It wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever read, but it was probably one of the worst I have read this year. So whilst I give 1 star for effort, and perhaps another half for getting it published, I am finding it hard to point out anything I actually liked about While You Were Sleeping, except the title, which sounded intriguing, and the general premise of the story, which I thought held great potential and made me request this book in the first place. So where did it go so terribly wrong?

Firstly, I found it very hard to get any sense of character, place or time in this novel. Without actually searching for it, I am still unsure of where this book was actually set. Some non-descript cul-de-sac in a suburbian neighbourhood in ??? England? Australia? Siberia?  Tara’s rather bland and somewhat juvenile monologue is non-descriptive, telling rather than showing, and saying very little that is actually worthwhile knowing. Whilst the teenage Rosie can maybe be excused for being a complete strop due to her age, there was no defence for Tara’s faulty reasoning. There was no blood on me, therefore I couldn’t have killed my neighbour. No, I just woke up naked in his bed, with no recollection at all of what happened, but never mind, let’s just get on with our lives, shall we? I have seen plenty of people in shock through my work to know that there can be a certain sense of denial, but Tara really takes it to the extreme. She either is on a high dose of daily valium, or needs a mental health assessment – stat!

The writing often struck me as amateurish, and the police investigation is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever come across in a murder mystery. Forget about forensics, who needs them? No, instead, DI Holden Hunt (the name!!!), bases his whole investigation on: “Call me crazy, but I’ve always trusted my instincts, and you are not a murderer”, and shares the details of the ongoing murder investigation with one of the main suspects of the crime. Just to bring this point home to the reader, he repeats this several times in different passages: “But I am trusting my instincts here.” Perhaps this is a new technique we have not heard about, set to entrap the unsuspecting murderer?  Forget method – you have instinct? Welcome to the force! I am hoping that no real police detective out there ever picks up this novel, or my emergency department will be full of police officers with sore abdominal muscles from laughing too hard!

So, giving up on taking anything that comes out of Tara’s mouth seriously after statements like: “Turning back to me, he shakes my hand, and I hope he doesn’t take my clammy palms as a sign of guilt”, I read on with the sort of wry amusement that comes from resignation. This book was never going to do it for me. I was either going to give up on it, feeling slightly cheated out of the good read promised to me by comparisons of the novel to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train (I should know by now that this usually means very little), or see the strange humour in between the lines. I hate giving up on any book, but it proved difficult. Sadly, While You Were Sleeping never managed to redeem itself to me with anything clever in its revelations or twists.

Perhaps I have been spoiled by recent 5-star reads such as The Trespasser (now there is one of the best fictional police investigations I have ever had the pleasure to read!), or I See You (a real suspense thriller), but While You Were Sleeping did not deliver for me at all. I certainly did not get the palpitations experienced by another reader, except perhaps from laughing too much about one of Tara’s more absurd statements. Thrilling? No. Believable? No. Even the mystery is questionable, as in the end I really did not care about who killed the man. But, as always, this is only my very personal opinion, so if you are game, pick it up and judge for yourself. Rant over.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free electronic copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. 

Book Review: FOUND by Emily Brett

Title: Found
Author: Emily Brett
Publisher: Sparkpress
Read: September 2016
Expected publication: 18 October 2016



Synopsis (Goodreads):

Twenty-seven-year-old ICU nurse Natalie Ulster has a desire to see the world, in case she dies young like her mother, and a need to heal, which is compensation for her own damaged heart. Armed with an independence and self-reliance that stems from her father s emotional abandonment and wanting to separate herself from a deranged nurse whose husband just died under suspicious circumstances on Natalie s watch Natalie grabs life by the globe and accepts successive assignments in Belize, Australia, and Arizona. When Natalie meets Dr. Joel Lansfield, a physician who is also familiar with grief, she finds that Joel sees her for the strong woman she is, and loves her for all she has yet to figure out but she s not sure she s ready to make room in her heart for love. Desperate to maintain her emotional distance with Joel, she continues to travel. In each country, however, she finds herself confronted with near-death accidents, from a poisoned drink to a severe food allergy to being thrown overboard in the Great Barrier Reef. Too many coincidences force her to ask herself a frightening question: Is someone trying to kill her?"

My thoughts:

Natalie is a young ICU nurse who loves her job. However, lately her days have seemed somewhat joyless and exhausting and she feels that she is not living life to the fullest. Having lost her mother to cancer at an early age, she is afraid that she will run out of time to do all the things she has dreamed of before the same fate befalls her. When the opportunity to travel as an agency nurse comes along, she jumps at it, taking first an assignment to Belize and later to Australia. But soon Natalie realises that she can’t escape her demons – or her enemies – that easily, and realises that she must face up to the past in order to embrace the future.

Being a nurse myself, the premise of the story appealed to me and I thought I would be able to relate to its setting and protagonist. I really enjoyed the human aspect of Natalie’s patient encounters and the little side stories relating to her work, where the author’s love for her profession shone through for me, as did the common frustrations of our job. I also liked how the loss of her mother at an early age gave Natalie a vulnerable side and affected her in many ways in her adult life, driving some of her actions in the novel. However, I found it very difficult to relate to Natalie’s voice, who is 27 years old but sounds like a stroppy teenager throughout the book, which is totally at odds with her professional side. The pages are peppered with her rather juvenile angry phrases, such as: “You want to go bitch? Let’s go.” Or “What the fuck? This is not my fault, buddy. Hell no!” Do professionals in their mid-twenties really talk like this? Not any of the people I work with – it got a bit tedious after a while. Perhaps this would appeal to a younger audience, but I felt like I was in the room with my sulky teenage daughter, resisting the urge to shake her and telling her to snap out of it!

There were also some glaring holes in some of the medical details in the story, which were hard to overlook. Given the author’s professional background and experience I guess this was for the benefit of entertainment for the not medically trained reader and to spice up the action parts of the story, but it took some of the book’s credibility away for me. I guess it is a fine line between bogging down the story with too much medical jargon and detail, but on the other hand there is always the risk that people who work in the industry read it and roll their eyes in frustration if the facts don’t add up. I have never been good at suspension of disbelief for the sake of entertainment, so this really bugged me. I also thought that the story generally floundered a bit, roaming he streets of different genres like a poor little orphan Annie in search of a home. Was it supposed to be a romance, a mystery, a coming-of-age story? The mystery part was a bit too far-fetched and underdeveloped for me, and I wished that the author had concentrated more on the aspect of a young woman trying to “find herself” and overcome the shadow of her mother’s death and the unhappy childhood that followed. The romance part would have fit into this scheme perfectly.

As it was, the book as a whole did not really work for me personally, but I think that as a general idea the story had a lot of potential. Seeing how this is a debut novel, I look forward to giving this author another try as I think she has some great stories waiting to be written, using the background of her passion for her job and her many experiences as a nurse as a base for future novels.  

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free electronic copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: SAVING SOPHIE by Sam Carrington

Title: Saving Sophie
Author: Sam Carrington
Publisher: HarperCollins, Maze
Read: August 2016



Synopsis (Goodreads):

A teenage girl is missing. Is your daughter involved, or is she next?

Your daughter is in danger. But can you trust her?

When Karen Finch’s seventeen-year-old daughter Sophie arrives home after a night out, drunk and accompanied by police officers, no one is smiling the morning after. But Sophie remembers nothing about how she got into such a state.

Twelve hours later, Sophie’s friend Amy has still not returned home. Then the body of a young woman is found.

Karen is sure that Sophie knows more than she is letting on. But Karen has her own demons to fight. She struggles to go beyond her own door without a panic attack.

As she becomes convinced that Sophie is not only involved but also in danger, Karen must confront her own anxieties to stop whoever killed one young girl moving on to another – Sophie.

A taut psychological thriller, perfect for fans of The Girl on the Train and I Let You Go.

My thoughts:

How would you feel if the police turned up on your doorstep one night, bringing  your severely intoxicated 17-year-old daughter home, who you thought was safe in the company of a group of friends? Or the next day, when the body of your daughter’s best friend is found, and your own child has no memory of how the friends got separated or what happened that night. A parent’s worst nightmare – was your child in any way involved, or worse still, is she in danger?

It seems to have become a trend these days to populate psychological suspense novels with a bunch of unlikeable characters, perhaps in an effort o make them more interesting or perhaps to follow in the footsteps of successful novels like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl or Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (both of which I really liked, by then way). However, I find that usually only very skilled writers can pull this off successfully. It is an art mastered by few to know how to let just the right amount of humanity shine through the sheer awfulness of the character, or to exploit those very flaws to make the person appear more interesting or rounded. To put it bluntly – unlikeable characters rarely work for me as a reader. So this is perhaps the reason why Saving Sophie did not tick the boxes for me. Whilst I had empathy for Karen, who suffers from agoraphobia after a horrific attack, all in all I thought her to be whiny, self-indulgent and irrational in her decision making, and I could not warm to her despite trying to excuse those character traits as going hand in hand with her mental illness. As for Sophie and the other self-centred, rude and unlikeable teenagers, I spent most of the time torn between an impulse to smack them, wrench the phones out of their sweaty little palms and tell them to “grow up!” Mike, Karen’s husband, is sarcastic and a bit of a cold fish, so no real feelings for him either. And the police detectives, who could have shed some light on a different angle of the story and given the reader at least one person to champion, were too under-developed to be of real interest. About a third into the novel I had a feeling that none of the characters would really grow on me, and to be honest I didn’t care if the psycho responsible for Erin’s murder wiped out the lot of them. Sorry!

Having a rather logic-driven mindset, I am also sadly lacking in any Olympic-grade talent to suspend disbelief, and therefore generally don’t like reading novels where ¾ of the action could have been prevented if the key characters had acted in a reasonable manner. By reasonable I don’t necessarily mean “doing the right thing”, but acting in a way consistent with the personality traits they are endowed with. I would hope that any average citizen Jane Doe mother, whose daughter’s best friend has just been murdered would surely call the police as soon as she fears for her child’s safety or has any theory as to who could be responsible for the crime. Especially if she had been attacked herself in the past and still lived with the consequences of that event. In my personal opinion she would have to have a pretty strong reason not to do so, unless she is a complete idiot. I would think that in the real world this same mother would be making a nuisance of herself, calling the police daily to check on any developments and test her theories, and insist that everything possible is being done to keep her daughter safe.  Given the circumstances of Sophie’s involvement that night, I would certainly not let my own child out of my sight for a while and put measures in place to ensure her safety – the child is only 17, for crying out loud! I would also hope that any average citizen teenage girl, whose best friend has just been murdered and who receives creepy photos and messages on her phone, would also be scared out of her wits and pretty keen to let a parent or the police know – or at least act scared instead of just like any stereotypical obnoxious teen going about her daily business. The only thing I could think was: “Are these people for real?” Sadly for me the answer was no.

All in all, whilst I really liked the premise of the book and pounced on the opportunity to receive a preview copy from Netgalley, Saving Sophie sadly was not my cup of tea. Seeing that many readers really enjoyed it, I guess I am one of the minority, but one quite happy to stick with novels where I can like and relate to at least one of the characters. Call me old-fashioned.

1.5 stars from me for enjoyment, rounded up to 2 for the general premise of the story, which I thought had potential.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free electronic copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: ELOISE by Judy Finnigan

Title: Eloise
Author: Judy Finnigan
Publisher: Redhook Books (Hachette Book Group)
Read: July 07 - 08, 2013



Synopsis (Goodreads):

She was a daughter, a wife, a mother. She was my friend. But what secrets did Eloise take to her grave?

After her best friend Eloise dies from breast cancer, Cathy is devastated. But then Cathy begins to have disturbing dreams that imply Eloise's death was not all it seems.

With a history of depression, Cathy is only just recovering from a nervous breakdown and her husband Chris, a psychiatrist, is acutely aware of his wife's mental frailty. When Cathy tells Chris of her suspicions about Eloise's death, as well as her ability to sense Eloise's spirit, Chris thinks she is losing her grip on reality once again.

Stung by her husband's scepticism, Cathy decides to explores Eloise's mysterious past, putting herself in danger as she finds herself drawn ever deeper into her friend's great - and tragic - secret.


My thoughts:

I’m a sucker for a good ghost story, especially ones set in rural UK settings, so I was very excited to receive Eloise from Netgalley.

Still recovering from a recent bout of clinical depression, Cathy finds it difficult to cope with the untimely death of her best friend Eloise, a mother of two young children, from breast cancer. When Eloise begins to appear to her in her dreams, trying to convince her that her children are in terrible danger, Cathy finds it difficult to turn to anyone for help without appearing crazy and disturbed – even her husband Chris is doubting her sanity. Left without support, Cathy must find the courage to step out on her own to uncover her friend’s tragic secret.

As it turned out, the setting in beautiful Cornwall was the one thing I really enjoyed about the story, even when parts of the book read like advertising from the local tourism board. Finnigan’s love for the place is obvious, and showed in her descriptions of the story’s settings, which made Cornwall a strong contestant for moving a few notches up on my travel list.

Unfortunately I cannot say the same for the ghost story part, which for me was a huge let-down. From the start I found it very hard to relate to the protagonist Cathy, whose constant whining and self-pity wore thin very quickly. Having lost loved ones to cancer myself, the problem wasn’t a lack of empathy for Cathy’s feelings of loss – but the fact that I could not connect with Cathy’s feelings at all. Cathy mentions her depression, her sense of loss, her powerlessness – but she does not show them to the reader. Repeatedly we hear about her suffering from clinical depression, but where is the evidence?  When reading a novel, I am not interested in text-book explanations (I get enough of those at work), but I want to connect to the person’s feelings, the very soul of the character. I wanted Cathy to share her feelings, the sense of hopelessness she feels on waking, the blackness engulfing her with every step she takes, her sense of isolation, of living in a world apart from her peers, of being separated from the joys of life by an invisible wall, a heavy cloud bearing down on her. Instead, Cathy seems steeped in self-pity, without giving the reader a chance to feel her pain. This became very wearing after a while, until I dreaded picking up the book at all. I believe Eloise is Finnigan’s first novel – perhaps telling rather than showing is a trap many first-time novelists fall into, and this was certainly the case for me in this novel.

With the main protagonist having become a two-dimensional and rather tiresome figure I didn’t particularly like, I found it almost impossible to be emotionally engaged in any of the storyline unfolding. Cathy’s dialogue with the “ghost” of her deceased best friend Eloise is wooden and unbelievable, and destroyed the chance of any goose-bumps arising from the ghostly encounters. Cathy’s husband Chris, who is supposed to be a psychiatrist, at times acts so unprofessionally and unethically that I would have severe doubts about his professional credentials.

To keep this review as constructive rather than negative criticism, I will conclude with some points which normally make a good ghost story for me:

• An emotional connection to the main character and an insight into their inner torment / fear.
• An atmospheric description of the setting which has the power to elicit an emotional response and a spine-tingling feeling of fear / dread in the reader – eg a lonely moor, a bleak windswept coastline, a dilapidated mansion, etc.
• A mystery at the heart of the novel which is slowly unveiled and which is strong enough to see the novel through to its conclusion. This mystery should also drive the ghostly activity.
• Dialogue and action (rather than descriptions and explanations) carrying the story forward.

Unfortunately Eloise didn't deliver on any of those points for me.