Top Ten Tuesday

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a fun weekly meme hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

This week's theme: Genre Freebie.

I love THRILLERS! Especially when there are unexpected twists, a bit of edge and darkness, and some good psychological suspense. So I went through my past blog posts and chose 10 of My Favorite Thrillers:

1. The Edge of Normal by Carla Norton

2. The Whisperer by Donato Carrisi

3. Where Monsters Dwell by Jorgen Brekke

4. Girl 4 by Will Carver

5. A Dark Lure by Loreth Anne White

6. Good Girls Lie by J.T. Ellison

7. Five by Ursula Archer

8. Into the Black Nowhere by Meg Gardiner

9. Sister by Rosamund Lupton

10. The Man Burned by Winter by Pete Zacharias

Bonus:  Only Daughter by Anna Snoekstra

If you've never read a thriller and want to give one a try, I recommend any

and all of these! I also list more thrillers I've loved on my Memorable Reads page.

Happy Reading!

Pretty Girl-13 by Liz Coley

She'd left for camp as a normal kid, someone who belonged in a sitcom or family drama. Now she was the unwilling star of her own special crimes unit episode.... more than a thousand days had been stolen from her. And no matter what the calendar in her head said, the flow of time and cruel experience were written all over her.

The last thing Angie Chapman remembers is being with her friends at summer camp. To her it was just a few days ago. To everyone else, she's been gone for three years. She's sixteen on the outside; but inside she feels thirteen. What happened to her? How did she survive? Her psychologist thinks she had help: multiple personalities who stepped in to keep her safe. But now, Angie is ready to reclaim her life.

Pretty Girl-13 by Liz Coley is such a compelling read. I loved the whole psychological aspect of Angie's dissociative states, and I thought Coley did a masterful job of weaving all those fragments and pieces together into one suspenseful puzzle. I also appreciated how raw and real it felt at times between Angie and her parents, and her friends, and the trauma of those three missing years. It's an emotional and engrossing page-turner that I really got sucked into. 

Happy Reading!

Similar reads:

The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo

If You Find Me by Emily Murdoch

Good As Gone by Amy Gentry

The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager

"It'll be a summer you'll remember for the rest of your life."

Emma. Vivian. Natalie. Allison. They're the four girls in Dogwood cabin. Emma, who's the youngest at 13, has never been to summer camp before, but Vivian takes her under her wing. Their favorite game? Two truths and a lie. Then one night in July, Vivian, Natalie and Allison sneak out in the middle of the night and never come back. The police search the woods and the lake, but the three girls are never found. 

Fifteen years later, Camp Nightingale is reopening. The owners ask Emma to come back to teach art. She's a famous painter now...a painter who's suffering from a severe case of artist's block. At first, she doesn't want to go. But then she thinks she might be able to figure out what happened to Vivian and the others. Find some closure. Move on with her life. But being back at Camp Nightingale is harder than she expected, bringing back memories she'd rather forget. And when three more girls go missing, Emma becomes the prime suspect.

I really liked this book:  the summer camp setting, the flashbacks of Emma's first summer at Camp Nightingale, her ghostly visions of Vivian, the psychological suspense as everyone else around her begins to doubt her sanity, the mystery behind Vivian's, Natalie's, and Allison's disappearance, and the secret history of Camp Nightingale itself. It's all great!

Happy Reading!

Bookish suspense...

Title & Author:  The Vanishing Season by Joanna Schaffhausen

The Characters:
ELLERY HATHAWAY-- Fourteen years ago she was abducted by a serial killer. She was his seventeenth victim.  She survived. Now she's a police officer in the small town of Woodbury, Massachusetts, where three people have gone missing in three years, all disappearing in the same week of July. She thinks there's a serial killer in town, only her boss doesn't believe her. Neither does anyone else.  Except Agent Reed Markham.

REED MARKHAM--Fourteen years ago he was the FBI agent who found Ellery and saved her life. Now he's in the middle of a divorce and on a temporary "stress leave" from the BAU. He's also drinking too much. But when Ellery calls asking for his help, he heads to Woodbury to help track down this mysterious killer that seems to know more about Ellery's past than anyone else in town. 

My thoughts:
Both of these characters are flawed and imperfect. In fact, when I first started reading this book I wasn't sure I was going to like either one of them. But while each has their own faults, neither is stupid or frustratingly stubborn, and I ended up liking them both. (I really liked Ellie's basset hound, Bump, too!)

As for the mystery, it's interesting without being predictable; the author had me suspecting a couple of different characters along the way. And while this book won't change anyone's life, it is a compelling and enjoyable mystery of psychological suspense. I'm looking forward to reading the next book that Schaffhausen writes....especially if it's as a good as this one. (And it has Ellie and Reed in it again.)

Happy Reading!

Bookish Suspense...

Julie is only 13 years old when she is abducted from her bedroom in the middle of the night in Amy Gentry's Good As Gone.  Eight long years later, she comes home. Anna, her mother, can't believe it. Having Julie back is the happy ending she never let herself hope for, or even imagine. Finally, their family is whole again.  But then Anna catches Julie in a lie. And a former detective investigating the case questions Julie's story and her identity.  Bones of a young girl are found that fit the timeline of when Julie first disappeared.  And Anna begins to wonder if the young woman claiming to be Julie is her daughter after all.

Sounds like the plot of a typical psychological suspense novel, with all the obligatory twists and turns, doesn't it?  But wow, is Good As Gone so much more than that. I started reading it after dinner one night and I could not put it down. The unique way Amy Gentry chose to tell this story is so compelling and intriguing it completely sucked me in...and it made me want to go back and read it all over again from the start when I was done. And I was not expecting that from this book! I love it when a book exceeds your expectations. And this one definitely exceeded mine. I wish I could be more specific as to why, but I don't want to risk giving anything away. It's too good to spoil. So I'll just say...

BBC series: Thirteen

Happy Reading!

But if you like the sound of this one, then you might also like these:

Baby Doll