The Housemaid is Watching by Freida McFadden

Description from Amazon

“You must be our new neighbors!” Mrs. Lowell gushes and waves across the picket fence. I clutch my daughter’s hand and smile back, but the second Mrs. Lowell sees my husband a strange expression crosses her face. In that moment I make a promise. We finally have a family home. My past is far, far behind us. And I’ll do anything to keep it that way…

I used to clean other people’s houses—now, I can’t believe this home is actually mine. The charming kitchen, the quiet cul-de-sac, the huge yard where my kids can play. My husband and I saved for years to give our children the life they deserve.

Even though I’m wary of our new neighbor Mrs. Lowell, when she invites us over for dinner it’s our chance to make friends. Her maid opens the door wearing a white apron, her hair in a tight bun. I know exactly what it’s like to be in her shoes. But her cold stare gives me chills…

The Lowells’ maid isn’t the only strange thing on our street. I’m sure I see a shadowy figure watching us. My husband leaves the house late at night. And when I meet a woman who lives across the way, her words chill me to the bone: Be careful of your neighbors.

Did I make a terrible mistake moving my family here?

I thought I’d left my darkest secrets behind. But could this quiet suburban street be the most dangerous place of all?

*Apparently Goodreads thinks my post has spoiler alerts but I thought I'd kept it generic so read at your peril!* 

This is the second Freida McFadden book that I have read, and based on the two of them, no more for me. Apparently this is the third in a series and the others are better, but wow this one just had me scratching my head. You didn’t need to read the others to understand this as the whole backstory does get explained but there are events in this that seem to contradict the characters’ motivations in previous stories.

The book starts with Millie standing over a body and there is blood everywhere. Now go back some time before, and Millie, Enzo, and the kids have moved into this house that they seemed to get for a steal even though they can’t really afford it. Their neighbours, Suzette and Johnathan, seem super wealthy and since they want Enzo to help out with the garden and it’s money coming in, Enzo is happy to help. But Enzo seems a little too happy spending time there and Suzette is a tad handsy around him. Plus they have a super creepy maid who watches them as though they are thieves.

The book carries on really slowly, with their son Nico starting to act out to the point where Millie starts to think he is a psychopath (the praying mantis, really?), the lady across the street (who keeps her son leashed to a backpack) continually warning her about the neighbours and the fact that she is watching everyone, Ada, the daughter, crying constantly and then suddenly threatening bodily harm, Enzo keeping secrets about money and spending a LOT of time with Suzette, and Millie, well, basically doing nothing except watching all this happen and worrying about Enzo. And each thing that happens you think is going to lead to something but it kinda fizzles out.

So you get to just before the end and find the killer and the reasons behind it. Um, okay. Reasons for people to stay with others? Nope… call the cops, hello! It was like there was a seed of an idea, but in worrying about upsetting people, it wasn’t expanded on, so the whole premise behind the reason for the killing was stretched somewhat. And then the epilogue. Hmmm. After eventually understanding what Enzo and Millie do to help people (and while we are on that, seriously – Enzo keeping his past like that while telling all else? Again…hmmm) it was so odd that the person who needed help (and was being assisted but not to everyone’s knowledge) would not come forward sooner. Did it add anything to the story? Not really. It may have answered a question we could have guessed, but otherwise, no.

So, in a nutshell, that is me out. No more Freida. The book was slow, the characters dull and some really not necessary, the plotline through the story tenuous at best, and some dialogue and internal thoughts just not great. One example being Millie’s lipstick that wiped off but made no difference as it was the same shade as her lips. Words are precious – don’t waste them!

Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt by Lucinda Riley and Harry Whittaker

Description from Amazon:

Maia, Ally, Star, CeCe, Tiggy, Electra and their long-lost missing sister are gathered together for the first time, on board the Titan, to say a final goodbye to the enigmatic father they loved so dearly.

He has entrusted each of them with a clue to their past. But for every truth revealed another question emerges. How did Pa Salt amass his fortune? Why did he choose to adopt the sisters and why were they chosen from such different parts of the world? Have the answers been there all along, if only they had known where to find them?

The sisters must confront the idea that their adored father was someone they barely knew – and, even more shockingly, that his long-buried secrets may still echo through the generations today.

 

Oh how I wanted to love this book and it’s binding of the parts, but alas.

There are two feelings about this: one is that an explanation was given for each sister and the reason for Atlas’s run was clarified. But the other is complete incredulity at what the reader is supposed to swallow.

 

So Atlas has a diary that pretty much laid it out, and where entries were missing over the years, he summarized it later. It explains his start and about the kind people who adopted him. After travelling nearly 6,000kms from Siberia to France on his own, with something very valuable around his neck, as an eight-year-old boy. Um… wow… Then we move through his childhood where he refuses to speak to protect himself from someone after him (and the people around him all seem to feel he wants to tell them something but are quite happy to wait years for it) but manages to prove his extraordinary violin-playing ability. He also meets the love of his life. At eleven years old. Fast forward and a series of amazing links to the next countries drag him along, all while he is in fear of the person who might be just behind him.

 

Now bear in mind that this diary is being read by the sisters on the boat. Dear old Georg couldn’t just summarise what happened and tell them. Nope, each had to have a copy of the diary, go off and read it on their own, and not read any further than where they would stop for the day. A tad unrealistic. Fair enough, the relationships that get revealed within the diary are quite interesting and how people who worked for Atlas came to be. And we won’t (cough cough) focus on the bow and arrow or what aided in the mine in Australia.

 

Then we go through all the ways he adopted the girls and there are tons of parts in it that make no sense and don’t drive the story forward. Why he would go to certain places and see certain people seems like padding for nothing in a book already far too long. This could have been culled in so many places and dialogue made to sound much more natural.

 

But then the ending... oh my word. Worst villain ever. And worst villain’s son who is also a villain ever.

 

So yay that the girls got their origin story and learned how they fitted together as well as understanding the backstories to those aligned with Atlas. But gosh... I was disappointed in it.

Sweet Fall by QK Petty

Description from Goodreads:

Every storm leaves scars. Some never heal.

The House of David has fallen—fractured, betrayed, and cast into the shadows of a world teetering on the brink of ruin. But amid the wreckage, Tennin Aiden Yeager stands with the last of his allies, determined to stop Seditio from finishing what they started.

As a new threat emerges in the form of Mary Denau, a chaos-seeker with a dark obsession, old enemies and unlikely allies collide in a final confrontation that will decide the fate of both the living and the damned. And when a mysterious child with blood tied to the relics enters the fray, every choice becomes a gamble between redemption and destruction.

Sweet Fall, the breathtaking finale of A Series of Four Seasons, delivers a raw, emotional climax where healing hurts, redemption cuts, and survival comes at a cost.

The seasons are ending. Only the strongest will see the dawn.

The House of David versus Seditio. But each side has suffered its share of losses and wants the fight over. So when a child with a special blood ability comes along, it’s going to be a fight to the death – but whose death…

This is the fourth book in the series, so it was initially a little difficult to understand the roles of the characters within the story and to each other, but the main theme that stuck out to me was redemption. While certain things became clearer later, some of the weapons and their abilities never came through. I found the idea behind the relics and the bacteria in Alexander the Great’s body that allowed for regeneration intriguing. Then added to the mix were those whose blood had special abilities.

You have Aiden on one side, who is conflicted about being able to lead yet still show compassion. And you have Mary on the other, who is hellbent on destruction and whatever chaos and physical destruction she can cause. But she is conflicted too, and is starting to make decisions very contrary to her evil nature. And in the middle is Dallis, a young girl with blood that has regenerative properties. There are quite a few characters in the story, but the author has been able to convey each unique identity well, and you become invested in each one.

The writing style seemed to change right after the beginning of the book. It was very (almost too much) descriptive and airy in a way, and then as soon as it changed to the present, the writing became a lot more to the point. The action sequences were well detailed, and the quieter moments held gravity.

What a pity this story had so many proofing errors, though. They ranged from things like missing or doubled-up quotation marks, to commas missing before direct address, to missing words in sentences or sentences being repeated right after each other. A character’s name changed spelling throughout, and at one stage, a character had a dress on that suddenly changed into pants.

This will appeal to fans of clever fantasy stories that don’t hold back on the action. There is a trigger warning for this as there is physical torture, and some of it happens to children, so take that into account. But overall, a great read…

The line between good and evil can be blurred… sometimes…

Thanks to Reedsy Discovery and the author for the opportunity to review the book:
https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/swe...

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Description from Goodreads as Amazon’s description only had half of it!

On a stifling summer's day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. Jack's in charge, she said. I won't be long.

But she doesn't come back. She never comes back. And life as the children know it is changed for ever.

Three years later, mum-to-be Catherine wakes to find a knife beside her bed, and a note that says: I could have killed you.

Meanwhile Jack is still in charge - of his sisters, of supporting them all, of making sure nobody knows they're alone in the house, and - quite suddenly - of finding out the truth about what happened to his mother.

But the truth can be a dangerous thing ...

So with a description like that, you’ve just got to get excited about what will happen, right?

Oh boy. This descended into a comedy at times and was definitely not an on-the-edge-of-your-seat thriller.

We start off with the three kids being left in the car while their mom goes to call for help from an emergency phone on the side of the road. But the mom does not come back. So off they go to try to find her but no luck. Fast forward and they get picked up and taken home, their mom’s murdered body gets found, and their dad loses it and goes out to get milk one day and never returns. Jack is now in charge and does whatever he can to get food and money for them.

On the other side of the coin is a pregnant Catherine who wakes up with the note next to her and freaks out but doesn’t tell her husband about it. Cue the confusion about pregnancy brain and not being able to take care of herself.

In the town (which is boring and where murders don’t happen enough according to the new police arrival Detective Marvel) the hunt is on for the Goldilocks vandal – someone who breaks in to empty houses and steals things and sleeps in a bed for a night. And obviously these two plots are going to intersect.

The plot at this point is still somewhat going in the right direction. BUT… the execution. You have another cop (Reynolds) working with the team who is an absolute stickler for rules and will not deviate from the straight and narrow. Until he makes an error or two that derail things and then all of a sudden there can be grey areas. You have Marvel who tries to set up a capture house for Goldilocks by “remembering” that if you put bait in the right place it can capture the thing you want. What???

So Goldilocks has found the knife linked to the murder and is trying to get someone to get the cops to see it. The knife is an extremely expensive one-of-a-kind item that apparently the original cops on the case didn’t follow up on. Weird. And now it’s just the path to proving who did it.

You have coincidence after coincidence, a laughable fight scene at the end, the cops being given breadcrumbs to the witch’s house and still nearly missing it (figuratively obviously), and a highly improbable homeless man rescue.

All these elements together just made it a story coasting on a path where you know the killer from relatively early on and are merely waiting to find out what happens. The snap? Hmmm… that was pushing it. Plus the story is not finished off. And what made it worse were the number of exclamation marks and derogatory descriptions of people. I dived into this book really excited for a gripping crime story and closed it with pursed lips and a furrowed brow.

The Missing Sister by Lucinda Riley

Description from Amazon:

From the vineyards of New Zealand to the majestic landscape of Ireland, The Missing Sister is the penultimate instalment in the multimillion-selling epic Seven Sisters from Lucinda Riley. A breathtaking story of love and loss, inspired by the mythology of the famous star constellation.

They’ll search the world to find her . . .

The six D’Aplièse sisters have each been on their own incredible journey to discover their heritage, but they still have one question left unanswered: who and where is the seventh sister?

They only have one clue – an image of a star-shaped emerald ring. The search to find the missing sister will take them across the globe; from New Zealand to Canada, England, France and Ireland, uniting them all in their mission to at last complete their family.

In doing so, they will slowly unearth a story of love, strength and sacrifice that began almost one hundred years ago, as other brave young women risked everything to change the world around them . . .

 

It’s been quite a few years since I read the first six novels in the series, but I remember they seemed very formulaic and I was hoping that all would be solved with this “final” book which, as it turns out, is not the final one and does not answer much but leaves yet more mysteries to be solved.

I’ll be honest… it was a slog getting through this. So incredibly long with so much unnecessary info in it. The bits that were interesting were the historical retelling of the trouble in Ireland and the stories behind the sides of the family that you get to see through the eyes of generations. The childhoods and turmoil the families went through and the political angle thrust on them made for intense reading.

It was so odd that these sisters all thought it was a great idea to find this missing sister and pursue her across the world even though she had told them to stay away and that she was scared, thinking she was being stalked. Why would she take any interest in attending a funeral for someone she didn’t know and that she (and technically the others) were not even related to? Imagine someone pitches up and says I’m somehow related to you and now you must come with me to honour someone you’ve never heard of? Especially when you know who your family is? I’d run a mile.

But what was tedious was the repetition of things like people telling others how tired they looked, or someone saying they were perfectly capable of doing something, or the same event that had happened repeated by the other person from their POV. Or even the number of times food and drink were brought into the story – we know Mary likes toast as breakfast so please don’t tell us ten times! Or that Mary was called Merry so many times? And for goodness’ sake – do we have to have a summation of each sister’s backstory again?

Georg the lawyer could have solved all this early in the book yet chose to disappear “to find something out” and couldn’t be contacted. Really? With all this going on and the money being spent from the estate to track the sister down? Not to mention the “secret” Mary was hiding. Again, really? In this day and age, and considering she was on the other side of the world, why couldn’t she have done something about it or told her husband of thirty-five years? Thirty-five years and she couldn’t share something that “terrified her every day of her life”? Nope. The ending with Peter was not necessary. The whole meeting just took up space and could have been over and done with in one conversation. Ambrose and Father John, however, now that was a lovely part of the story.

I’m looking forward to having all the loose ends (and there are a lot) tied up as the premise behind the series is great but the execution has been so hard to get through. Pa Salt here we come…

Hunting Time by Jeffery Deaver

Description from Amazon:

THERE ARE TWO FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF SURVIVAL.
#1: NEVER BE WITHOUT A MEANS OF ESCAPE.
Allison Parker is on the run with her teenage daughter, Hannah, and Colter Shaw has been hired by her eccentric boss, entrepreneur Marty Harmon, to find and protect her. Though he’s an expert at tracking missing persons—even those who don’t wish to be found—Shaw has met his match in Allison, who brings all her skills as a brilliant engineer designing revolutionary technology to the game of evading detection.
#2: NEVER BE WITHOUT ACCESS TO A WEAPON.
The reason for Allison’s panicked flight is soon apparent. She’s being stalked by her ex-husband, Jon Merritt. Newly released from prison and fueled by blinding rage, Jon is a man whose former profession as a police detective makes him uniquely suited for the hunt. And he’s not alone. Two hitmen are also hot on her heels—an eerie pair of thugs who take delight not only in murder but in the sport of devising clever ways to make bodies disappear forever. Even if Shaw manages to catch up with Allison and her daughter, his troubles will just be beginning.
SHAW IS ABOUT TO DISCOVER RULE #3:
NEVER BELIEVE ANYTHING.
As Shaw ventures further into the wilderness, the truth becomes as hard to decipher as the forest’s unmarked trails…and peril awaits at every turn.

So, honestly, with the blurb giving us excitement about Allison on the run and Colter tracking her, it sounded like a good setup. I’d read one or two of the Colter Shaw books before, and they weren’t too bad. I figured since this was Deaver it’d be good too.

But I really don’t feel the same about Shaw as I do about Rhyme! There is something about Lincoln’s character that is a lot deeper and Shaw feels underdeveloped to me. I appreciated his survivalist backstory and how he integrates it and the fact that he works for “rewards” now but he doesn’t feel like he has enough substance. I think maybe Lincoln’s methodology and each piece of evidence makes it feel as though the cases are really solved through clues, while with Shaw’s case it wasn’t what he was looking for but more of what he was bringing to the party.

Okay, so the story has Allison and Hannah on the run from Jon after his prison release and him threatening to kill Allison. We know Allison has some secret about Jon and is some engineering tech genius, but her using these skills to evade a tracker? I think her skills were highly overrated and more often than not, she just used instinct and good sense. Hannah’s petulance and reliance on the internet was to be expected, and then her about-turn when she was learning all these new skills from Shaw and becoming one with them? Maybe. Just felt forced to me. The thugs following them must have been the dumbest hitmen out. Yes they could kill people but their conversations and actions (and the whole itchy skin thing!) were silly.

Deaver makes plot twists a thing. Then he started creating twists on twists and now he has so many twists in his books that from the beginning you suspect everyone and thus cannot get close to characters or invested in the books. It takes the fun out of loving or hating a character and at the end going “Oh no!” And this twist? Very flat I’m afraid.

When I closed the book, I battled to remember what the beginning was about, and two days later I actually had to read a few reviews to remind myself of parts of the book. That’s never a good sign. I want a book that blows me away to the point where days later I’m still asking why I didn’t see it coming. Oh well… I guess I’ll keep reading his books, hoping for a new one that is amazing. Not even Justin Hartley will save this one.

Hitman Anders and the Meaning of it All by Jonas Jonasson

Description from Amazon

 

It’s always awkward when five thousand kronor goes missing. When it happens at a certain grotty hotel in south Stockholm, it’s particularly awkward because the money belongs to the hitman currently staying in room seven. Per Persson, the hotel receptionist, just wants to mind his own business, and preferably not get murdered. Johanna Kjellander, temporarily resident in room eight, is a priest without a vocation, and, as of last week, without a parish. But right now she has two things at her disposal: an envelope containing five thousand kronor, and an excellent idea . . .

Featuring one violent killer, two shrewd business brains and many crates of Moldovan red wine, Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All is an outrageously zany story with as many laughs as Jonasson’s multimillion-copy bestseller The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared.

 

I had never read any of this author’s books but I was drawn by the font and the colour of the cover (not the one pictured here) so I figured I’d give it a go. According to other reviewers, this was not as good as the other books by the author, and based on this book, I wouldn’t read the rest.

 

Granted, there were a couple of moments I did have a laugh but I felt like I could have skipped over quite a bit. So in essence you have the receptionist and the priest. They are referred to by those names more often than not so I’ll leave them as such. The money destined for the hitman lands up with the priest and she decides there is a better way of the hitman receiving money and for her to skim as much as possible.

 

The hitman doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself other than be in jail, so tends to do things to get himself incarcerated again and again (but only in the maim not kill category). But now he has people after him and the receptionist and priest decide that, to save themselves, they need to work together and go into the world of marketing. After all, what better than to advertise the services of a hitman on TV? This will control the mobsters and hopefully bring in money, which they will handle (read into that take as much as possible). (The authorities seem to have no issue with this?) Until… the hitman discovers religion and decides that being a hitman is no longer for him. The problem is that they have taken money for hits that he now will not do. So… how do you use religion to make money? You start a church and ask for donations, of course…

 

And the plot goes from there. Some funny moments – the communion wine was quite something – but it fizzled out for me and I started hurrying just to get it finished. Then, when it was done, I actually didn’t even realise I’d read the last page as it was just over. Maybe it was the lost in translation part. Maybe it was the interesting first idea that spiraled and made the characters more and more silly as time/pages went on. Absurd or satire I can laugh at. This just didn’t hold my interest enough for the characters or the story. It feels like time taken from me I could have spent on other books. This might appeal to some, but to me I was never invested enough…