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The Suspect // by Fiona Barton

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//published 2019//

Last year I read and quite enjoyed The Widow, which centered around a (no surprise) widow, a reporter, and a detective.  Later in the year Barton’s second book appeared, The Child, wherein the reporter (Kate) and the detective (Bob) show up again.  While I didn’t enjoy The Child as much as The Widow, it was still a very readable story and I was excited to learn that Kate and Bob would be back for a third installment.

The Suspect felt like a more personal story.  At Bob’s end, his wife is suffering from Stage IV cancer with a very poor prognosis.  Kate’s oldest son, Jake, left the country at the end of the last book (two years prior), dropping out of college and heading off to Thailand to work with sea turtles and “find himself.”  Since then, contact with him has been sporadic at best, and Kate worries that she’s pushed him away or put too much pressure on him in the past.

A call comes into Bob’s station reporting two girls missing.  The problem is that they were in Thailand when they went missing, visiting for their gap year.  They haven’t been missing long, so there isn’t much the police can do at this point.  However, Bob gives Kate a head’s up, and since it’s a slow time in the news, she eagerly jumps on board the story, visiting the anxious parents and learning how the girls ended up in Thailand to begin with.  She’s especially drawn to their story because of Jake being gone.

Once the stage is set, the story really begins to roll.  Kate’s portions are told in first person, with third person sections from the perspectives of Bob and Alex’s mother in between.  We also get short chapters that are comprised mostly of emails Alex is sending home to her best friend. In this way, we see both the outcome and the build-up, even while the reader isn’t completely sure what actually happened.

All in all, The Suspect was an easy 4* read.  The pacing was excellent and the story engaging.  However, my residual feeling when I finished the book was just one of sadness.  I felt really bad the entire book because Alex was SO excited about her trip and had made all kinds of plans and then it ended up being absolutely miserable.  It seemed so unfair and depressing.  It also felt weird to have Kate so involved in the investigation when things got more personal.  Still, I really like Kate a lot, and I also love Bob, and in this book it was really fun to see Kate’s reporter-in-training, Joe, become more of an individual – he’s also quite likable.

Each of Barton’s books can be comfortably read as stand-alones, but it’s enjoyable to see the growth/relationships between the main players by reading all three.  While I’ve found these books rather sad and don’t see myself rereading them, I’m still quite interested to see what Barton produces next.

NB: All book title links go to my own reviews of those books.

June Minireviews – Part 2

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Sometimes I don’t feel like writing a full review for whatever reason, either because life is busy and I don’t have time, or because a book didn’t stir me enough.  Sometimes, it’s because a book was so good that I just don’t have anything to say beyond that I loved it!  For whatever reason, these are books that only have a few paragraphs of thoughts from me.

The Second Chance by Joana Starnes – 3*

//published 2014//

In this P&P variation, the characters from that classic also meet up with the characters from Sense and Sensibility.  This was a book that I really wanted to like, but just didn’t.  It was boring, there wasn’t really any kind of villain, Darcy spent way too much time wandering around being morose, and the whole book was just kind of choppy.  It wasn’t horrible, but it definitely wasn’t great.

For those who are interested, there is a more detailed review over on my P&P blog here.

Planting With Perennials by Richard Bird – 3*

//published 2002//

This is a really basic introduction to perennials.  If you literally aren’t even sure what a perennial is, this would be a great place to start.  However, if you’ve worked with them at all, you probably already know most of the information in this book.  There are a lot of photographs and some nice charts.  And since this book doesn’t claim to *be* anything other than an introduction to the topic, I can’t really fault it for being just that.

Ring of Truth by Jaclyn Weist – 3*

//published 2015//

I love a good fake-relationship trope, but I have to admit that this one wasn’t really very good!  While it would have made decent sense for these two people who just met to pretend they were dating, pretending that they were engaged made legit no sense and just created all sorts of unnecessary drama.  I was also confused about why they both acted like they couldn’t make their relationship real…  like… nothing to lose??  You were total strangers a week ago, so even if the other person thinks dating for real is stupid, oh well??  Finally, in the end, they go straight into being really engaged, even though they’ve only known each about three weeks!  What?!

The thing is, despite the fact that this book was thoroughly implausible, I completely enjoyed it!  It was just so innocent and happy.  No sex, no swearing, just purely relaxing and adorable.  I actually really liked the characters a lot, and would have been willing to forgive a lot of the story if they had just started dating in the end (and then an epilogue where they are happily married a year later or something), but leaping straight into being engaged felt ridiculous given the short time frame.

For now, I’m giving the rest of this series a miss, but if I find myself yearning for some quietly innocent romance, I may pick the next one up!

This is Book #2 for #20BooksofSummer!

The Child by Fiona Barton – 3.5*

//published 2017//

I recently read and enjoyed The Widow by the same author, so when I saw she had another book with some overlapping characters, I checked it out from the library.  I picked up this book coming off a bit of a slump wherein I basically was reading nothing but terrible P&P variations, so it took me a little bit to get into it, but once I did, I found it engaging but not electrifying.  While I wanted to find out how things were going to come together, there was never really any sense of urgency.  There were also some reveals that felt just painfully obvious but took forever to get to.  In many ways, it felt like it didn’t really matter if the mystery was ever solved or not.

The reporter from The Widow, Kate, is the main recurring character, and I liked her even better in this book.  And while it was fun to read this story with the background of The Widow in my mind, this could definitely be read as its own book with no trouble.  All in all, a 3.5* read.  It looks like Barton is going to publish a third book early next year, so I’ll probably pick that one up as well.  Hopefully it will have a little more zip.

The Possible by Tara Altebrando – 3*

//published 2017//

This was a book that came in a book box, so it was a totally random read for me.  I kind of like picking up the book box books, because they get me a little out of my comfort zone.  This one was engaging, but the story was a bit scattered at times, and there was some inconsistency with the characters.  (For instance, the lady doing the interviews is presented in the end as though she is a “good guy,” but at one point earlier in the story she had obviously manipulated what people had said to make things more dramatic/imply things that weren’t true… and that’s never addressed, she just goes back to being a good guy…)  The conclusion was decent, and I definitely was kept unsure throughout the story as to whether or not the ability to control things with the mind was a real possibility.  All in all, I didn’t mind reading this book, but it didn’t inspire to find out what else Atlebrando has written.

 

The Widow // by Fiona Barton

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//published 2016//

I usually find it moderately annoying when books told in 3rd person insist on heading each chapter with the name of perspective.  Like yes, I KNOW we’re hearing this from Josh’s point of view because the first sentence is, “Josh turned his head and saw Ellie coming down the hallway.”  I don’t need “JOSH” at the top of the chapter, sheesh.  But in this book, for some reason I loved the way that each chapter stated who it was about – but instead of names, it used their roles:  The Widow.  The Reporter.  The Detective.  While each of these main characters developed into individuals, the truth of the matter was that in this story, their roles were the most important part of who they were.

The Widow is one of those thrillers that I felt like I saw everywhere when it was first published (at the end of the post I’ll link to multiple reviews I read at the time), but since I rarely read ARCs, I’m always a couple of years behind everyone else.  :-D  (But that’s the way I like it…  ARCs are just too much pressure!  I don’t like all those deadlines and feeling bad if I don’t like a book someone sent me.  What I do like is if I feel like reading nothing but trashy Pride and Prejudice variations for a week like I have recently, it doesn’t matter!  No obligations!  Freedom!  :-D)

The pacing in this book was excellent, and was a huge part of why the book worked overall.  We start in June 2010, from the perspective of both the Widow and the Reporter, but after a few chapters, we pick up with the Detective in October 2006.  The Widow’s perspective is first person but everyone else is third person.  It seemed like this should have been annoying, but I actually liked it.  It meant that the Widow’s perspective was still the most biased one, and while I wouldn’t exactly term her as an unreliable narrator, she trended a bit that direction (don’t we all), and I was never exactly sure where the facts ended and her interpretation of the facts began.

At first, there doesn’t seem to be much connection between the case the Detective is working on in 2006 and the story the Reporter is trying to cash in on in 2010.  (Aside:  Don’t worry, everyone has real names in the book, and are only referred to by their titles in the chapter headings.  But for the simplicity of this review, I’m going with titles instead of names.)  But as the two timelines start to merge, bits and pieces come together, and it was done quite well.  I genuinely had no idea if the Husband was guilty or not – like I was pretty sure he was because he’s obviously a manipulative piece of trash, but then something else would come to light and I would wonder if he really was just a victim of circumstance who also happened to be a crappy person.  Why else would the Widow have stayed with him?  I can’t imagine staying with my husband if he was accused of such a crime – unless I was completely certain of his innocence.  Throughout the story, I was never sure if the Widow stayed with him because she knew he was innocent or because she didn’t know what else to do.

In some ways, the Widow was a frustrating person, because she had allowed the Husband to control her for so long.  But  like so many people in emotionally abusive relationships, she just didn’t see what he was doing.  And it’s one of those things – some of what he does isn’t exactly wrong, but then he goes a step too far.  Like it isn’t a bad thing to check in on your loved one and make sure things are alright… but double-checking her stories with other people to make sure they match is a bit creepy.

Pornography is also a big part of this story, and I really, really appreciated that it wasn’t presented as a harmless “private matter” like it so often is.  Instead, the dark truth about pornography was brought forward – how it’s quite addictive, and becomes something that people not only want to see more of, but to see more and more extreme examples of.  I personally feel that pornography is such a huge blot on our society, and it horrifies me how it’s so brushed off as not that big of a deal.  For a modern society that claims to be oh-so concerned about women’s rights, it’s kind of mind-blowing that watching endless hours of women being beaten and raped online is just a “personal choice” that other people shouldn’t get all judgy about, apparently.  While this book wasn’t remotely preachy, parts of this story showed how genuinely harmful pornography can be (and more often than not IS), how the images and concepts that we feed into our brains constantly start to become something that we see as a potential reality.  Anyway, that’s just my interpretation of a thread that’s running through the story, never something that’s explicitly discussed or analyzed in the actual book.

I will say that I felt like the weak point of this book was the actual investigation.  While I liked the Detective as a character, I wasn’t particularly impressed with his detecting skills.  It felt like he just jumped from one random suspect to another without a lot of proof, and there was a witness whose word they took entirely too seriously without any other collaborative proof.  Instead of working through the clues to find a suspect, he would find a suspect and then start trying to make the clues match, and the whole thing made me hope that he wasn’t ever in charge of finding out what happened to one of my loved ones, should I have need of a detective in my future.

Still, for me, this was an easy 4* read.  It was a sad book and in many ways difficult – it’s not a book that I would necessarily read again, but I would definitely be willing to read whatever else Barton brings to the table.  I recommend The Widow if you like your thrillers on the somewhat slow-burn side, examining different sides of a relationship and bringing dark secrets to light.

For some other perspectives, please check out all the reviews from blogs that I follow!  This one was recommended by –