I didn’t choose to review Day of the Accident based on its description. In fact, having read the description I nearly dismissed the book. I mistrust too entangled stories. There’s always a risk that the author created a head-spinning start that will not be graciously untangled in the end. That is not the case with Day of the Accident. Every bit of this story about a family tragedy, a woman after coma and a missing person gets explained.

What I liked in the book

The writing

What drew me to the book was the provided excerpt. From the first lines I trusted the author and I knew she will tell the story well regardless of the story itself. The writing flows. There’s no silly suspense that interrupts an action, there are no simplistic dialogues, no unnecessary details.

The voice of the main character

It is real. Her emotions are genuine and raw. In thrillers it’s usually the story that grips you but in Day of the Accident it is also the main character’s voice and your wish for her to be fine.

What I liked less

Implausible choices

I had problems with the choices some characters made. Even with all the background information it was hard to imagine a person who would behave this way in provided situations.

Melodramatic moments

I predicted all twists long before the book was over. That’s why I found some of the dialogues dragging and melodramatic. In literature characters tend to sound dumb when a story is obvious to everybody but them.

Final thoughts

Day of the Accident is way better than many other thrillers I recently read. It will be enjoyed by anybody who’s looking for a gripping fast-paced story, and of course by those who value high quality narrative. I’m giving the book solid four stars.

Day of the Accident will be available for purchase on February 21st, 2019. I’m thanking the publishers for my copy that I received in exchange for my honest and unbiased review.

General information about The Chalk Man by C. J. Tudor

The Chalk Man is supposed to be a very scary book about children and some games they play. The book is, indeed, gory. If you get squeamish about body parts spectacularly falling out of places they originally belonged to, this book is not a proper reading choice for you. I don’t watch such scenes in movies but looks like I need something more than the scrutinised anatomy of amputated limbs to scare me when it comes to books.The only thing that scared me, actually, was the wish to drop The Chalk Man 50 percents into the story. I had been longing for the book so much! I had been so excited to have my request for it approved! I had thanked the publisher, I had received good wishes from the author and here I was, not being able to last through another page. I summoned my courage and continued. Here is my obviously honest review.

What’s good about The Chalk Man by C. J. Tudor

The story does manage to become slightly more interesting after the middle of the book. You start getting a clearer picture of who the victims are and what actually happened to them. There are also a few unexpected and well-arranged plot twists. The whole plot is knitted from many different threads so it’s also interesting to see how they connect eventually.

What’s bad about The Chalk Man by C. J. Tudor

The dialogues

The dialogues in any book could help reveal a character. It doesn’t mean that a dialogue should be rubbed over a character like a thick layer of warning signs: attention, she’s a bitch! Look out, he’s an idiot! Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happens with the dialogues in The Chalk Man. The lodger of the protagonist, for example, is not able to appear in any scene without producing a bitchy remark. Like a stupid robot, she says something unpleasant whenever she opens her mouth, just for the sake of it. The protagonist himself is not able to mention her without a snappy remark of his own even if it’s about a banal, unrelated to the plot, shopping list. In fact, he always tries to impress you with his misplaced humour but instead he just sounds like a distant relative whose silly jokes you have to acknowledge with a polite smile.

The characters

None of them is developed enough to be multidimensional. They are all just tools to serve the plot. They never grow larger than a function assigned to them.

The clichés

Warning: if you know these clichés they will turn into spoilers for you.

Below are a few clichés from the book. How many of them will you be able to guess? If you do recognise a cliché though, it will be a spoiler for you. Question one: what will happen to a pet in a spooky thriller? Question two: what will happen to a person who announces he knows who the murderer is but will reveal the name later? As for the villain, it’s not a butler (because there’s no butler ) but it gets close to that.

The constant premonitions in The Chalk Man

Suspense is a condiment. You add it to the whole dish to spice it up, to make it more interesting. What will happen to the dish if you unload the whole pack of spices in it? Exactly. Suspense is a must in a thriller but it cannot be the main substance of the plot! You can’t lead a reader through the most of your book just by a mere promise to reveal something spooky later.

Final thoughts on The Chalk Man by C. J. Tudor

I’ve seen people praising the book and saying they left the lights on at night and couldn’t go to sleep while reading the book. My experience wasn’t anything like that. I guess I should be scared by a different type of things and whatever they are, they should be better written.

Thanks a lot to the publishers for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

I’m starting to suspect that some level of implausibility is expected in thrillers in the same way as dragons and elves are expected in fantasy.

The Stranger Diaries is not a bad thriller. It’s gripping, fast-paced and it’s a very easy read. It took me just a few hours to finish the book. My eyes were gliding through the book. I wasn’t bored once and I even managed to like a couple of characters and to chuckle a couple of times. That alone means that the book is a proper read for a few hours to kill.

The story is about students, teachers and their families. Someone of them is a murderer.

I found it hard to believe, though, that two main characters managed to miss major spheres of each other’s lives. Their friends and even random strangers who accidentally walked into their rooms discovered the secrets within minutes and yet these two family members living under the same roof did never notice such things.

The Stranger Diary is described as “contemporary gothic” and it’s not really untrue. It’s just that contemporary in this book goes one way while the gothic part goes the other. The gothic floats in contemporary like oil in water. They do not mix or match. There’s a modern family story, there’s a gothic family story. They do not cross. If you try really hard you can find a few threads to bind them together just for the sake of justifying the existence of the gothic part in the plot. If you pull them apart you will have two fully formed unconnected stories. Up to the shocking point that one of them is squeezed whole at a very unexpected moment of the other.

My other, very likely overly subjective, reason to be confused with the story is that its characters’ names often start with the same letter. Try to distinguish between them when you have a dozen of others to keep an eye on: Holland, Henry Hamilton, Herbert. One of them is a dog. At one point the protagonist talked about two of them. It took me some time to remember who of them was the dog.

A few other implausible moments happen when a character contradicts his own behaviour. At first he protects something and just a few pages later launches to destroy it with no reason for the change. One mystery is solved because apparently nobody has ever looked at a historical artefact close enough, but now a teenager did so and the answer is suddenly found. A character gets shocked at an “unacademic” word “creepy” but then says something as unacademic as “soonish”. (That “soonish” made my Kindle come too close to be disposed through the window).

Thus, although The Stranger Diary is entertaining, fast-paced and gratifyingly easy to read, these details soured my experience. I’m giving the book 3.5 stars, but I can imagine that many people will like it more than that. 

I’m thanking the publishers for the copy that I received in exchanged for my honest and unbiased opinion.

I saw a unicorn! A literary one. I mean I’ve just found something as beautiful and presumably nonexistent. I’ve found a good thriller!

It’s Force of Nature by Jane Harper. It’s the second book in the series but you don’t need the first book to understand the second one.

The book is promising from the very beginning. The writing doesn’t make you cringe. It’s not clumsy or artificial. It sounds original and natural.

The action takes place in Australian wilderness, which is a factor in my subjective perception of the book. I know similar places, I love them, and from time to time I swoosh through such places myself. That’s why I giggled at some reviewers’ disbelief that a group of unprepared hikers was so easily sent to the wild. I don’t know about Australia but trust me there are places in the world where nobody would care if you are prepared or not, or if you ever returned from your hike at all.

I gave in to the suspense of the story immediately so I promptly enlisted all possible villains and plot lines. When the book kept going but I was still no closer to cracking the plot I knew I had finally found it. I have discovered a thriller that actually thrills! I then eased myself into blissful not-guessing and just enjoyed the book.

The characters are full and multidimensional. They open up through the story so you get to know them gradually. It feels like meeting new people. Nothing about the characters feels forced or made up for the sole purpose of the plot, and yet all the details play a role at some part of the story.

I found a few dialogues overstretched, especially when they happened at crucial moments and delayed important revelations. I also don’t like it when an author frustrates readers by halting such revelations but doesn’t provide anything as exciting in exchange. I understand that this trick is demanded by the genre but I will keep believing in unicorns and hoping for even better ways to keep the reader engrossed in the story.

I’m very thankful to Jane Harper, the author of the book, and I’m also thankful to Umut who reacted to my desperate Tweet about the lack of good thrillers I’d been experiencing and suggested Force of Nature to me.

The book gets 4.5 stars from me and I’d happily suggest it to anybody who’s looking for a good thriller.

Genre: thriller. Stars from Goodreads: 3.89. Stars from me: 1

Do you know what the worst thing about a bad book is? It poisons your own language. The disfigured style plays in your head even after the book has finished. Just like the characters in the book you are no longer able to express your thoughts coherently. You suddenly find yourself squeezing in words you don’t need, making unnecessary sentences. As if you were now also cursed with having one wish only, and that is to hear the sound of your own voice.

The symptoms of the curse are phrases like these. (They are actual quotes!)

• “It doesn’t make any sense, but somehow it does.” It doesn’t sound like bullshit, but somehow it is.
• “Sometimes saying nothing says too much but somehow the words won’t come.” Sometimes writing nothing is better than writing something but somehow the nonsense still comes.
• “We all die in the end, I suppose”. We are all born in the beginning, I guess. Although some seem to have been dropped by storks.
• “We couldn’t get kids. We didn’t know why. The docs said it might be genetic.” Definitely dropped by storks!
• And the one coming from a comatose paralysed patient, “I mustn’t move. I mustn’t make a sound.”

If Stephen King suddenly got very much into drama, but lost all his talent for building characters and dialogues he could write this book. The plot, though, is also not of Stephen King quality. There are lots of loose ends sticking out from it like threads from an old tablecloth.

The author spins a few implausible characters in front of you, hoping to make you dizzy enough so that you wouldn’t figure out who the villains and the victims are. If you use the trick of ballerinas and focus on one point only, you’ll see through these juggles very quickly.

The plot itself got infected with the worst disease possible. The disease is called stupidity dependence. When this disease occurs the plot can develop only through the stupidity of characters and by the means of implausible facts. The intrigue at work progresses only because one character is an idiot who doesn’t notice things under her nose. A dangerous situation happens because a character is dumb and does not warn another one. A complicated scheme works out because apparently you can post two cat photos to a new Twitter account and get viral overnight for a gossip. Stealing drugs from a hospital and poisoning anybody with them, including hospital patients, is easy. Nobody notices because the plot is sick with stupidity dependence.

I had an audiobook version. Do you know the difference between an actor and a narrator? The narrator of this audiobook doesn’t. She dramatically breathes into the microphone through most of the lines, but if there are modal verbs she has to cry them. Like “I have to open the door but I CAN’T”. Whenever there’s a dramatic situation (and there are lots of them) she gets super intense. She literally sobs through some of the lines which made me want to calm her down rather than continue with the book. There are also lots of kid rhymes at supposedly scary moments and she makes it sound even more cliche because she sings them like in an outdated horror movie.

The only thing I’m thankful for is that there was no quasi-suspense like in Something in the Water. No actions were cut midway by a boring Wikipedia article. Instead, every time an action was interrupted a previously interrupted one was resumed. That’s the only thing that helped me move through the book. This, and a colony of ants I had to battle with on my balcony unable to press a stop button without contaminating my headphones.

I didn’t expect to have a one-star book so soon on my blog. I choose books carefully but I was tricked by an almost 4-star Goodreads rating and an interesting description. Sometimes I Lie is indeed not boring, but is still not worth your time.

Genre: thriller
Stars from Goodreads: 3.76
Stars from me: 2
Available on Amazon

Every now and then I get sad for the trees that were cut to print one bad book or another. What a waste. Thankfully, no trees suffered for my copy, as it was an audio version. When I finished this book I was so frustrated, I felt a need to constantly rant about it, and even more frustrated because I had nowhere to rant about it, my blog didn’t exist then.

That’s why I was so relieved when I found these two reviews on the Internet, first and second. Finally somebody was saying the words that had been clogging up my throat. There are spoilers in those reviews, but some books are better spoiled than read.

Something in the Water is about a couple who don’t know how to behave in the most obvious situations, but probably they were made idiots because the author needed a reason to move ahead with a catchy but highly unbelievable plot about mafia, money, death and Bora Bora holidays.

The audiobook took me through hours of tedious housework, so the book gets two stars from me, not one. You have to be thankful for company when cleaning cat toilets. I was able to zone out and focus on garbage while missing chunks of irrelevant internal monologues. By the end of the book there was a blister in the part of my brain that processes tag questions: ‘He won’t do this, will he?’, ‘They would already be here, wouldn’t they?’, ‘He can’t do this, can he?’ Marvellous grammatical exercise. Shitty internal monologue…isn’t it?

Perhaps, one of the biggest sins of this book is not even the fact that Catherine Steadman doesn’t distinguish Turkish from Arabic, or calls a city with two million people a village. The worst sin is that she doesn’t care if her readers are enjoying her book. There’s a difference between good, well-timed suspense that makes a book even better, and random, unrelated pieces of text jammed into the middle of an action with the sole purpose of moving the finale further away. The second one seems to be exactly what Catherine Steadman was doing.

Reese Witherspoon chose Something in the Water for her book club. I don’t know what kind of housework Reese Witherspoon had to do to come up with this decision. One thing is certain, Reese Witherspoon and I have very different chores and very different tastes in literature.