(4 stars) The Sentence is Death (Hawthorne #2) by Anthony Horowitz
I really like Anthony Horowitz. His mystery novels are such incredible homages to the larger concept of A Mystery Novel. He manages to poke fun at the genre while simultaneously improving it with his writing. The Sentence is Death, his second novel in a series about a curmudgeonly ex-police officer named Hawthorne, was fantastic. Once again, a fictional version of Horowitz (Anthony) acts as the main character and narrator, and the entire novel is deliciously meta.
In this novel, Hawthorne shows up at Anthony’s door after a celebrity divorce lawyer is beaten to death with a bottle of wine. Somewhat reluctantly, Anthony tears himself away from writing his detective series Foyle’s War (which Horowitz actually does write) in order to help Hawthorne investigate the crime. At every step, Hawthorne tells him to stay out of the way and reveals no information, yet they managed to figure it out together.
This book is just so entertaining, especially in the way that Anthony reveals aspects of writing novels and television shows. For instance, at one point he ends up in a car chase after a suspect. Anthony points out how if this was in a movie or television series, the cab driver would be running red lights and darting through traffic. Instead, the man diligently obeys all traffic laws and adds absolutely no drama to the event. He also reveals a lot of behind-the-scenes information about his detective series Foyle’s War. Again, it’s all of the miserable little details that are left out of most shiny and slick stories.
The mystery at the center of the novel was definitely interesting and difficult to solve. But the style in which it was written makes it ten times as much fun to read.
(3 stars) I’ll Never Tell by Catherine McKenzie
I feel like I’ve read an unusual amount of thriller novels this year that take place at summer camps. I guess the remote setting, lack of cell phones, and stewing teenage hormones make for a great background for trouble.
This novel is just okay, and I’m going to spoil a little bit because one of the major plot points at the beginning kind of turned me off the rest of the novel. I’m willing to suspend a little bit of disbelief when it comes to thrillers like this, but this one was just so over-the-top. So I’m going to spoil it here for you because if I’d known about it going in, I probably wouldn’t have read the book.
20 years ago, a teenage girl named Amanda was attacked at Camp Macaw. Camp Macaw was owned by the McAllister’s, and following the death of the mother and father, their adult children have returned to Camp to read the will. The family is made up of a boy and 4 girls. There’s also a worker named Sean who’s a little older than the siblings and has been a resident of the camp for most of his life. At the reading of the will, it is revealed that for the last 20 goddamn years, Mr. McAllister felt pretty certain that his son Ryan attacked Amanda. And instead of at any point taking the evidence he had to the police or confronting his son directly, he instead left it in his will that his daughters must decide whether or not Ryan did it — and give him his inheritance based on their decision.
The rest of the novel bounces between the perspective of the children and Sean as everyone tries to figure out who attacked the girl. I will admit that the ending was pretty decent and the author did a great job with red herrings, but the setup was just so ridiculous that I couldn’t quite get over it.
(3 stars) Full Throttle by Joe HillJust like any short story collection, there were a few here I really liked, a few here I did not like it all and most of the rest were a little bit forgettable. Here were my favorites!
By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain
I have actually read this one before — it was featured somewhere that I can’t remember and I enjoyed it then as well as on the reread. It’s about two little kids that find the corpse of a plesiosaur on the banks of a lake. A plesiosaur is what a lot of people speculate that the Loch Ness monster might be. It’s a really sweet little story with a super creepy (and kind of sad) undertone.
Late Returns was another great one. In it, a man accepts a job driving a bookmobile. Only it turns out that the bookmobile allows him to deliver books to people in the past. At the end of Full Throttle, Hill talks about his inspiration for some of the stories. For this one, he says that he is terrified he’s going to die before returning a library book, and I really connect with that!
All I Care About Is You was probably my favorite in the collection. Which is funny, because it’s a really similar story to Pop Art, which is my favorite in his previous collection (20th Century Ghosts). All I Care About Is You is about a girl who find a robot that accepts tokens in exchange for its friendship. She puts money in it on her birthday and they go on an adventure together. It has such a spectacularly unexpected ending that I finished it and immediately re-read it. Definitely a stand-out from the collection.
(4 stars) Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg
Thank you for recommending this, ClaireBadger! I’ve actually never watched Bojack Horseman, but your review piqued my interest and I ended up really enjoying this sort of weird little collection.
“And I thought about how, actually, if you wanted to, you could say the same thing about life. That life is terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when you’re confronted with life you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you’re going to live. So you might as well be brave.”
I loved that quote, and I really liked just about every story in this collection. So much of it is weird and kind of spacey in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way. But the stories have a really cohesive feel when you read them all together, and I enjoyed just about every one.
One of my favorites was called the Up-and-Comers, about a rock band that accidentally gets superpowers. Unfortunately their powers only work when they’re drunk, which is as disastrous as you would expect. I also really liked the one as told from a dog’s perspective (Rufus). It was really sweet and kind of sad. Sweet and kind of sad is a reoccuring theme, really, like in We Men of Science (scientists invent an Anti-Door, but maybe we don’t want to see what the opposite of everything looks like). The cover image comes from a story about people who dress up as presidents at a themepark. It is definitely one of the weirder things I’ve read this year but I got sucked into it for sure.