OK this whole Amazon Kindle and Audible collection is called “Never Tell”. It’s supposed to be about secrets, lies, and mind games. Sounds intriguing, right? Well some of these six stories were really good – like five stars good. And some of them were “but why?” mediocre. Like “I guess this story had to be told, but why?” I’ll rank them in order from five stars to “but why” (according to me of course).
Grace Logan, a successful ghostwriter is lured in by a new / old story. She’s been ghostwriting for decades, as she prefers to not be in the spotlight. Additionally, her husband just died in a tragic and sordid boat accident. He was cheating on her on their boat when it blew up or something. There was fire and he died. Grace isn’t sure she’s ready to start writing again, but the offer is almost too good to refuse.
Claudia Blackwell was a successful novelist accused of a grisly triple murder that included her boyfriend and a small boy (he’s someone’s little brother, I can’t remember whose). Claudia decides that she’s ready to “write” her memoirs by having a ghostwriter come to her secluded island and interview her. Grace is skeptical, because the previous ghostwriter died under mysterious circumstances. She’s filled with dread the entire time she’s heading to the island, setting up, and interviewing Claudia. She knows something just isn’t right.
Late one night Grace sees Claudia – who is frail and wheelchair bound – running from a strange man and screaming bloody murder. She freaks out and wakes up the house. They basically tell her she’s hallucinating because she’s out of sorts, and nobody is really concerned.
I loved the sense of dread and the general feeling that I had no idea what was going on, right up until the end. I liked this one a lot, and gave it five stars.
As someone who just recently moved into a new house, lots of this story resonated with me. Plus, the main character’s name is Lauren (my actual real name!), which I always get a kick out of.
We start the story as Lauren and Kelsey are waiting for the movers to arrive to move their furniture into their new dream home. There’s already a kink though, their new key doesn’t work. Kelsey’s small though, and figures out she can climb through a basement window to unlock the front door. They decide they’ll call a locksmith in the morning, after they move all of their stuff in. Oh, Kelsey is also pregnant with their first child.
Their first week, they meet a few strange neighbors, who are varying degrees of creepy / weird. They meet Bob (I can’t remember if that’s his name, but that’s what we’re going with!), who seems like one of those men who kinda believes that women can’t do things and is a little overbearing. He also seems to pop up at creepy times, and it seems like he’s spying on them.
There’s also another neighbor who’s a psychic. She makes Lauren a little paranoid too when she talks about the previous owner of the house. Lauren decides that Bob killed the previous owner, and she has to figure out how to prove it. The way this all wraps up really got me, and I fully enjoyed it. Four stars.
This was actually the first one I listened to, and it’s kind of in the middle of the pack for me. The story was really interesting, but some of it was a little hard to believe.
We meet the main character Frankie as she’s headed to work. She’s taking care of a crotchety old man named Bill (we’ll go with that, again I forget names easily). He wants her to make his lunch just right, and if she doesn’t, he’ll end up throwing it at her. She tries her best, and she really does seem to be kind to Bill.
She starts to fill us in on her backstory though, and it’s not great. She had a bright future including college and a promising career. We learn that she ended up going to jail for a short time because she had to steal food for her ailing mother. This is her mother who has basically disowned her for daring to steal food to keep her alive. Frankie isn’t doing all that well.
Very quickly Bill dies, and Frankie is kicked out of the house by his ex-wife, who hates everyone. Bill left Frankie some clues to a treasure though, before he died.
Frankie has to team up with some unlikely accomplices, and it goes about as well as you’d think. I guess I just had a bit of a hard time believing that someone would head out into the desert for hours with no contingency plan, and rely on the kindness and “I won’t kill you or abandon you”-ness of at least two terrible people.
It was a good listen though, and I gave it 3.5 stars.
We meet Jade after she broke up with her “boyfriend” who was really terrible. She’s fulfilling her annual tradition of going to the last restaurant her father took her to on her birthday before he died in a tragic accident.
This year though, she’s extra sad and is contemplating ending it all when she gets back home. There’s a car horn or a siren or something while she’s eating dinner, and she looks out to the street and swears she sees her father standing at the window.
This starts Jade down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out what or who the heck she saw on the street, what actually happened to her father, and who she can trust.
I thought it was a good story, but I really didn’t need the parts about her asshole boyfriend (now ex). It just served to make her look more like a doormat and not actually very smart. I gave it 3.5 stars.
And now we get to the “but why” portion of this collection. I don’t want to disparage the authors and say that the writing was bad, but these last two stories just did not hold my interest. If they weren’t also available to me as Audible books, I’m not sure I would have powered through them. I think I read the preceding books in one sitting (or standing / walking), but these last two took a few listens to get through them.
We meet our main character Ellen as she’s out to dinner with her fiancé Troy. You can tell immediately that Ellen is a bit of an asshole. She knows that Troy loves her more than she loves him, and she’s eyeballing a handsome man across the restaurant while Troy is talking to her. They’re waiting for Ellen’s best friend Tanya and her new boyfriend.
Tanya arrives, and sure enough her new boyfriend is the guy Ellen was eyeballing. They spend dinner with Troy being sweet, and Ellen slyly hitting on Tanya’s boyfriend. I guess we’re supposed to think that Tanya is the “bad friend” in this story, and Ellen sure makes her out to be that, but by the end, I think we’re supposed to believe it’s Ellen. My problem is that I just did not care one way or another.
Ellen continues to be an asshole. She has kids with Troy, then decides he’s not good enough for her, then meets Tanya’s ex-boyfriend (years and years later) and marries him. Then she decides maybe Troy was right for her all along. There’s also a sexual assault sub-plot that I personally didn’t need, but I didn’t need this whole book, so who am I to judge?
As I’ve learned in the past, I have a realllly hard time enjoying books where I hate nearly everyone, or just don’t even care about them enough to hate them! Three stars for the “but why?”-ness of this.
This book wins the “but why did it feel so long?” award. All six of these books are short stories, not taking more than two hours or so to read. This one felt like at least six hours though. There’s soooo much detail, and so much of nothing going on that it felt like filler for a much longer book.
Our main character, Swan – whose name also annoyed me (we don’t really get a reason why she goes by that? Is it her name? Is it her last name? Maybe they told us and I blacked out? – is a recently separated from her boyfriend / husband tattoo artist. I would’ve liked to hear more about the situation with her boyfriend / husband (can’t remember which one), but we don’t get any of that. She heads out into the desert to live in a friend’s container home.
There’s a lot of small town “you don’t belong here” crap, there’s a fire, there’s tattooing, there’s inexplicable rage shooting, and there are a bunch of assholes. That’s about it. I know I was supposed to feel more during the big climax, but I was just so bored! I gave it three stars, my final “but why?”