Hide by Kiersten White
Fourteen people participate in a mysterious competition for a chance to win a life-changing amount of money. The challenge: to hide in a decrepit amusement park, and not get found out. But what the hiders don’t know is the true nature of the seeker… One of the worst ‘hot takes’ I ever read on the Internet was a post positing that there must be a limited number of souls to go around to all the billions of people on Earth, and that most people must […]
Shiver by Allie Reynolds
Well dang, what a wet raspberry of a book to end the year on. I have a couple more I’m trying to finish so hopefully at least one will be a banger, but this was not what I wanted it to be. Personal drama in a friend group as a basis for a thriller is just really, really not my thing. Especially when you don’t like any of the characters that make up the group, as was the case here for me. Not even the […]
The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
So after a night where this book sat in my subconscious probably doing things to me, I’m upping my rating to five stars. I can’t stop thinking about it, and the ending did what I want more horror endings to to do for me. There are quite a few people who experience a sort of literary catharsis with the presence of violence and gore, but I am not one of those people (and maybe they don’t even care about catharsis! who knows!). This book has […]
Middlegame (Alchemical Journeys, #1) by Seanan McGuire
This was my first Seanan McGuire book, which is a little unbelievable, both because she writes in genres I love, and because she writes so very prolifically. And I started with a really good one. I’m not against spoilers and frequently spoil myself for things, but I went into this book almost completely unspoiled, even for the premise, and I think that’s the way to go. The book is so weird it’s almost impossible to really sum up in a blurb anyway. So, how to […]
The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson
This was extremely entertaining. I can see why people keep publishing and reading Peter Swanson books, if they are only chasing the high they got from this book. The other book I’ve read from him was also really great, but if this and Eight Perfect Murders are his best books, and some of the others are apparently abysmal, I might be done with him and will just go out on a high note (unless I start hearing from other people that his writing is back to up […]
The Suspect (Karl Alberg, #1) by L.R. Wright
I’m not quite sure how to talk about this one! I had never heard of it before I went searching for a book to fill this specific Read Harder challenge (⇣), and I’d never heard of the author, either. I don’t think it’s because she was Canadian, I think it’s because she was popular in the 80s and early 90s, and then she and her books faded into the place where books go when they aren’t popular anymore and haven’t been inducted into “the canon”. […]
