Archive for the ‘Psychological Suspense’ Category

A LONELY DEATH by Charles Todd

A Lonely Death, by Charles Todd, is one of the most haunting mysteries in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series. The year is 1920 and the First World War has taken an enormous toll on the young Englishmen who naively went off to battle, expecting excitement and adventure. What they found, instead, was terror and violent death. Those who returned were often shell-shocked and/or physically maimed; their families suffered along with the damaged soldiers.

January 23, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Facing History, Psychological Suspense, Sleuths Series, United Kingdom

GIVE ME YOUR HEART by Joyce Carol Oates

GIVE ME YOUR HEART, the newest collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, shimmers with violence, actual or imagined. Reading these stories is like hearing footsteps in your home when you know you’re the only one there. They’re like seeing something impossible out of the corner of your eye and being sure that you’ve seen it no matter what your rational self tells you. The stories make your heart race and your eyes open wide in horror. They do not come to us gently. Joyce Carol Oates grabs the reader and pulls him into her unique vision where fear, panic, tension, death, love and murder prevail, often simultaneously. These are horror stories without any element of the super-natural. She’s the real McCoy of this genre.

January 17, 2011 · Judi Clark · 2 Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Horror, Psychological Suspense, Short Stories, y Award Winning Author

THE POISON TREE by Erin Kelly

THE POISON TREE, the debut novel from British author Erin Kelly, begins with a young woman named Karen driving her child, nine-year-old Alice to pick up husband Rex. This may sound like a fairly routine domestic errand, but the difference here is that Rex has just been released from prison after serving 10 years for murder. The novel’s first chapter is a window into the delicacy of a fractured family’s difficult reunion as parenting roles shift to a thinly structured “normalcy.” The underlying question is why was Rex in prison for murder? Just what happened to put Rex behind bars is slowly doled out to the reader as first-person narrator Karen goes back to the mid 90s when she was a university student at Queen Charlotte’s College and met the intriguing, free-spirit, budding actress Biba and her brother Rex.

January 10, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Debut Novel, Mystery/Suspense, Psychological Suspense, Reading Guide, United Kingdom

THE ART OF LOSING by Rebecca Connell

Rebecca Connell has written a finely fraught literary thriller and romance in her debut novel, THE ART OF LOSING. It examines the legacy of loss and betrayal and the extent to which a person will go to seek out the truth.

October 1, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Debut Novel, Literary, Mystery/Suspense, Psychological Suspense, Thriller/Spy/Caper, United Kingdom

THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY by Gianrico Carofiglio

THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY from former anti-Mafia prosecutor, Gianrico Carofiglio is primarily a psychological tale. While the novel contains a crime story, the main focus, and perhaps even arguably the main crime, is the complete and utter corruption of one human being by another.

August 14, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: italy, Psychological Suspense

BEAUTIFUL MALICE by Rebecca James

It is important to set the parameters, or the standards, of a Young Adult novel right up front when reviewing one in a public forum. The Young Adult novel is a genre that allows authors to explore edgy content within the typical bathos of teen self-consciousness. If a novel is to be successful in this market, it must ambitiously try to underscore topics such as murder, sickness, abuse, heroin addiction, suicide, sexuality – pretty much any topic with an “edge” – and have a central character that is either surrounded by the subject, or is going to potentially be lost to the subject. Take Romeo & Juliet, minus out the words of William Shakespeare, put it in first person narrative form – let’s let Romeo be the narrator – and you will be soundly situated in a Young Adult novel.

July 30, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Australia, Coming-of-Age, Mystery/Suspense, Psychological Suspense