Winter Thrillers

Reprinted from the Citizen:

Now that winter has finally shown itself, it’s a great time to hunker down and read a good book. Here are three mystery/thrillers that will have your heart pounding, your pulse racing and your mind working overtime to figure out what happened.

A.J. Finn’s debut novel, “The Woman in the Window” hit the bestseller list on the first week, which is quite an accomplishment. This book has had a lot of buzz since last spring, and it lives up to the hype.

The Woman in the Window

Anna Fox sits in the window of her Harlem brownstone, watching the neighbors go about their daily business. She hasn’t left her apartment in ten months, and her husband and eight-year-old daughter no longer live with her.

She spends her days playing online chess, dispensing advice on agoraphobia message boards and watching old black and white movies, like Alfred Hitchcock’s classics. Anna is also drunk most of the day and night, and takes numerous prescription pills.

We slowly get that something traumatic happened to Anna ten months ago, but exactly what is unknown to the reader. She is quite frankly a mess.

One day Anna sees new neighbors moving in- a mom, dad and teenage boy. The son comes to visit, and then later his mom stops by and she and Anna spend an enjoyable, drunken afternoon together.

Then Anna sees something disturbing happen at the new neighbors. She reports this to the police, but no evidence is found and Anna is not believed because she is such a mess. Anna is not even quite sure if she saw what she believes she saw.

Slowly, Finn reveals to the reader what happened ten months ago to Anna, and what happened to the neighbors. The last third of this crackerjack of a book will keep you up at night to finish. You will gasp in astonishment as events unfold. This book will be a blockbuster in 2018.

Lisa Scottoline’s thriller “One Perfect Lie” begins with Chris Brennan applying for a job as a high school teacher and assistant baseball coach in a small Pennsylvania town. But Brennan is also up to something more nefarious. 

One Perfect Lie

He needs to recruit a young male student for something bad, something that will happen on the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. He insinuates himself in the lives of three of his students- one a boy whose father died last year, one who never knew his father, and one a rich, spoiled young man.

Everyone loves Coach Brennan, and he works hard to quickly gain the trust of the people in this small community. 

Just when you think you know where this story is going, Scottoline turns everything upside down halfway through the story. It is a brilliant turn of events, and one I did not see coming. It turned what was a pretty good story into a crazy great story.

Other than a scene at the end of the book that was really over-the-top, “One Perfect Lie” is a fantastic ride of a book, and I tip my hat to the author, she really fooled me.

If you like your mysteries set in days of yore, Lauren Willig’s “The English Wife” is set in Cold Springs, NY in 1899. Bay Van Duyvil, a wealthy American heir, had a replica built of his English wife Annabelle’s family home on the banks of the Hudson River. 

The English Wife

On the day of their big Twelfth Night Ball to show their new home to the elite, Bay is stabbed and Annabelle is missing. Did she run away with the architect of the house, with whom she was rumored to be having an affair? And how to explain that Bay’s sister Janie saw Annabelle’s body floating in the Hudson?

Janie teams up with a newspaper reporter to find out what happened to Bay and Annabelle. The story shifts back and forth in time, from 1895 London where Bay and Annabelle met to 1899 Cold Springs. 

There are so many great characters here-  Janie, London dance hall performer Georgie, Bay’s nasty mother Alva, and Bay and Janie’s cousin Anne who stole Janie’s fiancee and was a bit too close to Bay.

There are also lots of secrets and secret alliances in “The English Wife” that keep the reader on her toes. The attention to period detail is also so well done here, you’ll feel like you are in 1899 as your read this terrific novel. 

The English Wife by Lauren Willig

The English Wife by Lauren Willig
Published by St. Martin's Press ISBN 9781250056276
Hardcover, $26.99, 376 pages

It is most fitting that much of the action of Lauren Willig's new novel, The English Wife, takes place on a cold, snowy winter evening in February 1899 at a home along the Hudson River. It's been so cold here in the Northeast, this just fits right in.

There are two settings for this crackling good mystery- 1895 England and 1899 Cold Springs, New York. The book opens at the Twelfth Night Ball that American heir Bay Van Duyvil and his English wife Annabelle are hosting at their new home on the Hudson River, a replica of her English home.

Amid gossip that Annabelle was having an affair with the architect of the home, Bay is found stabbed and Annabelle is missing. Bay's sister Janie swears she saw Annabelle's body floating in the Hudson River, but no body is ever found.

The action moves back to 1895 England, where Bay meets and falls in love with Georgie, a dance hall performer. They marry and Georgie assumes the name of her cousin Annabelle, a wealthy heiress herself who is nowhere to be found.

Bay's sister Janie teams up with Burke, a reporter from a New York paper, to discover what happened to her brother and sister-in-law. Janie feels she owes it to Bay and Annabelle's toddler twins, now orphaned.

Janie's mother Alva was not thrilled with Bay's choice of wife, and she is the very epitome of an overbearing mother-in-law. Alva rules her household with an iron fist, and believes it her duty to keep the name Van Duyvil untarnished.

Anne is Janie and Bay's cousin, they all grew up together, but Bay and Anne were especially close, even after Anne stole Janie's fiance and married him herself. Anne's marriage has collapsed, much to the disgust of Aunt Alva.

The scenes between Alva and Anne, and then Alva, Anne and Janie crackled with tension and fantastic passive/aggressive dialogue. If Andy Cohen were around in 1895, he would have signed these ladies up as the original Housewives of New York.

The timelines of 1895 and 1899 eventually dovetail, and we find out more information about Georgie, and her cousin Annabelle (does she even exist?), what is really going on in Bay and Annabelle's marriage, and what happened the night of the Twelfth Ball.

The characters are fascinating, especially Georgie, and I liked watching Janie blossom from a mousy young lady into a force to be reckoned with. Burke the reporter was an intriguing character with his own secrets as well.

There are a lot of secrets in The English Wife, some you can guess and others that took me completely by surprise, which I love in a good story.  I also enjoyed the attention to period detail, it is clear that Willig did a great deal of research to get everything just right.

I highly recommend The English Wife, for anyone who loves a good historical mystery, mixed with a little romance. (And the book cover is just stunning!)

Lauren Willig spoke about The English Wife at the Corner Bookstore in NYC, my post about that is here.

Lauren Willig's website is here.

Lauren Willig at the Corner Bookstore

The English Wife

I made my first trip to the lovely Corner Bookstore on Madison and 93rd Street in New York City for a book launch for Lauren Willig, author of The English Wife. The Corner Bookstore holds a special place in Willig's heart as it was her neighborhood bookstore growing up (her parents still live nearby), and she has been launching her books (starting with The Pink Carnation, thirteen years ago) there since she began writing.

Willig was set to write a book set in WWII Paris, and she had been in the middle of her research when she had a vision of a woman with a Gibson girl hairdo and 1890's clothing falling from a parapet into the Hudson River. This vision led her to drop the Paris book and write The English Wife. (Her agent suggested a saga set in Palm Beach, which the enthusiastic crowd groaned at.)

The English Wife is about an wealthy American man, Bay, who marries Annabelle, an English woman "with a dodgy past". He builds his wife a replica of her English home on the Hudson River, and amid rumors of an affair between Annabelle and the architect, on the night of a grand Twelfth Night Ball, Bay is stabbed and Annabelle goes missing.

The action in the book takes place in 1895, with Bay in England, and 1899, with Bay's sister Janie investigating the events of the evening. Eventually both timelines merge until we get to the the denouement of the mystery.

Willig then read a few a passages, and took questions from the very engaged audience. When asked if she knew the ending of the novel before she wrote it, Willig stated that she never knows how her books will end; she goes on a journey with her characters and she figures it out when they do. She stated that she "feels like I stumble on my characters in a bar and they follow me home", which the audience laughed at.

When asked about writer's block, Willig said that she finds two forms of it- the first is "I don't wanna write", and that the cure is just to sit there and pound away at the keyboard. The other happens when she tries to force her characters do something they wouldn't do. When that happens, her sister calls it  "going into the barn", which refers to a time when Willig was writing a scene set during the Dublin uprising and she had to get characters into a barn for a scene. She spent a month trying to figure a way to get them into the barn when her sister finally said "just don't go into the barn.'

Willig is a charming, delightful speaker. She is very at ease in front of an audience (and not all authors are), and there was a lot of great conversation between Willig and her audience. It was really one of the most enjoyable author events I have had the pleasure of attending. (I can't believe I didn't take a photo that night.)

The English Wife is now on sale, and I just finished it and it was a crackling good story. My review is here.

Lauren Willig's website is here.
The Corner Bookstore website is here.