Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry

Under the Harrow is Flynn Berry's debut novel. It's a fairly gripping, fast read with chapters that fly by--due in part to their brevity as well as the engrossing story. Set in England, the story takes place in a small English village about an hour's train ride from London.

When Nora arrives to visit her sister Rachel for her semi-regular weekend visit, Nora is shocked to find a brutal blood bath in her sister's home instead, and at its center, her sister's lifeless body, viciously stabbed nearly a dozen times. Unmoored by her grief and with little faith in the police detectives' ability to find her sister's killer, Nora embarks upon her own investigation to find both her sister's murderer and the man who brutally assaulted Rachel and left her for dead when she was a teenager. Is it possible her sister's attacker and murderer were the same man?

The police investigation reveals to Nora the secrets her sister kept even from her. There was Rachel's dog, a German Shepherd (also killed during the commission of Rachel's murder) that was a trained guard dog, and the evidence that suggests her sister was readying for a move to Cornwall, five hours away--neither of which Nora was aware. Most troubling is the revelation that Rachel never stopped looking for her attacker even though she told Nora she had let go of that obsession.

Now Nora returns to the sisters' old obsession with locating Rachel's attacker and utilizes their old methods in order to track down her sister's murderer. She begins a potentially dangerous game of baiting the man she suspects responsible for Rachel's murder. Flashbacks tell the story of Rachel's assault, happier times the two sisters shared as well as how the two women carried on their own investigation into Rachel's assault. All of which leads to devastating revelations of Rachel's own actions that lead directly to her murder as well as a pulse pounding conclusion.

There are many questions throughout this novel. Namely what was Rachel hiding? What other secrets was she keeping? How well did Nora really know her sister? Despite the closeness between the two sisters, it is evident from the flashbacks as well as the lies Rachel told and the secrets she kept, that there were parts of herself that she held back even from Nora. The reader has a distinct unsettling feeling throughout the novel that Nora's investigation, her fixation on a specific local man, and her naivete regarding the police investigation won't end well. But will it end with Rachel's killer remaining free and her murder unsolved? By the end of the novel most questions are answered except for the issue of what Rachel meant when she told Nora that there was 'something wrong with the town.' I can't put my finger on it, but something about the story structure makes the story and/or timeline difficult to follow in some places.

This is a psychological thriller/mystery drenched in grief. Even as Nora discovers the lies and the wrenching betrayal Rachel told and committed, she is determined to do right by her sister and bring her murderer to justice. In the end I think Nora finds it a poor salve for her heart breaking loss.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip. I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage. The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it. It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger. Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read. Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one. Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment. The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story. It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve. Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week. This particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst

A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

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