The Hush by John Hart

 

This is a weird novel--not Weird, as like a literary or genre descriptor, just weird. It's clearly a kind of Horror novel, with a patch of somewhere in the South that's haunted by a really old and really angry (kinda) ghost, and debts that convey along bloodlines; but it reads like a novel written by an author who isn't super comfortable or experienced with writing Horror, as though Horror is like a sideline or something: Thinking about it, this novel hits a lot of the same notes as The Chill by "Scott Carson," which is another Horror novel by a writer of mostly crime/thriller novels; maybe it's the kind of Horror those kinds of writers reach for, or maybe ancestral debts and hauntings are Horror trappings writers newish to the genre reach for. This is not as good a novel as that one, but it's not bad; the supernatural stuff sits kinda sideways to the more real-world-plausible elements, here, almost as though Hart wasn't fully committed to writing a Horror novel.

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman

 

A very engaging novel, maybe less of a mystery than a broader thriller--while there is a murder mystery and it is solved, the road there takes many turns and detours. Delicious phrases fall out of Osman's writing like prizes from a kid's cereal box, and he has a feel for all the characters in the novel. The story is just a bit over-the-top, and the characters kinda tend that way, too, sometimes, though they do manage to remain recognizable as people. If I were looking for another writer of series fiction to read, reading Osman wouldn't be any kind of hardship.

Light Years From Home by Mike Chen

 

This cover text on this book promises much more of a novel of pursuit than the covers actually contain, but this is otherwise a reasonably interesting book. There's like a hundred pages--maybe more--of the sort of intra-family drama that ends with you not really liking anyone, but that's just setup for the things that happen toward the end of the novel. The climax is not some chase resolution, or even really external/violent action, but the members of the family getting their shit sorted out and being able to move on with their lives as they should be. Well, two of them, anyway: One has her dementia relapse after a temporary magic-tech reprieve, and the other is off-planet fighting a desperate war. There was a stretch where I was seriously thinking the character just back from the extraterrestrial war might turn out to be entirely delusional, but this is in fact a SF novel, so that didn't turn out to be the case.

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

 

This is a beautifully novel about the pain of war, and the conflicts between duty and desire--at least, that's the surface story. Under that, there's a stream of self-justification--mostly on the part of people other than the POV, though he comes to believe it--based on reincarnation and fate; there's a scene near the end of the novel, in one of the brief stretches in 1995, where the character who triggers the extensive flashbacks that make up the vast majority of the novel makes it clear that predestination in Western (or at least Christian) thought is the same thing. What the novel's really about, though is the need to tell, and the potential healing power of telling; the difference in the POV/narrator's attitude in the epilogue/last chapter is the key, here--telling his story did more for his peace of mind than anything that might have anything to do with any putative past lives, or any putative fate.

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

It's kinda funny, considering that I was thinking about how Hendrix's writing is typically so arch and knowing, and here there's barely any humor. Wit, yeah, clever turns of phrase, and a palpable sense of self-aware Fandom (it's clear Hendrix loves slasher movies, maybe in spite of his better judgment); the strongest takeaway I get here, though, is sincerity. He sincerely loves slasher movies; his main here is never less than 75% sincere (there's some caginess, she gives off strong unreliable narrator energy for much of the novel); the novel's subtext is a thick stream just below the surface, friendship and trust and protecting your loved ones and the future, and it's sincere. Hendrix isn't arch, he's self-aware.

All the Blood We Share by Camilla Bruce

This is a very heavy book. Oh, it's not that it deals with serious things seriously or anything like that, it's just a weight like being thrown into the sea tied to a millstone, a darkness unrelieved by anything more than a mildly clever turn of phrase. Some putatively charming sociopaths who think they're master criminals, except the only way they can think of to take what they want is to kill the people who have it. It's based on real people and events, because there are and have always been people like that, and I guess there's some value in telling some version of that story, but this is most of 375 pages in the first-person mind of one or another of the family of sociopaths at the novel's center, and after a while you just want it to end, you end up hoping they all die. (They don't, because there's no documentation.) Not a fun read, not a great novel.

Night Shift by Alex Finlay

 

Well, this is a crime novel that plays in the current idiom of "stupidly overplotted thriller," with a dash of "omnicompetent sociopath"--though there's a reasonable chance the omnicompetent sociopath is not the killer. (I'm not entirely sure I buy every single part of the "resolution" of this novel ...) The fact that in a novel full of unpleasant manipulative asshats the only real "onscreen" death is one of the really good characters does not improve my disposition, here. The story could plausibly not have been *horrible*, but the author couldn't resist throwing stupid twist after stupid twist: It's clear he didn't trust his story to go out into the world less adorned.