#OMG-Thrilling : A Cry in The Night by Mary Higgins Clark

The blurb reads,

“Divorcee Jenny MacPartland’s struggle to support herself and her two small daughters is not helped by her irresponsible ex-husband. But suddenly a new man steps into her life. Rich, handsome Erich Krueger sweeps her off her feet and off to his mansion in the country.”

 

So the blurb nowhere begins to capture the complexity and brilliance of this book. I had read a Mary Higgins Clark sometime last year (not yet reviewed, much to my dismay) and there are a few authors you know you have to binge read. She is one of them.

This author, somehow succeeds in chilling you simply by the sheer brilliance of her writing alone. I am really looking forward to binging on her other books while I have a Scribd trial in place.

And while I write this review, I realise how grossly inadequate the blurb is to introduce the reader to what a brilliant book this is. Anyway, I hope I can convey that to the readers in the form of this review.

So I picked this book up, randomly among the others on Scribd and then jumped straight into it. Jenny MacPartland works in a gallery and is a divorced mother of two. She has an ordinary middle-class life for a New Yorker and while she isn’t greedy or fanciful, she does dream of a better life for her children.

The first thing she hears from Erik Krueger is,

“You look so much like HER!”

And thus starts the book. Erik is dashing, handsome, and the ‘artist of the century’. Critics cannot have enough of him and everyone wants to catch his eye. But Erik seems to have eyes for Jenny. He showers her with love and affection and indeed, they have a whirlwind courting before Erik decides to whisk Jenny to his farm.

This is where everything begins.

You know you have those books where you know that something that happens is the precipice of something more deeper and more important happening. And Jenny moving from New York is precisely that. Also, Jenny is a dead ringer for Erik’s mother.

I so fear I can’t write without revealing the plot away!! That is how brilliant this book is. Erik is one of the creepiest characters I have read about. When you read a book, some characters are so angelic that you know there is something beneath that veneer and Erik is one of those. Jenny finds herself and her daughters trapped in Erik’s house. His strange ways and the strange happenings in the house confound Jenny but she brushes it off as something which she imagined. And when Erik does the unthinkable, Jenny must act, or lose everything she lives for.

I read most of this book while coming home in a 50 minute flight. And I was so so engrossed in the book. I kept turning page after page after page. Erik and whatever he does simply stifled me. It did not help that I was sitting in an airplane which already has such a controlled environment. At some points in the book, I was positively spooked. I felt as helpless as Jenny and at some points, I really did want her to break away, and leave. But the next instant, Erik would have dashed all those hopes to the ground. And I felt as helpless as before. 

This is a great book. You are clothed in the despair and the helplessness that Jenny feels and also stunned by the confusions that keep coming up. You see yourself siding with Jenny and then questioning whether everything that happened in the book is as it seems. And that is where the book is brilliant.

I only have one fault, that the end is absurd. I didn’t feel the end was handled properly. I didn’t feel like the discovery of what Erik does to be as dramatic as the build up had been. And the end was rather cliche, much like it was suited for a film.

Notwithstanding all of this, it was a brilliant book which really deserves all the praise. I’m happy I read it! Definitely entertained me enough.

 

My Rating: 4/5

#BookReview – Waves of Reprisal by Malcolm Little

The blurb reads,

“Hanyma, a spirited young woman from the remote village of Kepler, is at a crossroads in her life. She wants to explore the unfamiliar, wide-open country outside her croft. But rumblings of dark, inexorable forces terrorizing the sparsely-populated continent dampen her aspirations.

That was before devastation gripped her. Now, driven by a wandering quest for vengeance, the headstrong survivalist struggles to combat a band of vicious marauders while simultaneously trying to comprehend all the strange phenomena discovered amidst ruins of technologically-advanced precursors.

Before long, Hanyma is thrust into circumstances beyond her ability to control, and she must team with an unlikely ally from a far-gone past who is determined to complete a mission of global importance. Whether that mission succeeds or not may well depend on the callow wayfarer from Kepler. Can Hanyma put aside her bloodlust when the fate of humanity beckons? Will it matter when pitted against the crushing weight of a powerful, inscrutable enemy?“

 

So when I started reading this book, my record for Sci-Fi was disastrous. Although I was very good in Science when I was in school, I never read too much of this genre. And I have always been meaning to start.

This book is a juxtaposition of dystopian fantasy and science fiction. The book starts with Hanyma watching her village being destroyed. The time for civilised living is long gone and the world is a pale shadow of what it was earlier. The world has been destroyed by nefarious forces and all its knowledge lies buried in cyborg controlled hibernation centres. Hanyma, having witnessed brutes kill her family, decides to avenge them and follows the destruction causing squad as it wrecks village after village.

While trying to save herself, she finds a room where a machine gives her some printed instructions in a language she does not understand. And she finds herself face to face with a cyborg. The mission that they embark on is one to save and restore humanity and to fight against those people who are against this revival.

This was a great book to read. Albeit a bit long. Towards the end, I felt as if the narrative sagged and I just wanted the book to end. But it was a nice read.

I thought about the unsustainable way in which we lead our life today. We are so engrossed with our own lives. The emphasis is on ensuring that private enterprise goes ahead which is not bad, but we do so at the cost of ensuring a better world for us to live in. Look at how polluted our cities are, how hectic and stressful our lives are. And we do this with pleasure. We don’t conserve the environment, we don’t spread positive and good vibes around. And then when I read such books, I don’t doubt that all those dystopian books will be a reality some day. And that prospect scares me.

It was interesting to read that this whole book happens because of one man’s foresight to preserve his legacy and save humankind, this whole book takes place. It reminded me that no matter how good someone’s intentions are, there are always forces looking to tear those intentions down. And how committed one should be towards their dreams, especially when those dreams involve making the world a better place to live in.

I wondered how it would be, to live in a world which would be programmed by artificial intelligence. But when you consider how human emotions make them so fallible and gullible, perhaps a synthoid type precision is required to take decisions which require hard calls to be taken.

This was a good book. The fight sequences were great and I definitely want to see what is coming up ahead.

 

My Rating: 3.5/5

 

#Chilling – Sin Eater (Episode 1.1) (Sin Eater #1) by Pavarti K Tyler and Jessica West

The blurb reads,

“From Award-Winning Author Pavarti K. Tyler and Speculative Fiction Author Jessica West, comes a Dark Urban Fantasy serial about evil, and the next step in its evolution.

**This is Episode ONE in a seven part urban fantasy/horror serial**

A Sin Eater who battles demons for souls
A Priest who must protect what he most desires, even from himself,
A rogue Romani mortician with an attitude, a secret, and a powerful weapon,
And a Secret Order of the Church who knows more than they’re saying…

Nikolai Grekh is the last Sin Eater.

Born into a world rampant with demon possession, Nik struggles to keep Hell’s hordes from consuming the world, but he grows weary of the constant battle against sin. Evil grows stronger as more souls are lost. With each new possession growing increasingly violent, Nik fears he may be losing the war.

When Nik confronts a demon he can barely defeat, he reaches out to the only man who can save him. The only man he trusts. The one man he can never have…

Evil has resided alongside humanity since the beginning of time, feeding on our weaknesses, our vices. Our sins. It hungers for our souls, its demonic offspring possessing humans, corrupting, manipulating, using us as unwitting pawns in a supernatural chess match for the ultimate price: life.

The Crucifixion of Christ saved humanity once. What will it take to save us this time?

*contains mature content, offensive themes, and general deviance*

So this was my first time reading an episodic novel and boy oh boy, I loved it.

Nickolai lives in this world festered with evil. He has the unenviable job of sucking evil from the world and purifying it. But when he encounters something much darker than he expected, he realises he has an uphill challenge.

There wasn’t too much in the book, you can’t expect too much in 45 pages either. But it is brilliantly crafted. Much like the pilot to a series, it captured my attention and hit all the right points.

• An Interesting Plot
• Some seeming evil (unveiled)
• A Troubled Main Character
• Paranormal

In that sense, the book was perfect. It introduced me to Nik and made me want to know what more is happening. I wanted to know about how the world came to have so much lurking evil and how Nik exorcised these demons to where they belonged. It did make me think on a rather philosophical plane. We live our lives in such a corruptible world. And by that, I mean, it is so easy for our feelings to be messed around with. We play with dark forces and we hanker for the dark in everything we read. Some dark element completes a book. Some grey nuances a character. But has our obsession with the other side led us to lead lives where we systematically seek invitations to flip over? Is the temptation of evil, dark, virulent and negative feelings stronger than the taste of clearer and happier emotions? Has our perpetual obsession with being the “Bad Boy” or the “Bad Woman” led us to belittle a simpler lifestyle?

The book made me think of all of these and I wondered how life was, focusing on what was wrong than right, and wondered who helped us cleanse these rabid feelings.

This was a good book. It is intense and it does make you think. I am delayed writing the review but I cannot wait to dig into the rest of the series.

My Rating: 4/5

 

#Thrilling – Servant of the Skull (Skullspeaker Series #1) by Edita A Petrick

The blurb reads,

The moment Gia’s hands touch a skull, the living history of the skull’s owner bursts inside her head. Indeed, for as long as her hands rest on the skull, she is a prisoner of its life-history. When she receives a field assignment in Greece to reconstruct skulls of three victims who perished in a plane crash, she thinks it’s just for identification purposes. But nothing could have prepared her for the kind of situation she walks into. There are just as many family members who want her to do her job as there are those who’ll stop at nothing to prevent it. When the skulls prove to be fake, and a woman’s body is found on the bottom of the cliff, Gia knows the killer would rather see her dead than let her confirm the victims’ identity

 

The blurb to this book was extremely catchy. And the prologue to the book was immensely attractive. I knew this had the potential to be a great book.

Gianna has always been special. She can touch skulls and learn their entire history in mere seconds. This sort of latent skill is dangerous and that’s precisely why Gianna gets into a field where she won’t have to deal with violent killings. Gianna works in museums, on private reconstruction projects, often where she won’t have to deal with violent deaths.

But her next assignment is something that throws a bit of a curve ball at her. She finds herself in Greece, bound by an onerous contract, to reconstruct skulls. A seemingly easy task, except somebody does not want the skulls to be found.

The book was very brilliantly set up. The mystery of the skulls and an ancient curse was something that kept my mind ticking throughout the book. I wanted to see what the mystery was with this book and that’s precisely why I continued reading it.

The discussions Gianna had while reconstructing skulls were fascinating and the mystery that had presented itself.

So, a family in Greece wants their father’s skull to be identified. His ex-wife needs it so that she can get some much needed funds from the will. The children want closure. And someone wants to make sure that Polyandros Laicos’s skull is not identified.

As Gianna went about connecting the dots, I connected the dots with her. I love those books that make you want to find out what happens and I read this book whenever I could. I absolutely loved Gianna as a character. I also wanted the plot to thicken and I definitely wanted to find out what was happening next. I wanted the threat to present itself and for Gianna to be embroiled neck deep in it.

I feel like the mystery in the book is excellent but the end was disappointing. I felt I wanted so much more to happen in the end. I guess I expected the book to give me something to go forward with, I wanted the end to be edgy, filled with thrills  but that wasn’t it. The end was pretty tame as compared to the prologue.

I don’t know what adventures will happen and whether it will feature Gianna. But while I was reading the end, I felt as though the epilogue and the book was done with Gianna. She suddenly left Greece after her work was done and there was nothing to suggest a continuity to the future books. I wonder though, what will come next, simply because the curse that binds the book together is a really fascinating one.

My Rating: 3.5/5