Tag Archive for: the suspect

Thriller Thursday Reviews: The Maid’s Diary & The Suspect

April 27, 2023/10 Comments/by Sharon

Hi Everyone! It’s me Sharon, I hope everyone is doing well. I know it has been a while since I posted Thriller Thursday reviews, I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago and then it took another week for my brain to come back from vacation mode. 😀 But I am back and happy to share my thoughts on a couple of psychological thrillers I have read; Loreth Anne White’s, The Maid’s Diary and Kathryn Croft’s, The Suspect.

Thriller Thursday Reviews: The Maid’s Diary & The Suspect

The Maid's Diary Goodreads

Author: Loreth Anne White

Publication Date: March 1, 2023

Publisher: Montlake

I have loved all the books I have read by Loreth Anne White and I am happy to report that her newest book, The Maid’s Diary, was right up there with all her others.

Kit Darling is a maid with a snooping addiction. She cleans the homes of the wealthy and the wealthy always have something to hide and Kit loves finding their secrets. It’s a harmless addiction really, that is, until Kit starts cleaning the house of new clients Daisy and Jon Rittenberg. Kit uncovers a very dark secret they are keeping, and this makes Kit dangerous to them. It also makes Daisy and Jon dangerous to Kit as well. Someone is willing to kill to keep this secret.

Homicide detective Mallory “Mal” Van Alst is called to a luxury home known as the Glass House, where she finds evidence of a violent attack. There is so much blood at the scene there is no way the victim can still be alive. The only problem is there is no body, the owners of the house are gone, and their maid is missing. The only witness is an elderly woman who lives across the street. She was woken up by the screams coming from the Glass House and she saw two people carrying a rug rolled up with what looked like a body in it. As Mal starts her investigation, she uncovers the secrets of everyone involved and she soon realizes that nothing is quite as it seems.

The story is told from the POVs of Daisy, Jon, Mal, and Kit via pages from “The Maid’s Diary.” There is not a lot I can say about this book without giving anything away and I think it is best to go into this story blind.

The book starts from the POV of an unknown female who has been drugged and is in the backseat of a car. We then get alternating timeline chapters. Mal’s chapters take place in the present as she works on the investigation and tries to solve the mystery of what happened at the Glass House. Daisy and Jon’s chapters start two weeks prior and are titled “XX days before the murder” and progress up to the night at the Glass House. In between we get pages of Kit’s maid’s diary. I love how White presented the story this way. Each chapter gradually connected the main characters, as well as throwing in twists and turns as secrets were revealed.

Mal was my favorite character and I loved following the evidence as she uncovered it. I thought I knew where things were going to go and then something new was uncovered that took things in a new direction. I also loved finding out the secrets of Daisy, Jon, and Kit, and oh, what secrets they were!

If you are looking for a psychological thriller full of twists and turns and that will keep you guessing until the end, then I recommend The Maid’s Diary. 4 stars

The Suspect Goodreads

Author: Kathryn Croft

Publication Date: February 6, 2023

Publisher: Bookouture

Kathryn Croft’s newest psychological thriller, The Suspect, follows one woman’s determination to uncover the truth of her mother’s murder.

When Jess was two years old, her mother Lori was murdered while they were in the park. Jess has no memory of who killed her mother. The police had a suspect, Nathan French, but there was not enough evidence to convict him. Now twenty-eight years later, Nathan approaches Jess in the street and tells her that he did not kill her mother and has proof of who did. Nathan wants to meet up again with Jess and give her the proof, but before they can meet again, Nathan is murdered. Jess does not know what to believe now. Could the man that she thought killed her mother really be innocent? When Jess searches for answers, she starts to uncover information that changes everything she thought she knew, and she realizes that the person that murdered her mother is closer to home than she imagined.

This book is told from the POV of Jess and Lori in alternating timelines. Lori’s POV starts the year before she was murdered and Jess’ POV is in the present as she searches for answers to who killed her mother. I really liked having the story presented this way, as each timeline brings us closer to solving the mystery of who killed Lori. I also enjoyed both of the timelines equally.

The story opens with the day Lori died. Right from the beginning I liked Lori and as the book progressed and I learned more about her, my love for her grew. Lori’s mother and sister were not all that loving with her. Lori had been her father’s favorite and her sister resented her for that, so their relationship was very strained. Lori loved Jess’ father, Danny, and they had a great relationship, until Lori found out a secret he was keeping. When Lori found out his secret she broke things off with him and was planning on moving away. I loved how even though everyone seemed to be against her, Lori still pushed forward and was determined to make a great life for Jess. She was a great mother to Jess and it broke my heart knowing that as I was reading she was getting closer to being killed.

Jess had the same determination as her mother did. When she met Nathan in the street, it opened up all the emotions about her mother’s murder that she tried to keep at bay. I loved how she was determined to find out what really happened to her mother no matter where it took her.

As the story progresses, the suspect pool grew. I was all over the place on who I thought killed Lori. I loved all of the twists and turns The Suspect had. I think Kathryn Croft did an excellent job of weaving a great mystery, with an ending that I did not see coming. 4 stars

Early Review: THE SUSPECT by Fiona Barton

January 21, 2019/14 Comments/by Suzanne

The Suspect by Fiona Barton
Also by this author: The Child

Series: Kate Waters #3
Published by Berkley Books on January 22, 2019
Genres: Mystery, Thriller
Pages: 416
Also in this series: The Child
Source: Netgalley
Amazon
Goodreads

FTC Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. All opinions are my own.

THE SUSPECT review

Fiona Barton’s latest thriller The Suspect is the third book in her popular Kate Waters series. In this novel, we follow journalist Kate Waters as she investigates what has happened to two teenage girls who have gone missing while traveling in Thailand. Kate is an ambitious journalist – she always wants to be the one to get the exclusive and be the first to discover the truth. This case is no different, although it does have the added motivation that it would have her traveling to Thailand.

Why is Thailand such a draw for Kate? Because that’s where her estranged son has been living for the past two years. She hasn’t seen him even once in those two years and he rarely ever tries to contact her or his dad and is evasive the few times he has spoken to them. Kate is hoping this investigation will give her the opportunity to check in on him herself and hopefully convince him to come home.

Kate decides that getting close to the families of the missing girls is the best way to ensure she is at the forefront and has access as the pieces of the investigation start to form a picture of what has happened to the girls. At first this seems like a brilliant move, but then the investigation takes an unexpected turn that has her regretting her decision to get so close to these families.

The Suspect is a suspenseful story that kept me reading late into the night. I knew just based on the novel’s title that a crime had potentially been committed, so as soon as I read that two teens had gone missing in a foreign country, I couldn’t put the book down until I knew what had happened to the girls and who was responsible.

The story itself was engaging because the fear of losing a child is a fear that all parents can relate to. Barton does a particularly good job of depicting the two sets of parents and how frantic with worry they are. There are several scenes where they get emotional and lash out at each other, desperately looking for someone to blame. The raw emotions in those scenes felt very real, and it was easy to put myself in these parents’ place and imagine what they were going through.

Another aspect of the story that I thought was very well done was the way Barton chooses to present the story from four different points of view – Detective Sparkes (who appears regularly in this series and often works with Kate), so that we get law enforcement’s perspective on the investigation, and of course, Kate so that we also get the media’s perspective. In addition to those two points of view, we also hear from the mother of one of the missing girls and from one of the missing girls, Alex. I loved the depth and the added layers that each perspective brought to the story. Any more than four POVs might have gotten too confusing to keep track of, but these four really came together to paint a full picture of what happened and to show how each piece fell into place. Alex’s perspective was particularly effective since we can witness firsthand the days and weeks leading up to the girls’ disappearance.

All of these elements made for a well-paced read that I didn’t want to put down.

Even though I enjoyed the story overall, I did have some mixed feelings about The Suspect, the first being that I found it hard to connect with Kate Waters. I experienced the same thing with the second book in the series. I like Kate well enough and I think she’s a talented journalist, but even three books in, I still just don’t feel like I really know much about her. In that sense, the books remind me of procedural crime dramas where the characters take a backseat to the crimes being investigated. There’s obviously nothing wrong with that and from a mystery standpoint, the story is fantastic, but because I prefer to feel some kind of a connection to the main characters, I found that aspect a little lacking in The Suspect.

One other issue I had was that I felt like we learned what happened to the girls a little too soon. I know the book is called The Suspect and therefore implies that the suspect is the primary focus, but I just would have preferred a little more buildup to the reveal of the crime.

The Suspect is another riveting mystery from Fiona Barton. Even with the couple of issues I had with it, I still found the story very engaging and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone looking for a good thriller.

GOODREADS SYNOPSIS:

The new must-read standalone crime thriller from the author of Sunday Times bestseller, The Widow, and the Richard & Judy No. 1 bestseller, The Child – featuring unforgettable journalist, Kate Waters.

The police belonged to another world – the world they saw on the television or in the papers. Not theirs.

When two eighteen-year-old girls go missing on their gap year in Thailand, their families are thrust into the international spotlight: desperate, bereft and frantic with worry.

Journalist Kate Waters always does everything she can to be first to the story, first with the exclusive, first to discover the truth – and this time is no exception. But she can’t help but think of her own son, who she hasn’t seen in two years since he left home to go traveling. This time it’s personal.

And as the case of the missing girls unfolds, they will all find that even this far away, danger can lie closer to home than you might think

About Fiona Barton

In Barton’s own words…

“My career has taken some surprising twists and turns over the years. I have been a journalist – senior writer at the Daily Mail, news editor at the Daily Telegraph, and chief reporter at The Mail on Sunday, where I won Reporter of the Year at the National Press Awards, gave up my job to volunteer in Sri Lanka and since 2008, have trained and worked with exiled and threatened journalists all over the world.

But through it all, a story was cooking in my head.

The worm of my first book infected me long ago when, as a national newspaper journalist covering notorious crimes and trials, I found myself wondering what the wives of those accused really knew – or allowed themselves to know.

It took the liberation of my career change to turn that fascination into a tale of a missing child, narrated by the wife of the man suspected of the crime, the detective leading the hunt, the journalist covering the case and the mother of the victim.

Much to my astonishment and delight, The Widow was published in 36 countries and made the Sunday Times and New York Times Best Seller lists.

It gave me the confidence to write a second book ,The Child, in which I return to another story that had intrigued me as a journalist. It begins with the discovery of a newborn’s skeleton on a building site. It only makes a paragraph in an evening newspaper but for three women it’s impossible to ignore.

The Child will be published in June 2017 and I am embarking on my next novel. My husband and I are still living the good life in south-west France, where I am writing in bed, early in the morning when the only distraction is our cockerel, Titch, crowing.”

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