Thriller

Review: Rattle

Fiona Cummins’ debut thriller, Rattle, is a mess.

A real world thriller with a supernatural horror genre identity crisis, Rattle – or, to give it its full title, according to Amazon, Rattle: a serial killer thriller that will hook you from the start (see: a mess) – is confused and confusing.

It works analogies to the point of abuse, it’s weirdly misogynistic (especially given it was written by a woman), and the muddled story it’s trying to tell falls down somewhere after its first ten descriptions of obscure medical conditions and never manages to scramble back to the same heights – rendering it a less fun read than 101 Bone Diseases That Could Kill You Tomorrow.

I’m not promising this review will be any better, of course. But I’m pretty confident it couldn’t be worse.

Book Reviews Thriller

Review: Dear Amy

written by M. J. Magee

The breakaway success of Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train – and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl before it – seems to have sent publishers scrabbling through their slush piles, snatching up any story with a suitably dodgy narrator they can shove onto the bandwagon.

Just as Stephenie Meyer launched a thousand supernatural YA novels, just as E. L. James launched… whatever she launched, Hawkins has crammed the shelves full of unreliable narrators, women who don’t want to go into their shady pasts or tell us what they’re taking all that medication for.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (It’s hard to argue you shouldn’t be publishing books people clearly want to read, after all.) Just because one author has hit success with a certain thought or theme or gimmick doesn’t mean another writer can’t riff off the idea to come up with something new and interesting.

Book Reviews Thriller

Review: The Woman in Cabin 10

written by M. J. Magee

If you’ve ever read one of the hundreds of books and blogs and pieces of particularly literary graffiti on how to write a story, you’ll be familiar with this – overly familiar, to the point it’s a little uncomfortable: ‘write something that completely surprises your readers but also feels inevitable, like there’s no other satisfactory way things could have ended‘.

But for the amount of writers who proffer this advice, very few seem to prescribe to it – and no wonder. It’s hard. But Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10 is a masterclass on getting this right.

A tightly told thriller and murder mystery, where half the mystery is working out if there was actually a murder, The Woman in Cabin 10 should be recommended reading for anyone trying to write mystery, suspense, or unreliable narrators.