thriller

Book Review: THE GHOSTWRITER by Julie Clark

| Jessica Crawford

The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark is a 328 page standalone novel published in 2025 by Sourcebooks Landmark.

Genre:

Mystery, Thriller

Synopsis:

June, 1975.

The Taylor family shatters in a single night when two teenage siblings are found dead in their own home. The only surviving sibling, Vincent, never shakes the whispers and accusations that he was the one who killed them. Decades later, the legend only grows as his career as a horror writer skyrockets.

Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont has spent her entire professional life hiding the fact that she is the only child of Vincent Taylor. Now on the brink of financial ruin, she’s offered a job to ghostwrite her father’s last book. What she doesn’t know, though, is that this project is another one of his lies. Because it’s not another horror novel he wants her to write.

After fifty years of silence, Vincent Taylor is finally ready to talk about what really happened that night in 1975.

Opening Line:

“I know what your dad did.”

My Thoughts:

This is an engaging mystery told through the lens of a ghostwriter penning the memoir of an unreliable narrator and trying to puzzle out the truth about an old murder case. It’s written in the first person present tense, and chapters rotate through three POVs in two timelines – Olivia in the present time, and her father and aunt in the months leading up to the murders in 1975. There’s a lot of nostalgia for those who grew up in the seventies here! We see a lot of flashbacks (and actual video footage from fourteen year old Aunt Poppy’s Super 8 camera) displaying family life and social issues of the era.

Did I side eye some of the details in this book? Sure. Did I remain hooked to the unfolding story anyway? You bet!

I’m beginning to realize that once you lie about your past, you wall yourself off from the present. From the people that care about you.

Book Review: THE LAST FERRY OUT by Andrea Bartz

| Jessica Crawford

The Last Ferry Out by Andrea Bartz is a 320 page standalone novel published in Ballantine Books May 20, 2025.

Genre:

Thriller, Mystery

Opening Line:

Blood hits limestone and splatters for a second before the rain beats it back, diluting it and sluicing it away in pink rivulets.

My Thoughts:

What a nice, original thriller!

Abby’s fiancée died four months ago while spending a few weeks on an isolated Mexican island in order to finish her capstone project in a peaceful location free of distractions. Eszter had died from an apparent allergic reaction. Now, Abby herself travels to Isla Colel in an effort to feel closer to her lost love, to see how she spent her last days alive, to understand how the unthinkable could have happened. As Abby meets and learns the secrets of the island’s residents and the group of expats who have fallen in love with the desolate locale (as well as the blank slate it offers), she begins to see that she never knew the woman she loved as well as she thought she did.

Abby was a wonderful main character, a grieving woman who learned to survive by being bold and valuing efficiency. Eszter was the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, and desired her parents’ approval despite their strictness and unyielding expectations. Isla Colel was a beautifully evocative setting, with the fonda, tropical beaches, limestone cliffs, and bioluminescent bay…and also with the abandoned resort hotel and rusting comm tower lending a more menacing air.

Just before her death, Eszter texted Abby, “There’s something I need to tell you.” The mystery of this story stems from Abby trying to understand what that might have been, and as she talks to the people her fiancée spent her last days with, it becomes clear that someone knows more than they’re saying. This was a refreshingly unique and decently smart mystery/thriller. Some readers are happy with the works of certain prolific authors who can’t be bothered to fact check the details in their books or to worry that the plot makes sense, as long as they’re telling an interesting story. To me, this book was a cut above that type of thing, for sure. And then just when you think it’s over and the resolution complete, out trots a twist that is just ::chef’s kiss::. Good stuff! 4.5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine Books of Penguin Random House for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

Book Review: THE LANGUAGE OF THE BIRDS by K. A. Merson

| Jessica Crawford

The Language of the Birds by K. A. Merson is a 368 page standalone debut novel from Ballantine Books with a publish date of May 13, 2025.

Genre:

Mystery, Thriller

Opening Line:

Arizona cradles the figure-eight pendant between her thumb and finger and counts the days since her dad died–seventeen, the same as her age, and a prime number.

My Thoughts:

This is an impressive debut by an author who cites the following influences: Andy Weir for showing that science and math writing can be accessible, Blake Crouch for demonstrating how genres can be blended and bent seamlessly, Steig Larsson for writing an inspirational heroine, and Stephen King for inspiring others to make a serious effort at writing.

Arizona is a neurodivergent seventeen year old traveling with her mother to spread her recently-deceased father’s ashes in some of the places he loved. After her mother goes missing at Bodie State Historic Park in California, Arizona receives a phone call from a stranger – he is part of a group that has her mother, is familiar with Arizona’s idiosyncrasies, and demands that she help them solve a cryptic puzzle if she wants to see her mother returned safely. But how do they know this about her, and how is the group that kidnapped her mother tied to her late father?

There were flavors of The Davinci Code in this story, as Arizona works her way through multiple puzzles using ciphers and all sorts of logic exercises with which I can’t pretend to be familiar. There are a lot of diagrams and maps in this book, as we follow Arizona and her dog Mojo along on this high-stakes adventure. Did I skim over many of the parts trying to explain how she figured out what the encrypted messages and riddles meant (fractals, Euclidean space, monoalphabetic substitution ciphers, frequency analyses)? You bet. Did I get a kick out of the story featuring the history of alchemy and U.S. history and geography anyway? Heck yeah!

This books tells a smart puzzle-filled adventure of a story while also showing us personal growth in Arizona as she learns a bit more about learning to trust people enough to form relationships, and that emotions can’t be dealt with in the same way as mathematical equations. On display is the author’s own love of historical mysteries, literature, and even topography/U.S. geography and an outdoor/nomadic lifestyle. Well done!

I received an eARC of this book from NetGalley and Ballantine Books of Penguin Random House in exchange for my unbiased review.

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Book Review: SALTWATER by Katy Hays

| Jessica Crawford

Saltwater: A Novel by Katy Hays is a 336 page standalone novel from Ballantine Books with a publish date of March 25, 2025.

Genre:

Thriller, Family Drama, Mystery

Opening Line

(After a news article regarding the death of a woman while vacationing with her wealthy family in 1992.)

Money is my phantom limb.

Synopsis:

In 1992 Sarah Lingate is found dead below the cliffs of Capri, leaving behind her three-year-old daughter, Helen. Despite suspicions that the old-money Lingates are involved, Sarah’s death is ruled an accident. And every year, the family returns to prove it’s true. But on the thirtieth anniversary of Sarah’s death, the Lingates arrive at the villa to find a surprise waiting for them—the necklace Sarah was wearing the night she died.

Haunted by the specter of that night, the legendary Lingate family unity is pushed to a breaking point, and Helen seizes the opportunity. Enlisting the help of Lorna Moreno, a family assistant, the two plot their escape from Helen’s paranoid, insular family. But when Lorna disappears and the investigation into Sarah’s death is reopened, Helen has to confront the fact that everyone who was on Capri thirty years ago remains a suspect—her controlling father Richard, rarely-lucid aunt Naomi, distant uncle Marcus, and their circle of friends, visitors, and staff. Even Lorna, her closest ally, may not be who she seems.

As long-hidden secrets about that night boil to surface, one thing becomes not everyone will leave the island alive.

My Thoughts:

Saltwater by Katy Hays is a tense and twisty thriller featuring family secrets and Rich People Behaving Badly, with a strong sense of place transporting the reader to the glistening shores and plummeting cliffsides of the Italian island of Capri.

The Lingate family is Old Money with a fixation on maintaining appearances, even when this means closing ranks when one of their own dies suspiciously. As an adult, Helen, the daughter of the deceased, just wants to live in the present, but her family seems tied down by the past. She would do anything to escape the bonds of her overly controlling family in order to experience true freedom for the first time in her life. Lorna is similarly ready to free herself from the life she is forced to live in the shadow of the rich and powerful. The two women plot together to free themselves from the unwanted constraints of the Lingates and other families like them.

This was a decent thriller with conspiring, betrayal, and murder, all set in enticing locales such as an Italian villa and on the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Who can trust whom? One aspect of this story that didn’t work so great for me was that the chapters alternating amongst three timelines, but each occurring in the same locations with almost the exact same characters present, got confusing at times. “Okay, so this chapter picks back up with Helen on a boat with Ciro, but is this the time Freddy was there with them, or Lorna? Was this before or after that other event? I can’t remember!”

Things get a tad bit convoluted and farfetched as truths are revealed, but overall I enjoyed this bracing story of suspense.

There is sexual content in this story, but nothing that happens on the page. There is violence, but nothing super graphic.

Thank you to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

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Book Review: ZERO DAYS by Ruth Ware

| Jessica Crawford

The comps for this book to The Fugitive crossed with Mr. and Mrs. Smith are spot on.

Jack and Gabe are a married couple of pen testers who work as a team when companies hire them to test their organizations for any weaknesses in security. When Gabe winds up murdered, suspicion automatically falls on his spouse, and Jack finds herself Suspect Number One. While the police are focusing their efforts on her, if Jack wants to figure out who is actually responsible for her husband’s death, she’s going to have to go on the lam and do some investigating of her own. On the run from the police and with few resources at her disposal besides a particular set of skills, Jack must try to uncover what her husband may have gotten mixed up in…and what it might mean for her.

As propulsive as this story was, it is far from Ware’s best work in my opinion (I am still waiting for another The Death of Mrs. Westaway!) The writing here seemed very plain and uninspired, making it a bit boring to work through at times. The dialogue was often overly simplistic, kind of silly, or straight up unbelievable, like when police officers discuss very pertinent details of a case in the corridor just outside the room where they have been questioning a person of interest, where they are easily overheard. Jack is alternately described as making herculean efforts to hold back tears at inopportune times and wondering if there is something wrong with her for not having cried yet–we are told how broken she is by the turn of events, but I never really felt that was the case. And I guessed the baddie the moment they were very first introduced in the story.

Things did pick up in the second half of the book, and it kept me flipping pages like a good thriller should. By then I was engaged by the balanced mix of mystery and tension. Overall I’d say this was a 3 star read for me.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC.