Ellie Mack was the perfect daughter. And then she was gone.
Ten years after Ellie’s disappearance, her mother, Laurel Mack, is trying to put her life back together when she meets an unexpectedly charming man in a cafe. Before she knows it, she’s meeting Floyd’s daughters – and his youngest, Poppy, takes Laurel’s breath away.
Because the eerily precocious Poppy is the spitting image of Ellie.
And now, the unanswered questions she’s tried so hard to put to rest begin haunting Laurel anew. Where did Ellie go? Did she run away from home, as the police have long suspected, or did something more sinister happen? A haunting page-turner of “sheer perfection" (Booklist, starred review), Then She Was Gone is a gripping and emotionally resonant tale of one mother’s quest to uncover the clues she failed to recognize and finally discover the truth of what happened to her daughter.
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I can’t say whether I like this book. So I gave it three stars.
I like this book. I quite enjoyed reading it.
And I don’t like this book. I don’t like to read the part about what happened to Ellie. I skipped most of it. It was horrible!!
Usually, I don’t like the kind of novel when the author tells the story in two parts, what happened in the past and what is happening at the present. For many times, I’ll just flip through the part about the past, because they are mostly very sad.
U. S. Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Along with his partner, Chuck Aule, he sets out to find an escaped patient, a murderess named Rachel Solando, as a hurricane bears down upon them.
But nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems.
And neither is Teddy Daniels.
Is he there to find a missing patient? Or has he been sent to look into rumors of Ashecliffe’s radical approach to psychiatry? An approach that may include drug experimentation, hideous surgical trials, and lethal countermoves in the shadow war against Soviet brainwashing …
Or is there another, more personal reason why he has come there?
As the investigation deepens, the questions only mount:
How has a barefoot woman escaped the island from a locked room?
Who is leaving clues in the form of cryptic codes?
Why is there no record of a patient committed there just one year before?
What really goes on in Ward C?
Why is an empty lighthouse surrounded by an electrified fence and armed guards?
The closer Teddy and Chuck get to the truth, the more elusive it becomes, and the more they begin to believe that they may never leave Shutter Island.
Because someone is trying to drive them insane …
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Like Alex Michaelides’s The Silent Patient, the authors both prepared a surprising ending. The kind I hate!!
I don’t like to read a book which was told from the point of view of a criminal. However, you won’t know it until the last chapter!
As usual, I will give Dennis Lehane another chance, before I decide whether to quit reading his books.
“In an isolated country town brought to its knees by endless drought, a charismatic and dedicated young priest calmly opens fire on his congregation, killing five parishioners before being shot dead himself.
A year later, troubled journalist Martin Scarsden arrives in Riversend to write a feature on the anniversary of the tragedy. But the stories he hears from the locals about the priest and incidents leaping up to the shooting don’t fit with the accepted version of events his own newspaper reported in an award-winning investigation. Martin can’t ignore his doubts, not the urgings of some locals to unearth the real reason behind the priest’s deadly rampage.
Just as Martin believes he is making headway, a shocking new development rocks the town, which becomes the biggest story in Australia. The media descends on Riversend, and Martin is now the one in the spotlight. His reasons for investigating the shooting have suddenly become very personal.
Wrestling with his own demons, Martin finds himself risking everything to discover a truth that becomes darker and more complex with every twist. But there are powerful forces determined to stop him, and he has no idea how far they will go to make sure the town’s secrets stay buried."
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At first, I felt like I was reading The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend again. A little town at the end of a road where people were leaving for a better place to live. Or The Dry. The Australia where people were suffering from the drought and struggling to live.
But I found it far less interesting while reading. Everything was so dry, just like the drought.
“If Nina Cormier’s wedding had taken place, she would be dead. But after the bride was left at the altar, the church stood empty when the bomb exploded. It wasn’t until a stranger tried to run her off the road that Nina realized someone actually wanted to kill her.
But who?
That’s what Detective Sam Navarro has to find out … fast. With a nightmare all around them, Sam and Nina must try to decipher the terrifying truth: they are at the mercy of a brilliant madman, one who is playing for keeps …"
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I was planning to go somewhere by train. I’ve been stayed home for almost three months after the Covid crisis in May. But I decided, again not to go out due to the weather. So, I stayed home to finish this book.
I have finished all the Rizzoli & Isles series, up to the latest I Knew A Secret. So I think it’s time I can focus on Gerritsen’s standalone books. And this was not the first standalone book of her I’ve read, either.
If you ask me what category I think this book falls into, I’ll say it’s more a romance than a detective novel. Not very impressive. It’s a romance novel, so you could guess that the bride and the detective eventually would have a happy life ever after. The person, whose crimes brought Nina and Sam together, was a bomber. So you could know there would be a bomb in the end to threaten their lives. And it would definitely be at the last second, not minute, when the bomb was disarmed. Such a cliche.
“Underneath V. I. Warshawski’s wisecracking P.I. exterior lies a real pushover. When elderly neighbor Mr. Contreras asks her to look into a fellow union retiree’s sudden disappearance, she says “yes” from her heart, not her head. And when a crotchety eighty-year-old dog owner starts wrangling with a Yuppie-Come-Lately couple on their blue-collar street, again, it’s V.I. to the rescue.
Only it all goes to hell in a handbasket when Mr. Yuppie turns out to be a lawyer in V.I.’s ex-husband’s law firm, and the missing retiree turns up floating facedown in a canal. And now V.I.’s strapping on her shoulder holster to snoop into Chicago’s labor unions and politicos, because being on the side of the angels won’t win her any halos… but it’s the perfect place for an encounter with violent death."
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According to the library card, the previous check-out of this book was exactly one year ago. Wow!
I kind of liked it, sometimes, and disliked it, some other times, while I was reading this book. V. I. Warshawski was a tough female detective. For probably the first half of the book, she underwent all sorts of difficulties, which seemed to just make her tougher, but they made me suffer by going through them with her.
I still can’t decide whether I like this book. However, I can’t find any of her books here in any of the libraries. Which sort of helps me solve the do-I-want-to-read-another-Paretsky’s-book problem.
閱讀, 旅行, 喝咖啡 The Road Not Taken 