Thrillers and Mysteries
There is nothing better in my opinion that a thriller/mystery that grips you so completely it feels like you can’t breathe during the tense moments! I have been a big fan of thrillers and mysteries since I first started reading Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys when I was in elementary school. I love trying to find clues and figure out what they mean (probably one of the many reasons I’m such a massive Taylor Swift fan)
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone
Benjamin Stevenson
“Family is not whose blood runs in your veins, it's who you'd spill it for.”
Benjamin Stevenson- Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone
Content Warnings: Murder, Death, Child Death, Suicide, Addiction, Kidnapping, Car Accident, Fire/Fire Injury, Death Of A Parent, Addiction, Injury/Injury Detail.
This is an Adult Murder Mystery
This book. This book, is PHENOMENAL! It’s a really good back to basics murder mystery. I knew the book was going to be good when the epigraph was the membership oath for the Detection Club. The next page listed the 10 commandments of Detective Fiction as written by Robert Knox. The Detection Club is something I’ve been obsessed with since I found out it existed. For those who don’t know, the Detection Club is a secret society formed in 1930 by British Mystery Writers including Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterson, Ronald Knox, and Dorothy L. Sayers. As soon as I saw that I knew that this was going to be an amazing book!
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone is told from the perspective of the main character Ernest Cunningham who is writing a book about the events of his family reunion trip, that he didn’t want to go on. Most of the story is told from the lodge that the family reunion is happening at, aside from a few flashbacks to past events. When the family who doesn’t get along well to begin with are trapped because of a snowstorm, tensions start to rise and then people start to die.
I think I bought this book during a kindle book sale. It is 1000% a book a bought solely based on the title. I was expecting a book about a family of serial killers trying to murder each other. I was quite pleasantly surprised! The narration was funny and quirky, and the “check-ins” from the author I thought added such a fun touch! There were a lot of humorous moments sprinkled throughout had me cackling at 2AM and scaring my dog awake. Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone is such a classic, back to basics murder mystery that doesn’t try to hard which just made it a really fantastic read. I’ve recommended it to SO many people because of how much I genuinely loved it. The sequel Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect has come through on my kindle through the Libby app and I am so excited to read it!
Happy Reading!
Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect
Benjamin Stevenson
“You want the difference between pulp and literature? Between a real writer and just a writer? I’ll tell you: adverbs.” “Adverbs?” “You use too many of them,” he said, derisively.”
Benjamin Stevenson- Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect
Content Warnings: Murder, Death, Blood, Rape, Violence, Sexual Assault, Vomit, Injury/Injury Detail
This is an Adult Murder Mystery
I read the first book in this series Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone last month and I LOVED it. I was so excited to find out that the sequel was coming out at the end of the same month. I read Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect this week and I'm so happy I did because it is also AMAZING. Just as smart and funny as the first book, with the same classic murder mystery vibe that I LOVE.
This book is again told from Earnest’s point of view and his voice is the same throughout this book as it was in the first book. We still get his perfectly timed interruptions in the narration to check in and also provide context to not only the story itself but also we get sneak peaks into how the murder mystery/detective genre works.
Most of the story takes place on The Ghan, a real train that operates in Australia which is where Everyone on this Train Is A Suspect takes place just like in Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone. I absolutely can’t get enough of the “murder on a train” plot point, I will read a book solely because it takes place on a train because I think it adds something really interesting to the plot. Especially since everyone is basically locking in with the murderer for the entirety of the story.
We join Ernest again after he’s published his book Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, he’s been invited to a crime-writing festival on the Ghan, hosted by the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society. However things quickly escalate when there’s a murder. Will Ernest be able to solve another murder, or were the events of the previous book a fluke? Secret identities, coverups, and scandal. This book combines several of my favorite elements in a murder mystery novel.
I flew through this book! I’m usually pretty skeptical of second novels because I find myself disappointed a lot of the time but I’m so glad to say that Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect lived up to the expectations set in Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone. I would (and have already) recommend both these books to everyone!
Happy Reading!
Never Saw Me Coming
Vera Kurian
“I’ve never met someone like me, but when I do, eventually, I think it will be like two wolves meeting in the night, sniffing and recognizing a fellow hunter.”
Vera Kurian- Never Saw Me Coming
Content Warnings: Murder, Death, Mental Illness, Rape, Sexual Assault, Gun Violence, Adult/Minor Relationship, Suicide
This is an Adult Mystery/Thiller
This is ANOTHER one of my brothers recommendations. I swear when we were growing up I never thought I'd be taking his recommendations on books or actually liking them. This was a BIG hit for me.
Never Saw Me Coming the first book I’ve read by Vera Kurian. I will be reading more books written by her! A Step Past Darkness is Vera's newest book, coming out in February and I've added it to my list of books coming out this year that I want to read!
The storyline is centered around a few characters and the University, John Adams College, that they attend. They also have one other thing in common, they're all psychopaths. This is what had me hooked from the start. Chloe Sevre is the main character in this book, there are a few other point of views that happen throughout the book but Chloe is the POV that you're reading in the most. Chole is attending John Adams College on a full scholarship due to her participation in a study on psychopaths led by a renowned psychiatrist known for working with psychopaths. His goal is to work with the "nonviolent" subsect of psychopaths and see if he can teach them tools to help integrate into society and also develop a better understand of what makes a psychopath, a psychopath. This all seems fine and well until participants in the study begin to die, one by one.
This concept alone was enough to make me immediately purchase this book. Getting be in the mind of a psychopath that's being hunted by a psychopath, I certainly never would have thought of it. I've also recently learned, through Instagram, that the author is a Psychologist. Which honestly does make a lot of sense looking back on how detailed the psychology aspects of the book are.
Never Saw Me Coming is so vividly engaging. Seeing psychopaths trying to interact with "regular" people while not understanding the emotions behind it honestly lead to some funny moments. At one point someone is experiencing shock after witnessing a murder and Charles ( one of the study participants) asks if they're cold because they're shaking from fear/shock. Charles has no frame of reference for those emotions because he's never felt them. You see Chloe pretending to experience certain emotions and learn how she's learned to "perfect" them, even though when you read from another perspective there's always something just a little off about it.
The majority of the book is spent learning what actually brought Chloe to the university. Is she just here for an education? Or is she actually here for a more sinister purpose? Whatever her reasons for attending she has to shift her focus so that she can survive the person hunting her and everyone else participating in the study.
Happy Reading!
The Butterfly Garden
Dot Hutchison
“Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”
Dot Hutchison- The Butterfly Garden
Content Warnings: Rape, Kidnapping, Sexual assault, Suicide, Forced Imprisonment
This is an Adult Dark Thiller
I originally found The Butterfly Garden on Kindle Unlimited, It’s been little while since then and I ended up buy it so I’m not sure if it is still on KU. This is one of the few books where I read the description BEFORE deciding to read it. I usually make these decisions based on the vibes and title. I really wasn’t sure about it but I ended up finishing this book in one night! I swear this book gripped me by the throat from the first page and held on through the end. I could not have put it down if I wanted to because I had to know what happened next. I finished it in one night.
The Butterfly Garden is actually the first book in The Collector series, which is a series of four books. The other books follow the FBI agents that we are first introduced to in this book. I haven't read those yet (My TBR pile is LARGE and overwhelming) however I recommended this book to one of my coworkers, and she was just as enthralled by it as I was, even more so honestly because she immediately read all of the other books in this series. She thought they were all just as good as this one although apparently she was in tears by the last book which has me a little nervous because I am a crier!
The story is told through a couple of different point of views and flashes between the past and present. It opens with two FBI agents, Victor Hanoverian and Brandon Eddison, interviewing one of the victims, Maya, who survived an abduction and imprisonment in a place known only to her as The Garden. Her captor is known to Maya and the other survivors as the Gardner, this is the man who abducted them, hurt them, and tattoos butterfly wings on their backs ( this still gives me the chills) The Gardner also gives all of his “butterflies” new names, which just further gives him a sense of ownership over them. The girls are kept in his Garden, which, true to its name does have a beautiful garden that the girls are allowed to spend time in. However, this beautiful garden existing does nothing to cover up the horrors that take place there.
As the story progresses you not only learn how Maya came to be in The Garden, but you also learn about her past, which arguably is one of the reasons she's able to survive her ordeal, in my opinion anyway. She's endured awful situations in the past and uses those experiences to survive The Garden and ultimately to aid in her escape. In these flashbacks we also learn about Maya’s time in The Garden, the friendships she makes with The Gardners other victims, her interactions with The Gardener, and the victims that were trapped in the Garden before Maya was abducted.
I’ve reread this book a few times since I first read it and it is just as chilling the second and third times you read it!
Happy Reading!