The Book: Eye Contact, by Cammie McGovern

The Story: In a small patch of woods outside of an elementary school, a young girl is murdered.  The only witness to the murder is Adam, a nine-year-old autistic boy.  Even on a good day, he is almost completely non-verbal, but after this, he totally shuts down.

His mom, Cara, has always been drawn to people who are broken or need fixed.  She has worked endlessly with Adam and can read his non-verbal clues like a book.  She has his mannerisms and routine down to a science.  Using this knowledge, she starts investigating why Adam (a rule follower to the max) would have been in the woods, and what could have caused the responses that he had.  This investigation takes her back to her past to her relationship with Adam’s father and her best friend at the time.  This untying of the past actually becomes pretty important as the book goes on.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on here: police officers with other motives, a middle-school boy who casts himself as a junior detective, over-bearing parents, and a lot of issues about dealing with special needs within the education system.

This book starts off strong, builds up the pressure, then offers twists everywhere until you can’t see which way is up.  I’m not going to ruin this for you, but the ending is wiiiild.

What I Thought: A lot of times, after I read a book, I’ll go to goodreads.com and read a few reviews just to see what other people think.  One of the reviewers said that this book seemed like a cross between I Promise Not to Tell and The Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight. I think that is an incredibly fair assessment.  If you end up reading this and liking it, pick up these other two.  Peas in a pod.

I thought that the first part of this book was totally intriguing.  The mystery was part of that, of course, but really the family at the center was the biggest intrigue.  Would Adam come out of his box to tell who did this, would Cara be able to figure it out or get Adam to talk?  How would the police and the school administration treat this gentle kid involved in a really horrid killing?  All these questions are what kept me reading late into the night one night.

I have to admit to a little bit of disappointment in where this ended up going.  I felt like there were way to many characters introduced to be supported by a little 250 page book.  The ex-boyfriend, his crazy mom, the ex-best friend, her brother,  the middle school boy, his mom, his friends, the special ed teacher, the middle school bullies…. I could go on and on and on.  These characters all had interesting stories, but it was all just a little too much.  The author didn’t give me time to truly get involved in these characters so they just seemed kind of trivial.

To be fair, the twists at the end were pretty much crazy and at several different times I thought I had it figured out, only to be totally blown away with just how wrong I’d been.  I like a mystery that does that.  So, there ya go.

Conclusion: If you like a quick little mystery between heavier books, try this one out.  Probably a book that I’ll forget about in the next couple of months, but it was a good distraction for a couple of days. Like I said earlier, I think if you liked Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight, that you will probably get into this one too.  It’s worth a shot.

The Book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Steig Larsson

The Story: So, there are really two stories going on here at the same time and they are both pretty complex. I’m just going to break it down real quick and avoid any spoilers. Here ya go:

The Vanger Corporation is one of the largest corporations in Sweden and has been for quite some time. A large portion of the family lives on an island and once every year or so everyone goes there for a big family reunion/business meeting.  During that meeting n 1966, one of the family members- Harriet- disappears.  She is 16 years old and her great uncle Henrick kind of becomes obsessed with finding her.

Flash forward to 2005.  Henrick has never given up looking although he believes all leads have been followed.  The fact that she has disappeared from an island blows his mind and he’s pretty sure that someone in his family is involved.  His family is flat out crazy, so he has pretty good reason for believing that.

Also in 2005, financial reporter Mikeal Blomkvist gets tried and convicted of libel against larger-than-life financial giant Hans-Erik Wennerstrom.  He has good info but refuses to give up his sources, so he is sentenced to a couple months in jail, but more importantly he’s stripped of his credibility.  Right after his conviction, he is contacted by Henrick Vanger and asked to spend a year digging up information on Harriet.  In return he promises a good amount of money, but also good info (with sources) on Wennerstrom.

Mikeal takes the job and moves to the island to spend the year pouring through old papers and pictures and trying to figure this whole mess out.  After making a couple of lucky breaks, he realizes that he can only do this with help.  Enter Lisbeth Salander, or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  She is an expert hacker and a great detective and the two team up to figure out the Harriet mystery and sink Wennerstrom.

Mixed up in there are: Nazis, incest, money laundering, murder, religious nuts, quite a bit of casual sex, violence against women, affairs, corporate fraud, and a whole mess of other issues.  This bad boy is 650 pages of pure crazy.

What I Thought: There was absolutely no reason for me to enjoy this as much as I did.  It was, in places, poorly translated.  The characters were kinda flat.  There was excessive violence, even for a mystery book.  The author went off on bunny trails that would take him 100 pages to return from.  I could continue.  This book did have weaknesses.

I pretty much loved it.

I’ve heard other people say that it took them 100 pages or so to get into it, but for me it was an immediate love.  Maybe it was just what I was in the mood for.  The modern mystery with all the corporate shenanigans and libel suits and such drew me in from the get-go and by the time that we got to the much more interesting mystery of what happened with Harriet, I was already sold.  I was staying up to late to read, thinking about it when I wasn’t reading and pretty much ignoring my husband for big chunks of each evening.  All this to say: this was a page turner when I was in the mood it.

Maybe I’m stupid, but most of the twisty parts I never even saw coming.  I would say that my one complaint about most mystery books is that I can think faster than I can read and I always get ahead of the author.  For me, that didn’t happen here.  A couple of times I had kind of guessed at the “answer,” but most of the time I was surprised.

I will say though, for those of you who stick mostly to bubbly, fun stuff: there are parts of this book that are fairly gruesome.  There is a lot of violence, including sexual violence and if that kind of things gets under your skin, I would probably be a little bit more reluctant to pick this one up.

Conclusion: The literary merit of this book isn’t off the charts, but what it lacks in that it makes up for in suspense and just plain old readability. A great summer read.  Read this on vacation or on the beach.  It’s not hard to get into and will keep your attention for a good long while.  Good stuff.

The Book: The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King

The Story: Like a lot of Stephen King books, this one takes place in Maine.  There are these two older guys who work for the local paper and they have a young female intern.  They are really kind of impressed with her, you can tell from the get go. She asks them if they have ever had a truly unsolved mystery on the island.  The story that they answer with is the story of The Colorado Kid.

Every town has these local legends, these stories that people tell each other with a little glimmer in their eye.  The men explain to the intern that this isn’t really one of those stories.  There are too many unknowns for it to be  ”glimmer in the eye” kind of story. It’s hard to even speculate as to what happened.

Here is the gist: A man is found dead on a beach.  He has no jacket and it is early April. He has steak stuck in his throat, and he has also suffered some kind of stroke.  His identity remains a mystery for over a year until a small clue leads them to Colorado.  From there, the list of unknowns more than doubles.

As they are telling this story, the two newspaper men are making the intern ask the hard questions and try to get to the bottom of this.  They are really feeling her out and seeing how well she would do working on the newspaper full-time.

And that’s as much as I’m telling you.  As with Into the Woods, I don’t want to give away too much. This is a mystery. It wouldn’t be fun if you knew all the twists and turns.

What I Thought: I found this on the dollar rack at Dollar General and remember having heard a great review of it from someone who is not a Stephen King fan.  She doesn’t like his scary stuff, but really liked this.  I hadn’t read it yet, so of course I picked it up.  And then, of course, I read it all in one sitting.

Good stuff.  I loved the old men who were kind of training this young girl.  They were good guys overall and just how they played off of each other and finished each others’ sentences was totally endearing to me. I wanted to meet them and have dinner with them.

The mystery itself was pretty basic.  For me, it felt like the mystery story took a backseat to the “present” story.  I’m not sure if he intended it that way but that is how I read it.

Did I mention that the intern was from Ohio? I love Ohio and I love when it is mentioned in books.

I guess that’s it.  This is a short little book. There’s really not much to say. This one wasn’t life changing but I do think it was worth the couple of hours that I put into reading it.  I loved the idea that it was this Hard Case Crime novel with the seductress on the front.  I also liked reading what seemed to be an experiment by Stephen King. Fun stuff.

Conclusion: If you like Stephen King or mystery novels, I’d say pick this one up.  It really won’t take too much time to read it and I think that you’ll be glad that you did.

The Book: In The Woods, by Tana French

The Story: Adam Ryan and two of his friends disappear into the woods in a small Ireland town about 20-something years ago.  The two friends are never found.  Adam is found, but with shoes full of blood and absolutely no memory of what happened.

Fast-forward 20ish years.  Adam Ryan is now “Rob” Ryan and he is a detective.  His partner’s name is Cassie and they are BFF. Best partners in the world.  They are the only ones around when a murder is called in in the same town that Rob grew up in.  Turns out, the girl that was murdered was murdered in the same woods that Rob’s friends disappeared in when he was a kid.  Rob and Cassie decide not to tell their superiors and instead, investigate away while Rob has a miniature mental breakdown.

There is a piece of evidence found at the scene that ties the two murders together and people start to think that there is a child serial killer on the loose.  The town kind of freaks out and there is a lot of pressure on Rob and Cassie to get this figured out.  There are a lot of leads to follow: local neighbor hood guy,  her parents, political revenge against her father, a stranger passing through, some pervert… and each of these ideas are explored pretty throughly.

I’m not going to tell you anymore.  It is a mystery, for crying out loud.  Suffice to say it gets pretty tangled and pretty crazy before it levels out again.  Quite the ride.

What I Thought: I read this for a book club meeting that will happen on Tuesday.  I really cannot wait to talk this one through because it had so many loops and so many areas for discussion.

Sometimes I feel like mystery novels in general are just kind of crap.  The characters are flat and cardboard and the situations are totally predictable.  I admit, I tend to turn my nose up at the “mystery” section.  This one, not so much.  It was actually well written.  Both Rob and Cassie had a lot of emotional depth and good back stories. While I didn’t find Rob likable at all (he was actually kind of a prick), I did think that he was well developed and I kind of got where he was coming from.  As for being predictable: maybe I’m just stupid, but I didn’t see any of it coming.

I have to say, there were some plot holes that I simply could not over look, although I don’t want to ruin the story for you.  I will tell you, too, that the end doesn’t get tied up all pretty and nice.  While reading a mystery book, though, you kind of hope for that.  Maybe she’s leaving herself open for a sequel? I’m not sure.

(After writing this, I realized that I had read the “sequel” without realizing it.  And, not to burst any bubbles, but no ends get tied up in that one either.  Maybe a trilogy?)

One thing that cracked me up when I first got into this book is that I didn’t realize that it was written by an Irish writer.  Every time it mentioned search crews going into the woods with torches, I kind of rolled my eyes. Torches? Really?  All of a sudden I got it.  They mean flashlights.  Ha.

Conclusion: A well written mystery novel, although a bit anticlimactic in the end. A good read and worth the time, for sure.

The Book: The Bright Forever, by Lee Martin

The Story: What is it with me and kidnapping/kids in peril  books? I am all about them right now.

This one is about a little girl, Katie, who gets snatched from her small town on the way to the library.  As the book unfolds, there are a lot of different characters that come out of the woodwork.  Notably, her math tutor, who at first comes off as a sweet guy who has fallen on bad luck but is then revealed to be more and more of a pervert.  There’s also Clare, an older lady who has recently remarried after being widowed.  Her new husband, Raymond R., is kind of a creeper, but again- is made out to be a nice guy.

Early in the story, Katie goes missing and the rest of the book is tacked together from different points of view (all the aforementioned characters, along with members of Katie’s family) and different times- some past, some present, and some written from the future looking back.  Little by little more is revealed that make different characters seem suspicious and lay out possible scenarios.

The question of  who is “guilty” is answered at the end of the book, but questions of responsibility leave this book with a bit of lingering tension.  Because the book is written from so many points of view, the reader gets to get into a lot of different heads who are all posing their own “what if I had…” questions.

What I Thought: I liked this one.  I didn’t love it- it didn’t move me enough for that- but I did like it.

What did it for me, I think, was the shifting points of view.  This isn’t anything new. I’ve read that before 1,000 times.  However, this time the actual voices changed.  It was actually like seeing the story through 5 or  6 different perspectives and that made the story that much more real for me.

The other thing that I really enjoyed was the actual town that the characters lived in.  It was a small town in Indiana, and for me it was like a character in and of itself.  I totally got it.  I felt like I was there.  The little class-wars, the nice but creepy guys, being a little girl with her friend just killing hours on the back porch.  Maybe that is what got me about this book. I’ve been a little girl riding my bike barefoot to return books to the library.  I could just see myself in this setting and it made the book come alive.

The fact that this book was nominated for the Pulitzer, however, is kind of beyond what I can grasp.  It was good and all… but Pulitzer nominated good? Probably not. Eh.

Conclusion: I need to read a cheerier book where all the kids are safe and happy.

The Book: When Will There Be Good News?, by Kate Atkinson

The Story: The book starts out with a young mother taking a walk with her kids.  A man comes to them and kills 2 of the kids and the mother.  The other girl runs away and hides until rescuers find her.

Next, we hop 30 years in the future, to another town with another dude who seems like a creeper.  He sneaks around then snatches some hair off of a kid’s head, then gets on a train going the wrong direction.

Hop again.  Now we’re with a 16 year old girl who is the nanny for a doctor and her weird husband.  The doctor is beyond nice and has pretty much taken the girl into her family.

Another hop.  A middle aged woman police officer who is unsettled in her marriage and is obsessed with watching over this mother and children after the father flipped out and killed some people at a party and is now after this family.

Little by little, these four stories start to weave together through several ways.  Phone calls, train wrecks, crazy brothers, dead teachers, a dog… you know, just the normal plot devices.  The suspense comes from a kidnapping and everyone else out looking for whodunit.  

What I Thought: I got this book because I had read Case Histories by Kate Atkinson and really enjoyed it.  While I remember enjoying it while I read it, I now have not even the most remote clue what it was about.  I’m sure in a few weeks this one will have worked its way out of my brain too.

Not that it wasn’t good. It was.  I loved Reggie and how she was young and scarred but really tough and able to hold her own. I also liked how quickly everything moved.

However, (isn’t there always a however?) I had a hard time with the crazy amount of plot devices and ridiculous “coincidences” that took place to bring everyone together.  It just seemed too contrived to me.   The first 150 pages took me forever to read. I couldn’t get into it at all.  The last half was much better and just sailed along for me. I read it in one night.

Conclusion: A good mystery, but not very memorable.