To celebrate the publication day of Her Turn to Cry I have a guest post from the author, Chris Curran. I had hoped to have my review ready for today, but unfortunately I've had some homework to do this week (Boo! Hiss!) so do pop back soon to read my review.
Her Turn to Cry is a gripping psychological thriller set in the 1950's and 60's. It is published by Killer Reads and you can buy your copy from Amazon by clicking here.
As if we needed any further temptation to buy books, Chris has very kindly shared with us her six best psychological suspense reads. I've certainly spotted one or two there that I want to read, so clicking the book covers at the bottom of the piece will take you straight over to Amazon.
My
six of the best in recent psychological suspense - Chris Curran
Like
all novelists I’m often asked about the kind of fiction I read
myself and I’m sometimes stuck for an answer because I’m a
voracious reader and there’s very little I won’t try. As a kid I
loved fantasy. As a teenager I turned to sci-fi, historical fiction
and romance. What led me to read, and then write, crime was
discovering Daphne Du Maurier’s two mesmerising tales of secrets,
lies and twisted relationships:
Rebecca and
My
Cousin Rachel.
If Du Maurier is the grandmother of this kind of book then Ruth
Rendell (or her alter ego, Barbara Vine) is the mother and after
reading A
Dark Adapted Eye
and the rest I was hooked.
Although
I now enjoy police procedurals, Chandleresque private eyes,
historical crime, Nordic noir etc. the sub-genre that still speaks to
me most intensely is this kind of psychological suspense. And I’m
not the only one. In the last five to ten years such novels have been
riding high in the bestseller charts.
Often
called domestic noir or grip-lit, the genre is dominated by women
writers, whilst strong female characters are the engine that moves
the story along. No longer just the pretty victim, the loyal
secretary or the femme fatale, these women and girls may be damaged
and conflicted, but are always compelling. The author takes us up
close and personal and the female protagonist is more likely to be
intimately involved with the crime and the suspects than to be an
outside investigator.
Unlike
more traditional crime novels there are no heroes seeking to clean up
the mean streets here. Indeed unreliable narrators are so common that
it’s not unknown for the protagonist to also be the perpetrator.
Trust no one is a good mantra when reading one of these books because
the most sympathetic and apparently trustworthy character may be
suffering memory loss or hiding terrible secrets even from
themselves. These novels tend to be whydunits rather than whodunits
and we can come away from them with the uneasy feeling: this
could happen to me; this could be me.
So
here are my own six of the best from the contemporary crop.
Weirdo
– Cathi Unsworth
I’ve
loved all of Cathi Unsworth’s books, but this remains my favourite
and is the one that most fits my personal definition of grip-lit. In
1984 a brutal murder took place in the down-at-heel East Anglian
seaside resort of Ernemouth. The killer was apparently apprehended
and convicted, but in 2003 there are moves to instigate an appeal and
the story switches back and forth between the events of 1983/4 and
the 2003 investigation.
Fifteen-year-old
Corinne Woodrow is the weirdo of the title: a wild haired goth with a
terrible background and a worse attitude. Enter Samantha Lamb, newly
returned to live with her wealthy grandparents. Samantha’s grandad
is a big noise in the town and blonde and pretty Sam appears at first
to be Corinne’s antithesis. But it turns out that she’s even more
damaged than Corinne and when she infiltrates Corinne’s friendship
group the outcome is disastrous.
Everyone
knows everyone else in Ernemouth and in this stifling atmosphere dark
secrets fester beneath the surface and the teenagers caught up in the
storm of their own adolescent passions are unaware, until it's too
late, that they are trapped by the corruption that runs through
generations of tangled relationships.
The
Secret Place – Tana French
Tana
French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels could be classified as police
procedurals, but her approach, which is to focus on different
detectives each time, means they fit very well into the psychological
suspense/grip-lit genre. And never more so than here.
Teenage
passions and tortured relationships dominate this novel too, but in
the apparently refined atmosphere of an Irish girls’ boarding
school. Banned from social media, the privileged teenagers use the
secret place of the title to post anonymous messages. When one of the
girls, Holly McKay, alerts detectives to a note from someone claiming
to know who murdered a boy from the neighbouring school, her story is
not taken seriously. But detectives, Stephen Moran and Antoinette
Conway, are given 24 hours to look into the mystery.
As
the girls share their recollections of the previous year, in the
hothouse
atmosphere of the enclosed school community, we
witness the friendships and rivalries that slowly but surely develop
into something deadly. The contrast between the steady build of
menace during the sections set in the past and the urgency of the
single day, when the detectives begin to realise that something is
very wrong, stretches the tension so tight you can almost hear it
twanging.
The Wrong Girl –
Laura Wilson
No teenagers here,
but three generations of females. 60s wild child, Janice, gave up her
daughter, Suzie, for adoption and is stunned when Suzie contacts her
for the first time and she discovers that Suzie also has a daughter,
ten year-old Molly. Another surprise is that the Norfolk village
where Suzie is holed up is home to reclusive former rock star, Joe
Vincent. Once Janice’s lover, Joe is a shambling wreck of the rock
god she remembers. And it seems that Joe harbours a terrible secret.
Janice’s
granddaughter has her own secrets. She resembles the age enhanced
picture of abducted child, Phoebe, and is convinced that she is
Phoebe. Phoebe’s mother is everything Molly desires in a parent and
the life Molly expects to return to when they are finally reunited is
very different from the ramshackle existence she shares with
unreliable Suzie. As well as being a powerful suspense story, The
Wrong Girl asks questions about celebrity and obsession, about
what makes a good mother and whether we can ever escape the burdens
we carry from the past.
Burnt Paper Sky –
Gilly Macmillan
The novel begins a
year after the kidnap of Rachel Jenner’s son, Ben. He disappeared
when Rachel allowed him to run ahead of her during a woodland walk.
But did she believe that at the age of eight he needed to experience
a little freedom, or was her behaviour that of woman too obsessed
with her ex-husband and his new wife to be properly protective of her
son? Even Rachel isn’t sure of the answer.
A burst of
hysterical anger during a disastrous televised appeal leads the media
to become suspicious of Rachel herself. She doesn’t fit the
expected image of the bereft and grieving mother. Did she kill her
son accidentally and dispose of the body, or murder him in a fit of
the kind of rage she demonstrated at the press conference?
As the tense and
absorbing search goes on it’s clear that the abduction of a child
arouses primal emotions in everyone.
Sharp
Objects – Gillian Flynn
There’s
a nightmare mother in Gillian Flynn’s first novel, which is still
my favourite. Journalist Camille
Parker is the (literally) wounded journalist forced to return to her
small home town to cover the abduction and murder of two young girls.
In
the claustrophobic atmosphere of her family home she is once more at
the mercy of her controlling mother and forced to confront the
tragedy that drove her away and led to a cycle of self-harm. She
carves guilty words into her own flesh and, although aware that she
needs to escape again, she cannot walk away when her precocious
younger sister may be in mortal danger.
Windgap
Missouri is a sick town and Camille’s own family could be the
sickest of all. And as she tries to make sense of what happened in
the past, as well as the more recent deaths, Camille makes some
disastrous mistakes. At least one of which turns out to be fatal.
Dare
Me – Megan Abbott
Dare
Me
features another group of intense adolescent girls – an American
college cheerleading squad. They perform not frilly pom pom routines,
but dangerous acrobatics. These teenagers are strong and hungry for
triumph, but also for food because they must keep themselves light
and lean. Their ultimate desire is to become the girl who tops the
squad’s glittering pyramid and somersaults to glory.
The
story is narrated by Addy, second in command to squad captain, Beth.
They
live and breathe cheerleading and share an intense friendship, until
their positions are reversed by new coach, Colette French, who
favours Addy over Beth. Although a married woman, Colette seems
almost like one of the girls. She pushes them to tackle yet more
dangerous moves, but also welcomes them into her home for giggly
drunken evenings. Addy is captivated, but Beth remains hostile and
suspicious.
We
know right from the start that a bad
thing will
happen, but the story is so skilfully told that it’s still a shock
when Addy finally blunders into the nightmare.
