I am a regular reader of Adrian McKinty, mostly his Inspector Duffy series about an Irish cop in the 80s. In The Island, McKinty turned to a more convI am a regular reader of Adrian McKinty, mostly his Inspector Duffy series about an Irish cop in the 80s. In The Island, McKinty turned to a more conventional thriller, with an American family taking a vacation in Australia that goes horribly wrong. This book follows the formula of a bunch of soft vacationers taking a wrong turn, a wrong bend in the river, or the wrong ferry, and suddenly finding themselves in Deliverance territory.
The Baxters are a pleasant all-American family with all-American problems. Tom, a successful doctor, lost his wife in a tragic accident a little over a year ago, and almost immediately married Heather, his much younger massage therapist. Heather does seem to actually love Tom, though her thoughts often turn towards the fact that she was poor and about to be unemployed when Tom swept her up. Tom's two kids, Olivia and Owen, are unsurprisingly not warming up to the new replacement mom their dad suddenly dropped into their lives.
When Tom travels to Australia for a medical conference, he agrees to bring Heather and the kids and make it a working vacation. So far, things are going kind of miserably, when they hear about a private island just off the coast with lots of wildlife that the kids haven't yet had a chance to see. Tom and Heather bribe a pair of shady ferry operators to take them over, "just for a quick look."
Of course, things go terribly wrong.
This setup worked well to establish the characters and the family dynamics, and The Island, once the story gets underway, is a pretty suspenseful thriller. Of course we're going to see Heather rise to the occasion, summoning skeletons from her own past and turning into a hot blonde sniper determined to protect her two step-kids, who will of course rise to the occasion by realizing that maybe their stepmom isn't the dumbest, most worthless person alive when she's trying to save them from a murderous clan of Australian rednecks.
But it's rough getting through the beginning, in which they all present themselves as the dumbest American cliches alive. Like, you've just been told this island is private land inhabited by reclusive islanders who don't like outsiders, and the guys taking you across couldn't be more sinister and untrustworthy if they were sitting on a porch playing banjos. Then when the Baxters take a drive across the island in their rented BMW, they almost immediately take a wrong turn (naturally) and then (view spoiler)[run over a kid on a bike and decide the smart move is to pretend nothing happened and try to flee back to the mainland before she's discovered (hide spoiler)].
Having taken that idiot ball and run with it, it's hard to work up much sympathy for Heather and Tom, though by the end, the islanders have proven themselves so malevolent that you kind of wish the Americans had run more of them over.
This was a suspenseful survival tale that despite Heather taking a few levels in bad-ass stays mostly grounded. The characters were all rather cliched though: besides Dr. Tom and his replacement upgrade wife, the two sheltered but decent kids, and the murderous hick Outbackers, there is a European couple that comes along for the trip to the island, and shows about as much instinct for self-preservation as a pair of quokkas.
I like seeing McKinty try other genres and Inspector Duffy is getting a bit worn anyway. This is a pageturner with some really horrific scenes, but it's not his best book....more
I'd never heard of Peter Foster, but he's apparently been kicking around since the 80s, a notorious Australian con man whose usual schtick was settingI'd never heard of Peter Foster, but he's apparently been kicking around since the 80s, a notorious Australian con man whose usual schtick was setting up fake diet supplement companies. He'd get a bunch of investors, collect their money, and then disappear. Later he moved on to sports betting and other ventures. He scammed everyone from 80s pop star Samantha Fox (who was apparently also his lover for a while) to Tony Blair's wife.
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As con men go, though, he's not all that interesting. Just a low-rent Bernie Madoff. He does illustrate a number of things you always see with these guys - that it doesn't take much scratching beneath the surface to find something wrong with their scheme, and their sociopathic ability to persuade people that "it's different this time" even when you know you're dealing with a con man. (Spoiler: It is never different this time.)
He also had a nasty mother who was party to his schemes - the two of them made a perfect dysfunctional mother-son cabal.
Justin Armsden, who has been on Foster's trail for decades, really, really hates this guy. You could tell it was personal at times. And this podcast/audiobook is timely, because according to Armsden, Foster is even today up to his old schemes, even though he has open judgments against him. The journalist is trying to blow up Foster's world before he cons a new batch of marks (Foster is now into online gambling and cryptocurrency), so we'll see if justice is done....more
This may be the first of what is no doubt a rush of "Coronavirus stories" rushed to market. While obviously seizing on the moment, and the plot contriThis may be the first of what is no doubt a rush of "Coronavirus stories" rushed to market. While obviously seizing on the moment, and the plot contrivance that makes it feasible for a long-lost granddaughter showing up on someone's doorstep to move in and stay there and be able to keep other family from investigating too closely, it worked well enough.
An Australian widower/retiree is living a comfortable, dull life as COVID lockdowns are going into place when a 19-year-old girl shows up on his doorstep with a compelling sob story: she is his long-lost granddaughter, she's just had a row with her abusive boyfriend, and she has nowhere to go.
While you can fault "Pop" for being credulous and overly charitable, she does have all her facts straight. He did long ago get his high school girlfriend pregnant, lose touch with her and the baby she put up for adoption, and recently applied through social services to be reconnected with his son, if the son had also happened to put in a request for information about his biological father. The girl on his doorstep knows all this, because she saw the letter her father wrote to him but never sent.
We know early on that it's a con, but as the details unfold, there are a couple of twists, though none terribly surprising.
A decent story for being an Audible freebie, though very much the sort an author rushes out quickly to catch a timely audience....more
Pretty good thriller about a psychotherapist who has some creepy clients and serious boundary issues.
For an Audible original, this was a decent story,Pretty good thriller about a psychotherapist who has some creepy clients and serious boundary issues.
For an Audible original, this was a decent story, though the protagonist, Margot Scott, was really starting to annoy me by midway through, with her lack of acknowledgment of her own culpability. Turns out, I was meant to be annoyed.
Years ago, when she was just starting out, Margot had a brief "inappropriate relationship" with a client who subsequently committed suicide. Her loving (boring) husband knew she'd gotten in some trouble with the board, but not just how deep her "relationship" had been. Now Margot has a picture-perfect life complete with a dull husband who loves her far more than she loves him, a teenage son who's getting bullied online, and a 17-year-old daughter whose hormones are raging for a hot bad boy.
Meanwhile, Margot is seeing a collection of troubled clients (aren't all a psychologist's clients troubled, by definition?), one of whom seems to be trying to push her boundaries. And since her husband is boring and this client is young and handsome, well, I give props to the author because I was really, really annoyed at Margot's internal monologue throughout the book as she rationalizes and justifies everything she does, maintaining a veneer of professionalism even when she's clearly not being professional. And then, after things go seriously bad and we get to the denouement, it fits together and I know that the author's representation of Margot was deliberate....more
I only picked this book because it popped up on PaperbackSwap and I recognized the title as one of those highly-regarded, prize-winning "literary" YouI only picked this book because it popped up on PaperbackSwap and I recognized the title as one of those highly-regarded, prize-winning "literary" Young Adult novels that are supposed to be life-changing and glorious and moving and representative of the heights of quality to which Young Adult literature can attain.
You may gather from this preamble that I was not all that impressed.
On the Jellicoe Road isn't a bad book. It's... interesting, if you find it interesting to read about teenagers! Having drama! About fucked-up parents! And secrets! About their past! And there's this one boy! In a tree!
Yeah, the boy in a tree is a dream about the main character's father and it's all very symbolic and whatever.
So, basically it's a contemporary YA novel about a girl named Taylor who was abandoned by her mother when she was eleven and has grown up at a boarding school. She's now a senior (or a "Year Twelve" or whatever they call them in Australia) and has just been put in charge of her house by a shadowy cabal of fellow students, which starts the book off with a lot of adolescent politics and power games leading to the annual "war" between the Jellicoe students, the Townies, and the Cadets in which Taylor is supposed to be leader and supreme commander of her Jellicoe kiddies. Mostly she spends the time whining, having asthma attacks, emoting about her tormented past and a mother who evidently suffered from all sorts of drug and mental health issues, and trying to uncover what happened to her father and some other people her parents knew. There's one teacher at the Jellicoe school named Hannah whom Taylor kind of sort of looks up to as a role model, and Hannah suddenly disappears, which ramps up Taylor's abandonment issues to eleventy, and since she's already a teenager and therefore living in a universe from which the gravity of her own self-importance allows no light to escape, she pretty much treats all her friends and the younger children at her school like shit, even though for some inexplicable reason they all look up to her.
I didn't like Taylor much. Yeah, she's had some rough breaks. But at the point where she's screaming at eleven-year-olds who have had their own rough breaks, not that this would ever occur to her, I lose most of my sympathy for her.
The whole "territory war" premise, in which the students, the Townies, and the Cadets wage a mock war complete with rules and treaties and things, all passing under the radar of all the responsible adults, was just a pretext to keep throwing Taylor together with Jonah, the leader of the Cadets, the brooding, dangerous, but secretively sensitive boy with his own tormented past who just needs the healing power of poontang as much as Taylor needs the healing power of peen. At the point where he and Taylor have the inevitable sex, the writing is just short of turgid with lots of "inside" and "oneness" metaphors and as graphic as a "literary" Young Adult novel will allow, so it's mostly about Feelings! And breath! And also kind of painful (for Taylor). Like giving teen readers a little taste of the forbidden apple and trying to make it sound kind of cool and exciting but also a little bit scary and vague, which I suppose is exactly how most teenagers view sex before they've tried it.
I can see why teenagers, particular younger ones, would go breathless for this book, but I'm too jaded and also, I have to say, this is a very girly book. By which I mean, Taylor's breathless first-person POV running at a constant high pitch of intense emotionalism is obviously meant to resonate with Taylor's peer group, and all of her actions and concerns and preoccupations, she goes about dealing with in a very teen girl way, which is fine but so outside my mindset that I couldn't relate. This is not a book for me.
The writing was pretty good for a YA novel, and the story eventually becomes one of adults hiding secrets (surprise!) which are finally dragged into the light and Taylor and Griggs getting some closure on their hurtful pasts, and everyone essentially having a group hug at the end, though not without a bittersweet denouement. It is possible that, boy or not, I would have really liked this book when I was a teen myself. I'd still probably recommend this book for, you know, people who like this kind of book....more
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