Tag: Psychological Thriller

Sometimes I think a psych thriller is going to go one way, and it ends up completely going in a direction I didn’t expect. The New Wife by Amanda Brittany and Karen Clarke is a perfect example.

I’ll admit that I had a hard time getting into the book at first. It seemed too “by the numbers.” New wife doesn’t get along with husband’s kids, there’s animosity; oh no, what will happen?

But stick with this one because it shortly becomes apparent that the relationship with the kids (who are really closer to adults) is the least of Nell’s problems.

The connections and relationships between all of the characters are sometimes complicated. Read carefully, and you shouldn’t have any problems.

And I do mean read carefully because there ends up being a lot going on. If you read too fast or skim, you’re likely to miss some important hints regarding the truth of what’s occurring.

I liked Nell’s job; it was cool and could see myself working in a place like it. And Nell is a good main character because she is down to earth and her reactions are natural.

Ruby and Poppy were not my favorites. Ruby was okay, but Poppy seemed immature for her age. I get that she’s trouble, but some of her choices are a bit too over the top.

I’m not going to mention a few other characters – because that might give something away. But there are a few things that may seem like they’re redundant or out of place. Especially when it comes to past and current relationships.

But I assure you, they’re very relevant. Even if the reader doesn’t know that until the end.

I also don’t know how I feel about all of the resolutions. I feel like one person in particular should have had a more fitting end than how it was written. At least, I wanted it to be more in the front of the story because the reader deserved to see the result.

However, I understand the authors’ choices.

The New Wife ended up being much better than I thought it would at first. I know that sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I prefer to think that Amanda Brittany and Karen Clarke pulled a good one on the reader.

I had a feeling that The Clinic by Sally-Anne Martyn was going to be a different type of psych thriller from the opening pages.

I mean, when it starts at a psych asylum, what else can you expect? Especially if you know that the main gist of the story is about “health and wellness.”

I also knew that it was going to be uncomfortable reading because of the focus on the lengths women will go to achieve what they perceive as beauty.

I wasn’t disappointed.

You can get the gist of the story from the blurb. Health clinic set up on the grounds of an old insane asylum. Is everything as it seems? Obviously not.

I thought the author did a fantastic job of building the dread. It wasn’t so much suspense as it was a more tangible feeling of not wanting to know what was really going on but not being able to stop reading further.

Even through the gory details.

And I do mean gory. The author does not mince words when it comes to detailing the truths about the clinic.

All in all, I was reminded of Shutter Island (which is an all-time favorite of mine). I was kept off-balance in the same way, wondering if people were who they appeared to be and what their motives were.

And actually, the commentary the author provides about women’s vanity is very thought-provoking. Also unusual for a psych thriller.

At any rate, The Clinic is a creepy-good story, and I will look for other books by Sally-Anne Martyn.

Forget Me Not by Miranda Rijks is a psych thriller that mostly delivers, and it has a couple of decent twists to boot.

I liked the setup. There is an incident of unknown origin. That’s how I’ve come to think of the events that often occur in a prologue.

Most of the time, we don’t know who, when, how, or why. And that’s good because it kicks the book off with a mystery.

In this case, the action jumps from the event in the prologue to Helen’s life in the current time. She makes an offhanded comment about timing that gives the reader another mystery to latch onto. And then the story is off and running.

The plotting is pretty good, and so is the pacing. I never got bored of the story, and it felt like it kept moving forward fairly smoothly.

I did like Helen. She is matter-of-fact and honest. She is a victim of circumstances and ugly people. However, there are times (specifically later in the book) when I think she could have been smarter about a few things.

That’s all I am going to say about that.

The author throws in quite a few red herrings along the course of the story. I found it pretty easy to tell what wasn’t important for the most part, but I will say I missed one major connection.

I did guess one of the bigger twists, so there was not a lot of tension in that. And I guessed at what would happen to one of the characters due to the situations at hand.

At one point, it seemed as if the author ran out of steam. A couple of characters I figured on being more prominent literally just disappeared. And a couple of resolutions were underwhelming.

But Forget Me Not was still a good psych thriller, and I will continue to look for books from Miranda Rijks.