Plus, an excerpt from Margaret Atwood's "The Testaments"
Didn't get enough thrills last week? Here are three more to check out courtesy of Kerri! |
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| The Thread's Must Read |
Three more thrillers to end your summer with
Book Riot had an interesting feature last month about how women have been drawn to thrillers since the Victorian era.
Writer Kathleen Keenan points to the way women devoured Wilkie Collins’ “Woman in White” and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s success with “Lady Audley’s Secret," a novel about a woman who stuffs her husband down a garden well so she can inherit his fortune.
Keenan adds: “Sensation fiction blended the juiciest, most sensational romantic and Gothic plot lines — think secret babies, kidnapping, poisoned spouses, and adultery, like Victorian-era soap operas.”
One-hundred-sixty years later, women are still reading more thrillers than men, but those thrillers read less like Victorian-era soap operas and more like sophisticated spy novels, police procedurals and psychological suspense stories. Last week, I recommended three of my favorite thriller reads of the summer. This week, I have three more:
I’m a big Barry Eisler fan. He created the John Rain series about the Japanese-American assassin who operates in the Pacific Rim. My favorite is titled “Killing Rain.” I thought I had read the whole series, but I’d missed “Zero Sum” and it’s an excellent addition to the John Rain genre. Rain has been working in the Philippines and he’s headed back to his home base of Tokyo where he encounters the new thug-in-charge and many more scores to settle.
If you’ve read Roxane Gay’s essays and memoirs, you may not know that she wrote a thriller set in Haiti called “An Untamed State.” It features Mirielle Duval Jameson, the wealthy, cossetted daughter of one of Haiti’s richest men, and it follows the standoff between her kidnappers and her father when he hesitates to pay the ransom. Gay knows how to turn the screws on the tension and the descriptions of Haiti are magical.
Finally, there's "My Lovely Wife” by Samantha Downing — and I have to come clean about something. This book was so disturbing in places that I put it down for a few weeks and had to think twice about finishing it. But even though the plot line of this novel is wildly far-fetched, the husband’s narration is twistedly persuasive and I just couldn’t leave the ending unread!
-Kerri Miller |
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| | | Talking Volumes 2019 season guide |
MPR and the Star Tribune are proud to announce the 20th season of Talking Volumes. This season will feature interviews with Alice Hoffman, Saeed Jones, Tim O’Brien, Karen Armstrong, Lindy West and Tracy K. Smith.
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