Reading List by Jennie for January through April 2025

JennieBook ReviewsLiterary fiction / mystery / Reading lists / Suspense2 Comments

The Funeral by Helen H. Durrant

This was an impulse request from NetGalley, and honestly I knew within a few pages that it wasn’t for me. But I hate dropping books, so I ended up skimming it.

Alice is down and out, barely scraping by with a part time job and living with a friend after getting kicked out of her previous apartment, when she receives a mysterious invitation to a funeral. The anonymous inviter implies that the (unnamed) deceased may have left Alice something in her will. So she hies off to attend in hopes of a windfall, and finds that the deceased is a woman going by Alice’s name (Alice herself is using an assumed name, Donna, after having run afoul of a loan shark).

At the funeral, Alice meets Alice #2’s employer Max and his wife Tara. Alice gets invited to their house after, where she meets their daughter Hannah. Before you know it, Tara has offered Alice Alice #2’s job, which was the first big thing that made no sense. Max is supposed to be a very rich and successful businessman, and it seems unlikely that he got that way by inviting strangers off the street to be his right hand (he has no other employees mentioned in the book). Alice accepts, of course, because she’s destitute and desperate. There is no training or vetting of her qualifications at any point.

The position comes with room and board, and Alice’s decision to stay with the family makes less sense once Max, Tara and Hannah start to ramp up the crazy. And ramp up they do – each of them is erratic in the extreme, verbally abusing Alice one minute and making nice the next. The strange behavior of the family was, I guess, intended to keep the reader guessing as to who, if anyone, was the villain (it doesn’t take long to start to wonder if Alice #2’s death was entirely natural). But Max and Tara particularly act insane, cycling through various personalities in the short length of a scene with Alice. Her decision to stay becomes less about having a roof over her head and a salary, and more about figuring out the identity of Alice #2 (kind of obvious from early on, honestly) and determining if someone harmed her. But Alice shows very little if any sense of self-preservation and it made no sense to me.

I sometimes come across books like this – where I feel like for whatever reason, the characters and their actions just aren’t meant to be realistic. I have no other way to explain it. I’ve also observed that this lack of realism and relatability really doesn’t bother some readers, but it absolutely bothers me. So I’m giving this a DNF, which seems only fair considering how much skimming I did.

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One By One by Ruth Ware

I’m working my way through Ruth Ware’s backlist, and this was a particularly representative example of her work (and of the sort of suspense I generally enjoy). A group of Britons gathers at a remote and luxurious French ski chalet; the visitors are all employees of a successful startup, Snoop, save one. Ex-employee Liz has been invited to the retreat, for reasons that are at first unclear. At the chalet they are greeted by the coordinator Erin; she, the chef Danny, and two others comprise the on-site staff.

Oh, and there’s a possibly catastrophic storm expected soon. Geez, I’ve never seen *that* before (just kidding – I love bad weather in suspense).

It turns out that Snoop is being offered a very lucrative buy-out, and Liz is being included because she was given shares way back when the company started. It also turns out that not everyone is in favor of the sale, and before you know it the group starts to be reduced in number. An avalanche during a ski outing leaves two of the group missing, and then bodies start turning up inside the chalet.

The story is told alternately by Erin, who harbors a dark secret about her tragic past, and Liz, who is annoyingly mousy and overly conscious of the gulf between her and the current crop of uber-cool Snoop employees.

I am not particularly good at figuring out plot twists ahead of time, but I did clock one thing early on, which pleased me. Let’s just say that the more you emphasize that someone had on a very bright and recognizable piece of clothing, the more likely I am to wonder if, when identified at a distance, the person wearing the piece of clothing isn’t the person everyone thinks it is.

I gave this a B but would probably say B+/B in retrospect – the story stuck with me for a bit and left a positive impression.

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The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

I picked this one up in preparation for reading The Woman in Suite 11, which features the same protagonist. Lo Blacklock is a journalist stagnating at a travel magazine; she has a possible break coming up, though, in the form of a chance to report on the maiden voyage of a small luxury cruise ship as one of the passengers. Shortly before she leaves, she wakes to a burglar in her apartment, an incident that discombobulates her (to put it mildly). To make things worse, she has a fight with her boyfriend the next day, and then must immediately depart for the trip. So, Lo is definitely not her best as the ship departs. (It doesn’t help that her solution to her problems seems to be to drink a lot of alcohol.)

On board, Lo meets various high flyers, including the British owner of the yacht and his uber wealthy Danish wife. She also encounters an ex-boyfriend among the other journalists assigned to cover the cruise. Finally, Lo has an unsettling encounter with the woman in the cabin next to her when she knocks on the door looking to borrow a mascara (side note: who borrows mascara? Doesn’t everyone know you’re playing pinkeye Russian Roulette doing that?).

There’s an introductory dinner the first night; Lo drinks too much and then wakes later in her cabin to the distinct sounds of a body being tossed overboard next door. Lo observes blood on the adjacent deck, and tries to get help from the staff. They are polite and patient with her, but insist that Cabin 10 was vacant and that all guests are accounted for. The cabin is checked, and Lo can see that it’s completely empty, which wasn’t the case the day before when she encountered the (maybe missing but not acknowledged by anyone else on the boat as existing) woman. The blood stain is gone as well.

From there, it’s Lo trying to prove that she’s not crazy, but continually doing things or not doing things that dont help her case (for instance, she has the borrowed mascara, but leaves it in her cabin where it conveniently disappears). I don’t love this type of story because I think I take on the protagonist’s sense of dread and frustration as she’s gaslit to the high heavens. Nevertheless, The Woman in Cabin 10 held my attention with good writing and a sympathetic if occasionally exasperating main character. I vaguely figured out certain plot points ahead of time, but not unreasonably early. It helps that I’m just not that good at guessing what’s going on and don’t try too hard; I’m usually content to let the solution to everything be explained to me at the end. But sometimes it’s fun to have an “aha!” moment. My grade for this is a B. I am looking forward to The Woman in Suite 11 and Ware has become one of my go-to suspense reads.

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The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley

I first read Foley with The Hunting Party, and then moved on to The Guest List. These books followed a formula, but not in a bad way: people converge on an isolated locale (a hunting lodge in a snowstorm, a remote island in a rainstorm) and various points of view are depicted; we learn the ties that bind the characters and the secrets that rip them apart. Eventually something bad happens, and the rest of the story is who-and-why dunit. It’s a formula that worked pretty well for me.

This one is different, if only slightly. The location this time is not remote – it’s the middle of Paris in a luxury apartment building. Jess has left London in a rush – after getting sick of her handsy boss, she’s made off with some money from the till at her dead-end bar job. She needs a place to regroup, and so she invites herself to visit her older half-brother Ben, a journalist who has recently settled in Paris. But when Jess gets there, Ben isn’t in the apartment, and there are signs that a struggle occurred. Jess and Nick aren’t close – their fractured childhood fractured even more for Jess when Ben was adopted by an upper-middle-class couple after their mother died. It’s fair to say that Jess has some resentment towards Ben. She’s a hard case (which I liked about her! I thought it made sense that she was tough and maybe a little ethically challenged, given her upbringing), but Ben is her family and so she sets out to find him.

Jess has help – Ben’s friend Nick also has an apartment in the building. The other denizens are odd and later revealed to have an unexpected link to each other – the rich older couple in the penthouse, the drunk whose wife leaves him on the night Jess arrives on the first floor, and the two younger girls who share an apartment on the fourth floor. There’s also a strange old woman, a hermit-like lady simply called the Concierge, who occupies a hut (!) in the courtyard and serves as the eyes and ears of the building. Various characters’ viewpoints are shared throughout the story, though Jess is the main narrator, and the only one that the reader can ultimately trust.

The mystery of The Paris Apartment didn’t engage me hugely (I mostly cared about Ben for Jess’ sake, as he didn’t ultimately seem like a very good dude). I did really like Jess quite a bit. She’s the reason the book is probably a B for me. I like Foley (she has one more mystery that’s come out recently, that I will get to at some point), but there’s something about her books – they are all good but I feel like they could be great? There’s a little something missing for me (I’m not sure what, which is why I’m not a writer or publisher but simply a judgmental reader).

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Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

Jayne reviewed this last year and Janine had it on her best of 2024 listed. I read it recently and adored it. I won’t recap the plot since Jayne has done a great job with her review. I will say that I just loved Margo. She was so funny and lovable to me, right off the bat. Just a very realistic aimless 20-year-old who did not have the best upbringing but also did not have the worst. Some readers will no doubt take issue with poor choices she makes –  her affair with her married professor being the biggest example – but the way it’s framed I find her mostly blameless. She’s young, lost, and wants to be seen, loved and accepted, and she’s lured into a relationship that she isn’t even really that interested in.

I thought Margo’s dad was an interesting and lovable character too, though his addiction plotline was a bit triggering for me. I have less than zero interest in pro wrestling, and so I approached that aspect of the story with trepidation, but honestly it worked pretty well for me. I had no problem with the Only Fans aspect, and in fact I thought the clever ways that Margo came up with to increase traffic were good examples of character development.

This was an A for me – it was just a really involving and feel-good (also hilarious) read, of the kind that has always been rare for me but in the past decade or so has been practically a unicorn. I understand that Thorpe’s other books might be a little different but I will probably seek them out at some point anyway, since I like her writing so much.

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