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Anyone wishing for a Halloween thriller will likely find it in The Last Girls Standing by Jennifer Dugan. With this horror story, Dugan creates Charlene Addison Barnes, aka Cherry, and Sloan Thomas, two survivors of a mass murder at Camp Money Springs where they had taken summer jobs as camp counsellors. Able to diffuse tension with a single sentence, Cherry survives the killing spree of a “save the Earth” cult with her memory intact. However, like a rabbit in a snare, Sloan is caught in a time loop in her head. Although Sloan wants to study social work and save the world, her perfect plansRead More →

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Lydia Chass is not averse to pulling strings or to cracking the patina of politeness. But such behavior is frowned upon in Henley, Ohio, where kindness is a social contract. On the path to getting out of small-town Henley and into a prestigious journalism school, Lydia has always aimed high and never made a secret of it. However, that ambition gets derailed when she learns that she doesn’t have the history credits required to graduate, an oversight that Mr. Benson, Henley High School’s Guidance Counsellor, didn’t realize because he’s overly fond of Jim Beam and pill-popping. Now, Lydia has an independent study project “of appropriateRead More →

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With its first line: “The prison is always quiet but never still,” I suspected The River Has Teeth would be suspenseful and riveting. Erica Waters did not disappoint.  Her novel joins the ranks of good psychological crime thrillers like Silence of the Lambs or the television series Criminal Minds. Besides the main plot thread of girls going missing in The Bend and the mystery of who is murdering them, the book carries several other threads to keep the reader engaged. One thread follows Della Lloyd and her family’s magic, murders, and infinite crimes in brewing potions for customers with vengeful thoughts. The Lloyds live inRead More →