Category: Contemporary

Title: How to Kill Men and Get Away With It
Author: Katy Brent
Genre: Contemporary, Thriller
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Source: Publisher via NetGalley
Format: Ebook
Release Date: April 11, 2023
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

Meet Kitty Collins.

FRIEND. LOVER. KILLER.

He was following me. That guy from the nightclub who wouldn’t leave me alone.

I hadn’t intended to kill him of course. But I wasn’t displeased when I did and, despite the mess I made, I appeared to get away with it.

That’s where my addiction started…

I’ve got a taste for revenge and quite frankly, I’m killing it.

A deliciously dark, hilariously twisted story about friendship, love, and murder. Fans of My Sister the Serial Killer, How to Kill Your Family and Killing Eve will love this wickedly clever novel!

Review:

Kitty Collins is a social media influencer and an heiress to her family’s abattoir. One night after leaving a club with her friends, a guy from the club follows her home. He’s angry that she rejected him, and he dies in a freak accident. Now that Kitty’s had a taste of revenge, she wants to avenge every girl who’s been attacked by a guy. Kitty goes searching for the awful men who target young women on dating apps, but when she takes it too far, she has to be careful that she doesn’t get caught. 

This was such a fun and twisty story. I’m sure almost every woman has had an interaction with a man that made her uncomfortable, or worse. Kitty specifically targeted the men who were preying on women, and she used creative ways of disposing of them. By killing these men, she was saving many women from being attacked by them in the future. She was carrying out justice, though if she got caught, she would be in trouble. Even though she had become a serial killer, I kept hoping that she wouldn’t get caught, because she was really helping all women who could potentially be attacked by these men. 

How to Kill Men and Get Away With It is a funny and suspenseful thriller!

Thank you HarperCollins Canada for providing a digital copy of this book. 

Content warnings: murder, rape (off page and described), assault, animal abuse, animal death, slaughterhouse, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, drug overdose

What to read next:

My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Have you read How to Kill Men and Get Away With It? What did you think of it?

Title: A Death at the Party
Author: Amy Stuart
Genre: Thriller, Contemporary
Publisher: Simon and Schuster Canada
Source: Publisher
Format: Paperback
Release Date: March 7, 2023
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

In this tense, spellbinding thriller set over the course of a single day, a woman prepares for a party that goes dreadfully wrong—for fans of Ashley Audrain and Lisa Jewell.

Nadine Walsh’s summer garden party is in full swing. The neighbors all have cocktails, the catered food is exquisite—everything’s going according to plan.

But Nadine—devoted wife, loving mother, and doting daughter—finds herself standing over a dead body in her basement while her guests clink glasses upstairs. What happened? How did it come to this?

Rewind to that morning, when Nadine is in her kitchen, making last-minute preparations before she welcomes more than a hundred guests to her home to celebrate her mother’s birthday. But her husband is of little help to her, her two grown children are consumed with their own concerns, and her mother—only her mother knows that today isn’t just a birthday party. It marks another anniversary as well.

Still, Nadine will focus just on tonight. Everyone deserves a celebration after the year they’ve had. A chance for fun. A chance to forget. But it’s hard to forget when Nadine’s head is swirling with secrets, haunting memories, and concerns about what might happen when her guests unite.

Review:

Nadine Walsh is hosting a sixtieth birthday party for her mother, the bestselling author Marilyn Millay. The hundred guest party is a success, with drinks flowing, beautiful decor, and delicious food. However, at the end of the party, Nadine is left standing over a body in her basement. This story follows the entire day leading up to the party, which Nadine spends rehashing events from her mother’s birthday party thirty years earlier when her aunt Colleen was found dead, up until the party with another dead body. 

This story was thrilling and fast paced. There were loads of hints of dark secrets to come in the first chapters. Everyone had secrets in their small community, and everyone was connected in some way. The story opens with Nadine standing over a dying man at the end of the party, but we don’t know who he is yet. There were so many possibilities as to who he could be that I was still guessing until the end. 

My only critique is that I want to know what happens next! I thought the story would still have a couple of more chapters when it ended. I would love to hear what happened after that final chapter. 

A Death at the Party is a great new thriller!

Thank you Simon and Schuster Canada and Tandem Collective for sending me a copy of this book. 

Content warnings: death, death of teenager, drugging, suggestion of sexual assault, mention of child pornography, extramarital affair

What to read next:

The Golden Spoon by Jessa Maxwell

Have you read A Death at the Party? What did you think of it?

Title: The Writing Retreat
Author: Julia Bartz
Genre: Thriller, Contemporary
Publisher: Simon and Schuster Canada
Source: Publisher and Tandem Collective
Format: Paperback
Release Date: February 21, 2023
Rating: ★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

A book deal to die for. 

Five attendees are selected for a month-long writing retreat at the remote estate of Roza Vallo, the controversial high priestess of feminist horror. Alex, a struggling writer, is thrilled.

Upon arrival, they discover they must complete an entire novel from scratch, and the best one will receive a seven-figure publishing deal. Alex’s long-extinguished dream now seems within reach.

But then the women begin to die.

Trapped, terrified yet still desperately writing, it is clear there is more than a publishing deal at stake at Blackbriar Estate. Alex must confront her own demons – and finish her novel – to save herself.

This unhinged, propulsive, claustrophobic closed-door thriller will pull you in and spit you out…

Review:

Bestselling author Roza Vallo hosts a writing retreat at her remote estate for aspiring writers under thirty-years-old. When Alex finds out that she’s been chosen for this exclusive retreat, she’s excited but there’s a problem. She’s had writer’s block for a year. On top of that, her ex-best friend, who she had a fight with a year before, has also been chosen to go to the retreat. The experience isn’t what they expected. Roza wants them to each write a complete novel, writing 3,000 words a day to complete it in a month. However, the women begin to feel trapped, and strange things start happening. It isn’t just their writing careers that are at stake, but their lives as well. 

I loved the premise of this book. It would be a dream come true for me to go to a writing retreat with my favourite author! I can’t imagine having the privilege of doing that. The thriller aspects of this story were good, but there were some strange scenes. 

The strange scenes involved hallucinations and dreams. It gave the story a bit of a fantasy side, which disrupted the intense thriller. There were also some references to homosexuality and race in publishing that didn’t really make the impact they should have. It felt like some attempted representation that was thrown into the story without a purpose or without fully making a statement. 

The Writing Retreat was an intense and unusual thriller. 

Thank you Simon and Schuster Canada and Tandem Collective for providing a copy of this book.

What to read next:

The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse

Have you read The Writing Retreat? What did you think of it?

Title: The Sanatorium (Detective Elin Warner #1)
Author: Sarah Pearse
Genre: Thriller, Contemporary
Publisher: Viking
Source: Publisher via NetGalley
Format: Ebook
Release Date: February 2, 2021
Rating: ★★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

You won’t want to leave…until you can’t.

Half hidden by forest and overshadowed by threatening peaks, Le Sommet has always been a sinister place. Long plagued by troubling rumors, the former abandoned sanatorium has since been renovated into a five-star minimalist hotel.

An imposing, isolated getaway spot high up in the Swiss Alps is the last place Elin Warner wants to be. But Elin’s taken time off from her job as a detective, so when her estranged brother, Isaac, and his fiancée, Laure, invite her to celebrate their engagement at the hotel, Elin really has no reason not to accept.

Arriving in the midst of a threatening storm, Elin immediately feels on edge–there’s something about the hotel that makes her nervous. And when they wake the following morning to discover Laure is missing, Elin must trust her instincts if they hope to find her. With the storm closing off all access to the hotel, the longer Laure stays missing, the more the remaining guests start to panic.

Elin is under pressure to find Laure, but no one has realized yet that another woman has gone missing. And she’s the only one who could have warned them just how much danger they are all in…

Review:

Le Sommat is a former TB Sanatorium that has been turned into a resort in the Swiss Alps. Elin Warner is an English detective who is on leave from her job. She goes to Le Sommat with her boyfriend Will for her estranged brother’s engagement party. There is a huge storm as soon as they arrive, with the threat of an avalanche. The morning after Elin gets to the resort, her brother’s fiancé, Laure, goes missing. While Elin is investigating Laure’s disappearance, another woman turns up dead. The pressure is on for Elin to solve these mysteries while the storm brews outside. 

This was a fast paced thriller. There were a bunch of different mysteries that had to come together with the same solution. The different threads didn’t seem to be connected, so I was really curious to see how the story ended. My only critique is that I don’t think the reader could figure out the ending because there is some crucial information that isn’t provided until the end. 

The Sanatorium is a great thriller!

Thank you Viking for providing a digital copy of this book.

What to read next:

The Retreat by Sarah Pearse

Other books in the series:

• The Retreat

Have you read The Sanatorium? What did you think of it?