A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness & Siobhan Dowd

Frequently a book is simply better than the movie.  In this case it’s better written and so much darker. 

Conor lives alone with his mother, who is dying from cancer.  She’s been getting treatments, but they’re failing to make her better.  His father lives in America with his ‘other family’.  Conor has been havinv nightmares every night.  In the churchyard across the field from their home is a yew tree.  One night, it comes to life and walks to Conor’s bedroom.  In the movie, it feels like an adventure.  In the book, it’s another nightmare.  Especially the fourth story, the one from Conor, the truth.

I could not read this without hearing Liam Neeson’s voice as the monster.

A note on authorship.  Mr. Ness has written a masterful work based on the idea of another writer, Siobhan Dowd, who died before she could write the book.  He could have taken all the credit, but he has made a point of citing her as co-author.

Tell No One by Harlan Coben

A Doctor and his wife, who has been his love since they were five years old, are on a trip to the family’s private lake when they are attacked.  He was swimming and could not get to his wife fast enough, and when he did reach the dock, he was knocked back into the water.  They found the body a few days later.  She had been stabbed repeatedly and branded with a ‘K’ just as several other victims of a serial killer.

Now, nine years later, he gets a mysterious email that has a feed from a security camera and his wife looks at him for 30 seconds.

He starts asking questions, digging up the old case and trying to find out what is going on.  This brings the attention of the FBI, who think he was the real killer.  More and more damning evidence turns up and he has to run to keep ahead of the authorities while he searches for the truth.

The Midnight Line by Lee Child

Reacher steps off a bus to stretch his legs.  There’s not much to see.  The only thing open in a pawn shop.  He finds a ring there, a West Point graduation ring, size small, like a woman’s ring.  It has an inscription.  He knows what hell a woman had to have gone through to earn that ring, so he decides to buy it and track her down to return it.  He gets the name of the person who sold to the pawn shop and where they’re from.  He goes there.

Reacher finds a network hidden in the back of a self-serve laundry that nobody uses.  As he tracks the origin he finds a Major, like his own rank, who did five tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.  She was injured by an IED and like many soldiers returning from war, the meds ran out, so she’s gone back to her childhood home in the mountains of Wyoming and is surviving there.

Her twin sister has also been looking for her, so when Reacher helps track her down, there is a lot to discuss and do, Reacher’s way.

Down the River unto the Sea by Walter Mosley

A new character; Joe King Oliver, private eye and former cop.  He was setup with a woman who then filed a complaint complete with video.  It’s 13 years later and he hasn’t forgotten that they showed the tape to his wife while they had him in an interrogation room, nor the fact that she wouldn’t post bail and left him to the tender mercies of prejudiced cops and felons he had put away.  She immediately divorced him.

Now he has a client on death row.  He was framed by the same cops.  An assistant attorney brought the case to him.  His daughter insisted that he take the case.  But he needs help.  And he finds it in the form of a man he’d caught escaping but had no evidence.  When called upon to testify in court, he refused to lie to convict the man.  Now that man, a killer with extended resources is helping Joe break a man out of prison on death row.

Mosley writes in first person, getting in the head of his protagonist so the reader becomes vested in his success.