murders Archives - The Y Logs

Yzabel / July 27, 2017

Review: The Serial Killer’s Daughter

The Serial Killer’s Daughter by Lesley Welsh

My rating: [rating=1]

Blurb:

Charmer, liar, father… Killer.
Suzanne’s life changes forever the day she receives a visit from Rose Anderson, the woman who has been living with her estranged father, Don.

Don is dead, but Rose wants Suzanne to have his possessions – including a series of intimate diaries and a mysterious collection of photographs of women.

To Suzanne’s shock, one of the photos is of her friend Sophie, who died ten years ago in an unexplained and devastating fire.

But Don only met Sophie once, on an unsettling visit he paid Suzanne just days before Sophie’s death… So why did he have a picture of her?

Unable to let Sophie’s memory alone, Suzanne begins to dig into her father’s life. What horrors is she about to unearth in his journals? And who is it that’s out there, watching her every move?

Review:

Reading about Don’s twisted point of view and convictions about himself, others and the world about him, was fairly interesting. This kind of characters always feels like a train wreck to me: you know it’s going to be horrible, yet you keep on reading nonetheless, to see if the monster is truly so abject or if there’s anything else. I definitely won’t empathise with the guy (no kidding), but… yes, I find that interesting.

My major problem with this story, though, was the style itself, of a definite ‘tell-doesn’t-show’ kind, which kept throwing me out of the narrative at almost every page. In turn, I couldn’t empathise with the characters (whether ‘victims’, ‘criminal’ or ‘investigators’); this would have gone much better if their actions, their feelings, and whatever went through their heads, had been shown dynamically. However, I constantly felt that I was being given a recap, a textbook, telling me about them (I guess the flashbacks, or rather, where they were placed, contributed to that).

This diminished the tension created by the horrors described in Don’s notebooks and the investigation Suzanne embarked on, and didn’t contribute in making me warm up to ambiguous characters either, like ‘he’ (the man who follows Rose and Suzanne), for instance. So in general, I didn’t really care about them. I suppose I also expected something a little different, regarding the notebooks and the way Suzanne discovered the truth about her father—possibly something more psychological, and less along the lines the story followed in its second half.

Conclusion: 1.5 stars. Good basic idea, but I didn’t care much about the execution.

Yzabel / June 11, 2016

Review: Jane Steele

Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

My rating: [rating=3]

Blurb:

Like the heroine of the novel she adores, Jane Steele suffers cruelly at the hands of her aunt and schoolmaster. And like Jane Eyre, they call her wicked – but in her case, she fears the accusation is true. When she flees, she leaves behind the corpses of her tormentors.

A fugitive navigating London’s underbelly, Jane rights wrongs on behalf of the have-nots whilst avoiding the noose. Until an advertisement catches her eye. Her aunt has died and the new master at Highgate House, Mr Thornfield, seeks a governess. Anxious to know if she is Highgate’s true heir, Jane takes the position and is soon caught up in the household’s strange spell. When she falls in love with the mysterious Charles Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: can she possess him – body, soul and secrets – and what if he discovers her murderous past?

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I have a weak spot both for retellings and for “Jane Eyre”, so no wonder I’d request this novel. And it turned out to be fairly interesting, although it’s more “inspired by” than an actual “retelling”, and at times my attention waned a little—not sure if it’s because of the book or just me being myself, that is, with the attention span of a dead amoeba. Also, I don’t why, I had forgotten that the novel was set in the 19th century, and was surprised at first that it wasn’t set in some contemporary UK. Dead amoeba, I tell you.

Jane Steele, who incidentally is an avid re-reader of the original “Jane Eyre” story, is, like her heroine, an orphan surrounded with a hostile family that mocks her at best and generally despises her. Her mother being an artist and a laudanum-addict doesn’t exactly help. However, unlike Jane Eyre, Miss Steele early enough takes matters into her own hands by despatching those who are in her way. These aren’t just random murders committed by a psychopath, though, and her victims aren’t exactly goody-two-shoes. Jane is actually trying to protect the people she really loves, not obeying some dark unexplained instincts. And so this brings quite a few questions about whether killing might be seen as “justified” in some cases, or not? After all, so many people kill others in wars, and it’s seen as “justified” and not “murder” because “it’s for your country”… so why wouldn’t “it’s for love” be good enough a reason either?

And there you have it. There are killings in this novel, yet they come second to complex relationships among very different people. Thornfield and his Sikh family. The girls at Lowan School, united in misery through a perverse net of betrayal and friendships disguised as hate (unless it’s the contrary?). Jane and her cousin who could so very well end up raping her. Jane and her mother, and these two and Aunt Patience, because there must be a reason for the latter to despise them so much.

There were a few funny moments, especially when the inspector was concerned—well, I did find them funny, especially with Jane constantly trying to escape him. And I also liked the way assault/rape was handled, as it turns out not so many characters in there blame the lady, and do think instead that, yes, she’s not the one at fault at all.

To be honest, I preferred the first part of the novel, with Jane’s years at school with the other girls. The plot in the second part was nice, but… the pacing and the setting in general were less thrilling (which is too bad, for Sardar and the others provided characters and a setting that screamed “badass”)… not to mention that, in spite of the inclusion of a large cast of Sikh people, in the end what could have broken the typical colonialist/jingoist mould of many Victorian-era stories just didn’t do that. (It’s still about white people finding happiness, and the non-white ones kind of get the shaft.)

As for the romance, of course it was meant to mirror the one in “Jane Eyre”, in a fashion, however I never really felt any chemistry between Jane and Charles: it felt more as if they were destined to end up together because Brontë’s characters did, and not because of their traits as people.

Conclusion: I really liked the beginning, so I’m still giving this book 3 stars. The second half and ending didn’t do much for me, though.

Yzabel / March 6, 2014

Review: The Necromancer’s Gambit

The Necromancer’s Gambit by Nicolas Wilson

My rating: [rating=2]

Summary:

Knight, the sheriff of a local magical government known as “the Gambit,” is called to recover a mutilated body, tainted with magic and dumped at a popular haunt. When the corpse is identified as a close associate of the Gambit, it threatens the safety of the community he protects, and those he cares about most. As the fragile peace amongst the city’s magic-wielding factions disintegrates, Knight must track down a cadre of murderers before his friends are picked off, one by one- with each death used to strengthen the spells cast against the Gambit.

Review:

(I got a free copy of this book through ARR #1665 in the Making Connections group, in exchange for an honest review.)

The Necromancer’s Gambit is one of those conundrum books I don’t exactly know how to rate, because it had strong good sides, but also strong points that disagreed with me. Part of me liked it, while another part didn’t really want to go through with it.

Mostly I was really interested in the background it developed, with mages organised in groups (“gambits”) aiming at settling disputes, protecting their cities, and so on. Each gambit has a defined set of members, named after chess pieces, with defined roles: Kings and Queens on the political scene, Rooks as guardians, Knights acting as sheriffs, and so on. These members are also well-versed in different kinds of magic, from tracking spells to necromancy to devising bombs and traps. There are definitely lots of possibilities and combinations here, especially considering the presence of other supernaturals such as vampires in town, and I don’t doubt the series—since this is book #1—aims at exploiting them more later.

There’s also mystery, a noir flavour, murder attempts, murders performed through the use of gruesome magic, necromancy (I’m such a weakling for necromancy)… It’s certainly not a kind world. And the novel plays on enough different aspects, between action and investigation, that a reader will likely find something to his/her taste in it.

However, I found it hard to focus on the story, and it came down to two problems for me. The first was editing. Some sentences had a weird structure, making them hard to follow (punctuation included). Sometimes, it was also difficult to follow who was talking, and who was the POV character for a given chapter (mostly Knight, with forays into Rook’s and Pawn’s sides of the adventure). Also, I think some bits of dialogue should’ve been omitted, as they made scenes a little too long. This ties into the second problem: a serious overload of sexual jokes and innuendos? Now, this is coming from someone whose degree of well-being is measured by her friends by the amount of dirty jokes she makes (I’m worse in that regard than most men I know). Such jokes normally don’t bother me… but there were just too many of them, in situations where they fell flat and disrupted the narrative flow. Almost every character would sooner or later talk about his junk—or someone else’s; more than once I found myself thinking “why aren’t they getting to the point instead of mentioning X’s dick or Y’s boobs or whatever? It’s been going on for ten chapters.” As a consequence of those two issues, I tended to lose track too often, and I bet it prevented me from seeing some of the more subtle sides of the story. (A shame, since betrayal’s involved.)

I’m definitely liking the world those characters evolve in, and I wouldn’t mind discovering more about it. As it was, though, I’d have appreciated it much more without all the asides.