SWEET FURY
Sash Bischoff
“Revenge is a dish best served cold”
Dorothy Parker
Lila Crayne is working on an adaptation of Fitzgerald’s TENDER IS THE NIGHT with her fiancé Kurt. Part of bringing her role to fruition is her attending therapy. There she is introduced to Jonah. She attends therapy in the hopes that Jonah will guide her through her traumas and allow her to claim the role that is already hers.
Jonah is immediately helpful, almost to his detriment. He doesn’t realize until it’s too late that to help Lila he will have to excavate his past. To set her free, he must loosen himself.
This is Bischoff’s debut novel, and it is strong and wily. The rage hidden beneath the book’s surface is like a caged animal. Told to follow the rules, it only knows one way to survive. And that is to destroy everything and everyone in its path. Lila and Jonah are simply casualties of a war called SWEET FURY.
Lila and Jonah are chameleon characters changing with the chapter headings. Exposing parts of each other only to uncover parts of each other. The story takes a path I didn’t see coming. It took around twists I didn’t anticipate, and the ride was oh-so fun.
SWEET FURY releases her in the US on January 7, 2025. One of the best of 2025 so far! Make sure you pick up your copy where books are sold or borrowed!
Thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for the advanced copy!
SWEET FURY…⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
LEAVE NO TRACE
Jo Callaghan
“In the beginner’s mind, there are many options, but in the experts, there are few.”
Shunryū Suzuki
What aspects of being human could not be replaced by artificial intelligence? How can we use AI when our aptitude is lacking to forge a new future alongside our creation?
LEAVE NO TRACE follows Inspector Kat Frank and AIDE Lock, her artificial intelligence officer. Aide is a hologram manifested from a watch-like attachment on her wrist. It is up to her to activate the hologram and decide when it is used.
They are on their second case together as partners and this time they are set to solve a gruesome murder in the dead of winter. A man has been crucified on a cross atop a hill. Not just any hill. A hill made of waste at their local recycling and waste station.
It happens deep in the frigid winter months and traversing to the top of the hill is a significant part of the trouble in solving the crime. They must enter and exit the scene as if they didn’t. They must solve the crime and LEAVE NO TRACE.
This is the second book in an incredibly interesting crime fiction series written by Callaghan. I read the first book in the series last year and loved the questions it raised and the thought-provoking situations our characters found themselves in.
The dynamics would be interesting with any type of plot, but I find it more so within the context of a crime fiction novel. It seems perhaps that one of the first ways AI will be used would be in crime prevention and investigation.
The book is excellent first because of the writing and second because of the context. There are several situations these partners get into where the strengths and weaknesses of each partner are explored.
There are obvious advantages to having AI investigate crimes but there are also many disadvantages and key oversights that need to be addressed.
Coded in probability when put in situations where there is only one viable option, we as humans are superior in our ability to hold several possibilities in one mind. Several opportunities in one hand.
Sometimes you do what needs to be done, sacrificing what is perfect for what is right.
Excellent conversations and I can’t wait for the next in the series. 10/10 recommend!
LEAVE NO TRACE… ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
When Alice and Leo move into a newly renovated house in The Circle, a gated community of exclusive houses, it is everything they’ve dreamed of. But appearances can be deceptive…
As Alice is getting to know her neighbours, she discovers a devastating secret about her new home, and begins to feel a strong connection with Nina, the therapist who lived there before.
Alice becomes obsessed with trying to piece together what happened two years before. But no one wants to talk about it. Her neighbors are keeping secrets and things are not as perfect as they seem…
The multimillion-copy New York Times bestselling author B.A. Paris returns to her heartland of gripping psychological suspense in The Therapist–a powerful tale of a house that holds a shocking secret
The Therapist
B.A. Paris
This is B.A. Paris’s fifth book and the fifth one I’ve read. BRING ME BACK was a disaster as far as I was concerned, so I was curious where Paris would go with this one. Psychological thrillers are my absolute favorite books to read. When the storyline involves an actual mental health professional, it piques my curiosity even more. There are so many dark avenues to navigate when talking about characters who explore other people’s minds.
In This book, however, there was a bit of mirror play. Overall, I believe Paris was really expressing the narrative of boundaries and that came through in different plot lines and in several of the dynamics of the characters. I found this book to be extremely consumable, with enough going on that I was continuously interested and relatively satisfied with the book as a whole.
The biggest problem that I have with the writing is that I really felt Paris was again over-explaining, re-hashing too much, Internal dialogue mimicking external dialogue. It creates unnecessary lulls and times where I’m rolling my eyes screaming, “get on with it already.”
Paranoia is often an annoying personality trait to play out with a character while reading a book. And on the opposite side of the spectrum, avoidance of red flags and general apathetic regard for the truth and obvious signs are even more annoying. Paris possibly pushed it to the limit from time to time during this book.
Overall, super entertaining!
Four Stars
So glad I was able to get my hands on an early copy thanks to @netgalley and #macmillanaudio
Check out #netgalley for your advanced copy; request today!
