Rapid River January 2020 Final

BOOKS
Rapid River Magazine’s five best thrillers of 2019
REVIEW BY DENNIS RAY • NATIONAL
The question is precise; what is a thriller? My answer is a
book that makes you want to take a quick look at the last
few pages to see what characters, if any, are still alive.
That’s pretty simplistic, I know, but with these following
books, that thought is very much in play. Each of these I
would highly recommend and most certainly want to reread
at a later date. Are these the best thrillers of 2019?
I haven’t read every book so who knows. I needed a
headline. But, with all honesty, I can say each of these
books will give you a couple of days of enjoyment.
The Guardians
By JOHN GRISHAM
In the small Florida town of Seabrook, a
young lawyer named Keith Russo was shot
dead at his desk as he worked late one night. The
killer left no clues. There were no witnesses, no one
with a motive. But the police soon came to suspect
Quincy Miller, a young black man who was once a
client of Russo’s.
Quincy was tried, convicted, and sent to prison for
life. For 22 years, he languished in prison, maintaining
his innocence. But no one was listening. He had no
lawyer, no advocate on the outside. In desperation, he
writes a letter to Guardian Ministries, a small nonprofit
run by Cullen Post, a lawyer who is also an Episcopal
minister.
Guardian accepts only a few innocence cases at a
time. Cullen Post travels the country fighting wrongful
convictions and taking on clients forgotten by the
system. With Quincy Miller, though, he gets far more
than he bargained for. Powerful, ruthless people murdered
Keith Russo, and they do not want Quincy Miller
exonerated.
They killed one lawyer 22 years ago, and they will kill
another without a second thought.
The Chain
By ADRIAN MCKINTY
You just dropped off your child at
the bus stop. A panicked stranger calls
your phone. Your child has been kidnapped, and the
stranger explains that an entirely different stranger has
also abducted their child. The only way to get your
child back is to kidnap another child within 24 hours.
Your child will be released only when the next victim’s
parents kidnap yet another child, and most importantly,
the stranger explains, if you don’t kidnap a child, or if
the next parents don’t kidnap a child, your child will be
murdered. You are now part of The Chain.
The Warehouse
By ROB HART
Paxton never thought he’d be working
for Cloud, the giant tech company that’s
eaten much of the American economy. Much less that
he’d be moving into one of the company’s sprawling
live-work facilities.
But compared to what’s left outside, Cloud’s bland
chain store life of gleaming entertainment halls, openplan
offices, and vast warehouses…well, it doesn’t
seem so bad. It’s more than anyone else is offering.
Zinnia never thought she’d be infiltrating Cloud. But
now she’s undercover, inside the walls, risking it all to
ferret out the company’s darkest secrets. And Paxton,
with his ordinary little hopes and fears? He might make
the perfect pawn if she can bear to sacrifice him.
As the truth about Cloud unfolds, Zinnia must gamble
everything on a desperate scheme—one that risks
both their lives, even as it forces Paxton to question
everything about the world he’s so carefully assembled
here.
The Invited
By JENNIFER MCMAHON
A chilling ghost story with a twist: the
New York Times bestselling author of The
Winter People returns to the woods of Vermont to
tell the story of a husband and wife who don’t simply
move into a haunted house – they build one.
In a quest for a simpler life, Helen and Nate have
abandoned the comforts of suburbia to take up residence
on forty-four acres of rural land where they will
begin the ultimate, aspirational do-it-yourself project:
building the house of their dreams. When they discover
that this beautiful property has a dark and violent past,
Helen, a former history teacher, becomes consumed
by the local legend of Hattie Breckenridge, a woman
who lived and died there a century ago. With her
passion for artifacts, Helen finds special materials to incorporate
into the house–a beam from an old schoolroom,
bricks from a mill, a mantel from a farmhouse
– objects that draw her deeper into the story of Hattie
and her descendants, three generations of Breckenridge
women, each of whom died suspiciously. As the
building project progresses, the house will become
a place of menace and unfinished business: a new
home, now haunted, that beckons its owners and their
neighbors toward unimaginable danger.
Imaginary Friend
by STEPHEN CHBOSKY
A young boy is haunted by a voice in his
head in this acclaimed epic of literary horror
from the author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
Christopher is seven years old.Christopher is the
new kid in town.Christopher has an imaginary friend.
Single mother Kate Reese is on the run. Determined
to improve life for her and her son, Christopher, she
flees an abusive relationship in the middle of the night
with her child. Together, they find themselves drawn to
the tight-knit community of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania.
It’s as far off the beaten track as they can get. Just one
highway in, one highway out.
At first, it seems like the perfect place to finally settle
down. Then Christopher vanishes. for six long days,
no one can find him. Until Christopher emerges from
the woods at the edge of town, unharmed but not
unchanged. He returns with a voice in his head only he
can hear, with a mission only he can complete: Build
a treehouse in the woods by Christmas, or his mother
and everyone in the town will never be the same again.
Twenty years ago, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks
of Being a Wallflower made readers everywhere feel
infinite. Now, Chbosky has returned with an epic work
of literary horror, years in the making, whose grand
scale and rich emotion redefine the genre. Read it with
the lights on.
26 |RAPIDRIVERMAGAZINE.COM | RAPID RIVER’S ARTS & CULTURE | VOL. 23, NO. 5 — JANUARY 2020