Weekly "what are you reading" Thread #73

I coincidentally just finished the second thriller/mystery novel that I have read this month about a person who goes to Ireland and gets caught up something sinister. This is just random coincidence, but the two books make a stark contrast, are both recent, so I will review them in relation to one another.

The first "go to Ireland, get sucked into a thriller" book that I read earlier this month was The Guest List, by Lucy Foley. This is a made-for-the-movies page-turner about a destination wedding between B-list celebrities who book a remote and rustic Island off the coast of Ireland, and who invite a ribald mix of toxic relatives, old school-friends, disinterested siblings, and high-society types. The novel starts out with a scene of a dark and stormy night, with post-wedding revelry interrupted by an electricity blackout and a shocking report of a dead body. It then cycles through a series of flashbacks and time-jumps to gradually reveal all of the old rivalries and secret grudges between the people on the guest-list, in classic locked-room murder-mystery fashion (or, in this case, "isolated-island murder-mystery"). The time-jumping mechanic is well-executed, and the novel is a serious page-turner, where complex motivations and sordid histories get revealed with a tight, fast-paced building of suspense and intrigue. The setup is lurid and intense, and there is almost no fat on the pacing. It's an outstanding thriller/gothic/murder-mystery for the first 3/4. It's well-written and well-edited, but the inevitable movie will probably be almost as good.

The payoff and denouement are not bad, but are nowhere near the superb quality of the setup. The ending is mercifully fast, and reasonably satisfying to the questions and suspicions raised in the buildup, but it's a bit schlocky and overblown. Excellent beach read, fast-paced page-turner. If the payoff were as good as the setup, it would be an instant classic. But the payoff is only "pretty good", compared with the spectacular setup. Not bad enough to ruin the book, but enough of a softening in quality to relegate it from "must read" to "recommended, if you are in the mood".

The second "person who went to Ireland and got sucked into a mystery" book that I just finished is The Searcher, by Tana French. And it could hardly be more different.

The Searcher starts out slow, sparse, and laconic, with a middle-aged American divorcee who has moved to rural Ireland, almost on impulse, to try and start a new life, with little more than a mattress and a cheap dilapidated cottage. The writing style is somewhere between Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King, and it is only very gradually that we find out that the protagonist is a retired Chicago cop. The pacing is very gradual and loping. The writing is tight and vivid enough that it's never quite boring, but the central conflict of the book is not revealed until about chapter ten. And then, two chapters later, there is a pivot point where I was like "why are we wasting a whole chapter on some random guys hanging out in a pub?" where a huge reveal of an underlying conspiracy changes the whole tone of the book and the prior chapters. The world that seemed quaint and jovial and innocent takes on dark and sinister undertones, and the disappearance of a disaffected teenager from a broken home, some months prior, moves from "sure, who wouldn't want to leave this place" into "wait, what happened to Brendan?"

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