I love to read, and over the past decade or so my reading tastes have really changed. I used to read a lot of literary fiction, then I delved into the rabbit hole of the romance genre, and I’ve branched out into mysteries and thrillers and fantasies as well. I love to read. And I have some musings today about a recent read, Quiet in Her Bones by Nalini Singh, who is a well known author in the genre of romance/urban fantasy. But this novel is a mystery thriller and one my imagination was quite curious about when I read the blurb.
I really do love a good thriller, and I’ve enjoyed reading them over the past few years. When I get the chance to read—my reading time has been cut into by a certain adorable baby. So let me share my thoughts with you.
Blurb
From The Storygraph:
When socialite Nina Rai disappeared without a trace, everyone wrote it off as another trophy wife tired of her wealthy husband. But now her bones have turned up in the shadowed green of the forest that surrounds her elite neighborhood, a haven of privilege and secrets that’s housed the same influential families for decades. The rich live here, along with those whose job it is to make their lives easier. And somebody knows what happened to Nina one rainy night ten years ago. Her son Aarav heard a chilling scream that night, and he’s determined to uncover the ugly truth that lives beneath the moneyed elegance…but no one is ready for the murderous secrets about to crawl out of the dark. Even the dead aren’t allowed to break the rules in this cul-de-sac.
My Musings aka Book Review
While the writing was good, and the story had promise—and did rather keep me guessing—I thought it all fell rather flat. The main character is clearly one with anger management issues, mental health issues left over from childhood trauma—and not just his mother’s disappearance. I didn’t like him to be quite honest. He was a jerk. Perhaps a decent jerk, but still a jerk. I honestly was annoyed that he wanted to find his mother’s murderer for what I had to guess was personal vengeance.
I thought the fractures in memory and story thanks to Rav’s accident was interesting, and really threw me into a whirlwind of “what if” as the story developed and got more problematic.
While the story was interesting in that respect—I had a lot of predictions about what might be happening to Rav—there was little forthcoming as to what happened to Nina. And yet, she was alive in the story through the memories of her son. I was invested in her—even though I didn’t find her likeable in the least. And while we do get answers, the climax was rather anti-climatic, the murderer no one I’d have guessed and just didn’t grip or shock me in the slightest.
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So, if I was still in the habit of giving star ratings I’d have to say this is a 3/5. It was interesting but it also just didn’t hit in the right way for me. For a story with so much potential, it just left a stale taste in my mouth. Enough so that I don’t think I’d pick up another thriller by the author. The story is just forgettable in a lot of ways, though I do hate to say that. I had a feeling many things could be happening—suppressed memories, split personality disorder to name just two. But the effort to make our narrator into an unreliable narrator didn’t work out very well in the slightest.
Final Thoughts
In short, I didn’t much like the book. I didn’t know what to expect going into the book, but certainly it wasn’t anything like this. I much prefer the style of Ruth Ware or even Lisa Jewel when it comes to mystery thrillers. They’ve hit the balance between drama and twistiness in just the right way a lot of the time in my experience. I especially liked The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewel, and The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware.
Have you read this book? Share your thoughts below!