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Cynthia Murphy’s book The Midnight Game is nightmare fuel.  Although her novel may not reflect the same fear-factor as a Dean Koontz or Steven King work, it is certainly sinister.  A group of teens make the mistake of meeting up in real life with people they’ve met in internet chat rooms and through online threads. Ellie, Mei, Hugo, Callum, Toni, and Reece join in a terrifying game in which the Midnight Man comes to hunt. Classed as a pagan ritual, The Midnight Game was “a punishment for wrong-doers. . . . It was sort of a trial. . . . If the ‘player’ survived, theyRead More →

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Erica Waters explores intriguing questions in her psychological thriller, The Restless Dark: What is the lure of unknowable darkness? What draws some of us to such topics as horror and true crime? To explore this idea, she creates a trio of young women: Lucy Wilson, Carolina Cassels, and Maggie Rey. All three characters attend a Killer Quest event set in Cloudkiss Canyon, an oppressive and terrifying locale in North Georgia where the fog can disorient a person and where legends swirl: Is this a place where people come to dispose of unwanted shame or “to toss ill-gotten goods, murder weapons, bodies, and anything else theyRead More →

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An experienced mental health therapist and author, Josh Silver asks some important questions with his debut novel HappyHead. First, he wonders, whether happiness is an illusion or a notion prescribed to us by others. Ultimately, he suggests that we individually define happiness and need to resist many of the systems in place that manipulate our feelings about happiness. A dystopian thriller set in Scotland, HappyHead explores the potential for mental health to have a shady side if those designing therapy wish to use behavior modification to engineer a more nearly perfect society. While not an Aldous Huxley model, Silver does ponder the power that theRead More →

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Dragonfly Girl by Marti Leimbach is a fast-paced thriller.  Although the plot is somewhat disjointed and ends rather abruptly, Leimbach’s novel kept me intrigued with its science fiction elements, espionage-like features, and shady criminal types. I’m guessing a sequel will follow. Set in California, Sweden, and Russia, the novel features seventeen-year-old Kira Adams whose mother is sick and requires constant medical care that draws down the household’s monetary resources. Given that Kira’s preternaturally gifted father turned to alcohol to cope in a world that didn’t understand him and eventually “catches a stray bullet,” Cyril Adams is not in the picture. Therefore, Kira enters science contestsRead More →

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Boston, Massachusetts, teen turned Montana transplant, Tella Holloway has taken on the challenge of the Brimstone Bleed to save her brother Cody’s life.  Tella used to be “the girl who catalogued sandwich shops by which had the best oatmeal cookies.  Now [she’s] the girl who catalogs death and the girl who vows revenge” (187).  She’s not the lone Contender in this competition that covers four ecosystems: desert, jungle, ocean, and mountain; each with its own misery, dangers, and threats.  Because it is a sequel, Salt and Stone by Victoria Scott features the last two ecosystems and picks up the plot where Fire and Flood leftRead More →

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 Michelle Gagnon’s first novel for young adults, Don’t Turn Around is unquestionably a thriller, certain to resonate with social activist readers and those who know the power of computers to perform invasive functions.  With echoes of the hacktivism but not the dystopian angle from Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Gagnon takes on shady big business, the issue of government cover-ups, and the very real plight of children in the foster care system. Gagnon tells her story primarily through the parallel threads of two adolescent lives whose paths cross and eerily connect.  Sixteen-year-old Noa Torson, who lost her parents when she was just an infant, spent severalRead More →