Deus Ex Machina – DaneCobain.com

Title: The Break Down

Author: B. A. Paris

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 432

Rating: 4/5

I normally find thriller novels pretty hit and miss, but I’ve quite enjoyed what I’ve read of B. A. Paris so far. I might even be slightly more kindly disposed towards her because I was sent a copy of Behind Closed Doors, her first novel, ahead of its publication.

I think part of it is the fact that her writing just feels a little more polished to me. There’s a sort of style of writing that’s pretty common amongst thriller writers that just grates on me somehow, a way with words that just feels clunky and which pulls me out of the story. That doesn’t seem to happen with B. A. Paris.

Still, it wasn’t flawless. One of my biggest problems with it was a scene in which a group of French students steal a phone and then give it to the main character. I don’t want to say too much because I don’t want to spoil things for you, but it was kind of a Deus Ex Machina kind of thing where it all just felt too coincidental. And if it hadn’t happened, the whole story couldn’t have taken place.

Overall though, I did enjoy reading this, and I was particularly impressed by how gripping it was. I found it difficult to put down, and there wasn’t a slowdown in the story towards the middle, which I find is pretty typical in thriller novels. I think it probably also helped that it did some fun stuff with layout towards the end as we start to see a series of text messages, and this meant that the page was broken up and you could whizz through a dozen pages in just a couple of minutes. I think that layout might annoy some people, but not me.

So would I recommend The Break Down? Absolutely. It’s a refreshing little read in a genre that’s been done to death. In fact, I think that most people would probably enjoy it even if they don’t consider themselves to be thriller readers, and that’s saying something. It’s just pretty approachable, and it does a great job of the whole “twist” thing, to the point at which you could probably re-read it and still enjoy it because you’d start to look for the clues.

Now that I’ve enjoyed both this book and Behind Closed Doors, I think we can safely say that I’m a fan of B. A. Paris, and I’ll definitely check out more stuff.

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Gillian Flynn – Dark Places | Review

Title: Dark Places

Author: Gillian Flynn

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 440

Rating: 3.75/5

Gillian Flynn – Dark Places

This is the last of the Gillian Flynn books that I’ve been working through, and it’s also probably my favourite of her novels. It still has a few flaws, but not as many as I found with Gone Girl and Sharp Objects. I’d rank it as her second best after The Grownup, which is a novella. It goes The Grownup > Dark Places > Gone Girl > Sharp Objects, although those last two are pretty close together.

Here, we’re basically following the story of Libby Day, whose parents and family were horrifically murdered when she was a child and whose brother is in jail serving time for the crime. It seems as though the past is the past, all dead and buried, until Libby starts to dig into it a little more. From there, we basically embark on the typical Flynn plot, full of twists and turns and the past coming back to haunt people.

Unfortunately, it also has another Gillian Flynn hallmark which is the fact that it starts to drag a little in the middle. This seems to happen in each of her novels and I inevitably end up just skimming through the latter half of the book until the climax starts to kick in. I also wasn’t too taken with the way that it jumped backwards and forwards through time and from perspective to perspective. It wasn’t necessarily that it was difficult to follow along with it, it’s just that there were certain perspectives that didn’t interest me too much.

Gillian Flynn

I had a few theories along the way as to what might happen, but none of them turned out to be correct. At the same time, I was disappointed by the actual ending because I felt as though it was too obscure. I don’t want to share the specifics but I’m pretty sure that someone popped up right at the end who hadn’t been mentioned before then. It felt a little deus ex machina, and that was a shame.

Still, if you like psychological thrillers and/or if you’ve read some of Flynn’s stuff before and you know that you like her style, I would say that this is worth reading. It’s the best of her novels, at least if you ask me, and it does keep you turning the pages to find out what happens. That’s all you can ask for from a thriller. It also means that I’m all caught up with Gillian Flynn’s work, and I’ll keep on reading whatever else she publishes. I think bigger things are coming.