The Last Thing I Told You by Emily Arsenault

Full disclosure:  I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review.  What I wish I'd also received was a better pay-off for a story with a lot of promise.  Generally, I like novels about therapists and psychologists. The variety of patient stories, the struggle for their own stability, and the chance of great surprise when it turns out they are much scarier than anything you’d hear in their sessions.  Not everybody can be Hannibal, but there’s always that chance that the plaid suit and the kitchen utensils will come out by the tenth session. I got hooked into this particular story with the promise of a mystery and an unraveling patient-doctor relationship.

The book opens in the office of Mark Fabian, therapist for years and corpse for hours.  His head is bashed in, his patient notes are sketchy, and oh, by the way, his closest friends report him as having memory problems recently, so good luck with those notes again. The chapters alternate between narrators Henry, a local cop who gained fame from a retirement home shooting a few years previously, and Nadine, a former patient of Fabian’s.  I’m still getting my head around a shooter in a frigging *retirement home.* Not that it’s too farfetched these days, but what the what?

Betty White would have taken his punk ass out in a second.

Nadine’s story alternates between the present and 1997, when she was in therapy after a violent incident at school – with all this backstory, you expect her underlying psychosis to be something shocking.  She even writes that perversion is in her blood (cue dramatic music).  I don’t know if the author planned something bigger to explain the build-up to the outburst and then gave up or we’re actually supposed to be shocked by something that turns out to be terribly garden-variety.

Henry’s side of things covers his involvement in the shooting (he took down a shooter and is now a local hero who just wants people to stop calling him that) and his attempt to piece together how Fabian (I kept reading that as ‘Fabio’) wound up dead.  Oh, and his kids are getting warped by fairytales with iron shoes and decapitations.  I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a cautionary bit about your kids winding up in therapy or a suggestion for scary stuff hidden in children’s fiction. Either way, now I want to read ‘The Red Shoes.’

Honestly, this book felt like such a tangled mess that I can barely write this review.  It started out so readable and then just seemed to drag into wet noodles. Other crimes in the area are mentioned, but written in an almost throw-away fashion, even though they are suddenly a big deal for the ending.  There’s no startling reveal of some long-buried secret to explain Nadine’s violence.  There’s no startling reveal that Henry is someone interesting.  Fabian’s murder has one of the most beige explanations I’ve ever read.

"Yes, I know, but I'm trying to look Scottish or something."

If a book starts out crap and then ends the same way, that’s bad. This whole bait-and-switch thing seems even worse, because now you’ve had a chance to get excited over where things are going. Surely this will not end in you slapping yourself awake at nine p.m. and throwing the book into the library donation bag.  Just because I was almost asleep doesn’t mean I take the whole bait-and-switch thing lying down. I won’t be looking for anything else by this author.  Now if someone will introduce me to a nice novel involving a suit and fork…

Burntown: Can't see a clear story or likeable characters for all this smoke

I really wanted to like this book. I didn't even stop to read the summary, just said "ooh, the new Jennifer McMahon!" and marked it 'want to read.' Her books usually have characters I care about, plot twists I don't see coming and clear narrative. This book seems to have been written by someone else, because it has none of those things.

Narration is a jumble of viewpoints including a boy who witnessed his mother's murder, a homeless girl who lost her house and half her family in a flood, a drug-dealing closeted lesbian teen, a morbidly obese lady who pretends to be a fat lady in a circus and a private detective who features in the fat lady's mental circus as the strong man. Got all that? The jumping around was dizzying and the main character - the girl from the flood – seems as flat as the others. I thought I was misunderstanding who the protagonist was. In the end, I think nobody was. Things happened around them and to them, but none of them seemed to really push the story along.

The book begins with a young boy witnessing his mother's murder by a man in a chicken mask.

(Might be frigging terrifying but still makes me think Chik-fil-a got a little too vindictive about bad reviews.)

Murder evidence is found and the killer is caught...until the same chicken-masked man (I hate typing that) reappears several years later in pursuit of the now-grown boy's own children. What follows is the meandering story of the man’s daughter, now four years older and surviving on the streets by sticking flaming cotton balls in her mouth for money and candy.
I really wish I was making that up.
Actually, I wish nobody had made it up. Homeless people get a bad enough rep.

Did I mention there's also a device that lets you speak to the dead using a radio? That particular bit gets tossed in and you'd think that this supernatural aspect would be threaded through the storyline. NOPE. Even the character who's supposed to be dead-set on retrieving the radio's blueprints doesn't really seem to care - it's like the villains who want to take over Gotham but don't notice they need to actually kill Batman instead of hoping he doesn’t foil their plans. Ugh.

The twists were sort of lazy squiggles and for the first time reading this author’s work, I figured out the surprises before the reveals. Characters reacted in totally unrealistic ways to incredibly stressful and dangerous situations. The ending seemed simplified to the point of juvenile and rushed. Burntown was a burn-out.