Scare Me by Richard Jay Parker
My rating: 4/5 cats
this is one of the first books from angry robot’s new crime imprint, exhibit a, and it is a pretty solid foray into the genre.
number one: i love the title.
number two: i love the synopsis. let’s take a moment, shall we?
“When did you last Google yourself?”
Wealthy businessman, Will Frost, gets woken in the middle of the night by an anonymous caller, asking him exactly this.
When Will goes online, he finds a website has been set up in his name, showing photographs of the inside of his home, along with photographs of six houses he’s never seen before.
In the first of these strange houses, a gruesome murder has already taken place.
Will is then told that his own family is in mortal danger.
The only way he can keep them safe is to visit each of the houses on the website in person – before the police discover what has happened there.
Seven houses.
Seven gruesome homicides.
Seven chances to save his daughter’s life…
right?? awesome. this is the kind of stuff i like in my crime fiction: the psychological suspense that builds with each page, the ever-tightening circle of discovery and possibility of being discovered at a crime scene and prevented from fulfilling the rest of the task, the frustration of having to fly all over the globe, knowing that at the end of each flight, there will be one more gruesome tableau to confront and wearily endure, while the psychological toll escalates because of not knowing what will be waiting at the end-end of the journey, and how this will all play out, and if he and his family will still be alive. phoar.
and for the most part, it’s great. terrific pacing, very bloody and horrifying, plenty of tension and obstacles and close calls, plenty of different POVs, so you get that “noo, i want to know what is going to happen next for this character; don’t give me another tam chapter!” but in a good, delayed-gratification kinda way.
and then the ending. it wasn’t bad, not at all. stuff gets resolved, for the most part. you will not be unsatisfied. and it’s not that it is ambiguous—there is one piece of the puzzle “missing” in on-the-page words, but you know what’s what. however, he decides to pull a girl with curious hair move on the last page (the short story itself, not the collection as a whole) and it is just
but still in a good way.
i just don’t like it when authors try to get tricky with a “you will remember this ending!” when it hasn’t been that kind of tricky for the whole of the book. it seems unearned, unnecessary.
but still—a lot of fun, a lot of ick, and if this is indicative of the quality of thriller coming out of the angry robot house, i may have to become a thriller-fan.
read my book reviews on goodreads
