Wulf's Book Reviews

An Accidental Death: A Novel by Peter Grainger My rating: 4 of 5 stars Peter Grainger and Detective Sergeant Smith first came to my attention through the New York Times article “The Best Literary Detective You’ve Never Heard Of, and the Man Who Made Him” ( Gift link ). It made an excellent introduction to both author and character. In “An Accidental Death”, a young man drowns after a party, apparently leaving Kings Lake police with a routine investigation. Smith, newly back at work, is paired with trainee Christopher Waters, and the case gradually becomes more complicated than the initial explanation allows. I will keep the details there, because the pleasure lies in watching Smith work rather than in having the investigation pre-explained. Smith is an immediate winner for me. He is experienced, observant, stubborn, and quietly funny, but Grainger never turns him into a grandstanding super-detective. His appeal is much more understated. He notices what other people overlook, follows h...

Something Wilder by Christina Lauren My rating: 2 of 5 stars “Something Wilder” wants to be a second-chance romance, a treasure-hunt caper, and a desert survival thriller. Lily Wilder stages fake treasure hunts through Utah using the hand-drawn map she has from her father. Leo, her first love, returns with friends, and Lily’s map pulls them towards a real treasure hunt. The route back to the ranch and to each other soon becomes a violent scramble involving guns, knives, death, greed, and a suspiciously reusable set of villains. Attractive premise, poor execution. » An explosion detonated in his blood. « That sentence appears twice, in Chapters Thirteen and Fifteen; Chapter Twenty-One repeats the same blood-and-fire image twice more. The pattern feels less like a developing motif than a shortcut: whenever desire peaks, the prose reaches for combustion instead of letting the characters carry the scene. Romantic-adventure capers need momentum, danger, and protagonists whose choices becom...

A Murder in Springtime by Martin Walker My rating: 2 of 5 stars Less murder mystery than background noise in St. Denis. “A Murder in Springtime” ought to have been a return to what these Bruno novels used to do well: a local crime, a lived-in village, familiar people, and a mystery that actually matters more than the garnish around it. Instead, I found myself trudging through a novel that seemed oddly embarrassed by its own murder plot, forever wandering off into side-business, social clutter, stale emotional nonsense, and the usual namedropping of recurring figures who barely justify their presence. The international spy absurdity may be gone, and that is a mercy, but Walker has not replaced it with focus. » It might not have been quite like the old days « No kidding. That line lands almost like an accidental confession. The book keeps gesturing towards the older, better Bruno formula, but it never really recovers it. The murder feels secondary for far too long, and by the time the ...

Reliquary by Douglas Preston My rating: 2 of 5 stars “Reliquary” is what happens when a sequel mistakes escalation for improvement. Where “ Relic ” ( review ) was a fast-paced thriller that, for me, got the basics right and delivered genuine suspense in a tightly contained setting, “Reliquary” sprawls, overexplains, and keeps piling on lurid ideas until the whole thing starts to wobble under its own weight. It still has energy, and now and then it lands a scene well, but mostly I found myself watching it become more absurd with every new revelation. Its old-fashioned impulse to go big, dirty, and nasty is not a strength here but one more reason the whole thing feels overcooked and heavy-handed. Preston and Child clearly want the New York underworld here, literal and figurative, to feel mythic, diseased, and overwhelming. At moments, that works. There is proper propulsion in some of the descents into the underground, and the book can still generate suspense on a scene-by-scene level. O...

Middle of the Night by Riley Sager My rating: 2 of 5 stars I picked “Middle of the Night” up because a Goodreads friend recommended it. In hindsight, I really should have known better. Riley Sager has been wildly uneven for me, and this novel lands firmly on the wrong side of that divide. At first, the setup works. A vanished boy, a suburban cul-de-sac, a traumatised adult returning to the scene of childhood horror, sleepless nights, uneasy neighbours, dark woods. That is exactly the sort of material from which a properly creepy thriller can be made. Sager knows how to build that initial itch of dread, and for a while I kept reading in the hope that the book would cash in on its atmosphere. » The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle… « The problem is that the novel gradually mistakes strangeness for depth. What begins as eerie and potentially poignant becomes weird in a way that feels more contrived than unsettling. The story grows increasingly complicated without becoming ri...

Facets of Death by Michael Stanley My rating: 3 of 5 stars "Facets of Death" is a strange sort of prequel: useful if you already like Detective Kubu, but not quite alive enough to explain why you should. On paper, it has all the right ingredients. A huge diamond robbery in Botswana, an inside-job suspicion, cross-border violence, and young David “Kubu” Bengu entering the Criminal Investigation Department with more education than field experience. The opening has that procedural promise I usually enjoy: logistics, institutions, competence, and a crime whose mechanics matter. What works best is Kubu himself. Even in this younger version, he is recognisably the man I like in the later books: observant, stubborn, fundamentally decent, and already more interested in understanding people than in swaggering through a case. I enjoyed seeing the early shape of him, especially the way his intelligence has to push through resentment from colleagues who do not quite know what to do with...

The Vanishing Neighbor by Ava Roberts My rating: 2 of 5 stars “The Vanishing Neighbor” wants to be a glossy domestic thriller about belonging, grief, and the violence that can hide behind curated neighbourhood charm. Its hook is simple and promising: Grace is at a neighbourhood party, slips away for half an hour, and that small absence becomes suspicious when Sadie, the beloved neighbour, later goes missing. In the hands of a sharper book, this could have been a tight little study of how a community turns predatory the moment it smells weakness. Instead, it reads like something shallow, but desperately pretending to be more. Grace, our viewpoint and reluctant investigator, is the one-eyed king among the blind, surrounded by people blinded by their own perceived importance and supposed social standing. The problem is that the novel mistakes that setup for depth. It keeps gesturing at “appearances” and “secrets” as if naming them were the same as exploring them. Characters do not feel l...

The Unquiet Grave by Dervla McTiernan My rating: 3 of 5 stars There is a lot here that ought to work for me: a body lifted from a bog, the unsettling suggestion of ritual, and Cormac Reilly caught between a high-pressure investigation and a personal call for help. Dervla McTiernan still writes with that clean, brisk confidence that makes her Cormac books so readable, and, on a scene-by-scene level, I rarely felt bored. That slightly acid note of humour is something I usually enjoy in these novels, and it is here, too, tucked into conversations and reactions rather than delivered as showy one-liners. The problem is that the larger shape of the book never quite gels for me. The central case keeps switching gears in ways that feel more like plot-management than accumulation, and the tension leaks away whenever the narrative turns aside for threads that do not pay their weight. The bog-body premise has a fantastic, sickly pull, and I liked how the novel toys with the reader’s expectation...

Stolen Family by Lisa Regan My rating: 5 of 5 stars Lisa Regan’s “Stolen Family” hits like a heatwave and does not let up. Set against Denton’s Balloons and Tunes Festival, it opens with a tableau that is both theatrical and chilling: two bodies, mother and daughter, arranged beneath fairy lights, and marked with blood-red flowers. The case hooks on spectacle, but it tightens quickly into something far more unsettling - because the killer’s calling card is not just a flourish, it is a promise. » They're camellias. « From there, the novel sprints. Regan is excellent at drip-feeding information without ever letting it feel like stalling, and the heatwave setting adds a faint sense of delirium to the investigation; everything is bright, crowded, and slightly too loud, which makes the moments of quiet menace land harder. When the book swerves, it does so on the back of evidence, not authorial whim. The pacing keeps widening the circle without losing clarity. Each new lead feels like ...

Wicked Women by Angela Marsons My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Wicked Women” is one of those rare long-running-series instalments that makes you feel, within a handful of pages, that you have come home. As the twenty-third novel in the Detective Kim Stone series , it has every right to coast on familiar beats, but it does the opposite. Angela Marsons drops you straight back into Kim Stone’s world with that familiar, brisk authority - sharp observation, sharper dialogue, and a case that refuses to sit still. The premise flirts with witchcraft, but the book’s real trick is how elegantly it keeps the supernatural at arm’s length: present as culture, performance, fear, and suggestion, yet never allowed to bulldoze the procedural logic. Like Kim, I do not believe in witches, and I loved how the novel leans into that scepticism while staying delightfully ambiguous. » ‘But no one really believes in them,’ Kim stated. « That line sets the tone: we are here for evidence, motives, and human choices, ...

The Good Turn by Dervla McTiernan My rating: 4 of 5 stars Dervla McTiernan’s "The Good Turn" is, for me, the point where the Cormac Reilly series stops being “a case” and becomes properly his (and, to a lesser degree, Peter’s) story. Book three feels like the culmination of the internal conflicts he’s been dragging around since “The Ruin”: loyalty versus integrity, ambition versus decency, and the nagging sense that the job will always ask for more than it gives back. It’s a page-turner in the straightforward, genre-satisfying way you want from contemporary crime fiction. What makes “The Good Turn” stand out, though, is that the case is almost the excuse. The real investigation is internal: what Cormac will tolerate, what he’ll sacrifice, and what it costs to keep choosing the “good” option when everyone around you has a spreadsheet of compromises. » ”I don’t think you would, Emma, and I wouldn’t blame you because the truth is I wouldn’t be happy. That isn’t what I want.” ...

The Scholar by Dervla McTiernan My rating: 5 of 5 stars I flew through “The Scholar”, and it felt like McTiernan sharpened everything that already worked in " The Ruin ", the pacing, the mounting pressure, and the uneasy sense that every answer creates a worse question. Cormac Reilly is pulled into the death of a young woman linked to Galway University and a pharmaceutical dynasty with money, influence, and far too many reasons to want the truth managed. The investigation is the kind I love, official interest, media heat, colleagues second-guessing every move, and the creeping suspicion that the system is designed to protect itself first. What really sells the suspense is how personal it becomes. Cormac’s relationship with Emma Sweeney adds an edge of emotional risk to every decision, and the novel keeps nudging you into uncomfortable questions about bias, loyalty, and what “objectivity” looks like when the stakes are human. The atmosphere is crisp and chilly, even when the...

The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan My rating: 4 of 5 stars I picked up Dervla McTiernan's “ The Ruin ” wanting a modern police procedural that actually feels like police work, rather than a string of convenient revelations, and this one delivered. It’s set in Galway, it’s wintry, it’s quietly grim without being gratuitous, and it has that satisfying sense of a case tightening like a screw. Better still, it reads like a complete novel, not a “series pilot” padded with placeholders. It’s dark, yes, but it never slides into misery tourism. » I haven't seen Garda Reilly in twenty years.' And somehow that simple truth sounded more like a lie than anything else. « Cormac Reilly is a solid centre of gravity: competent, dogged, and self-aware enough to notice when the institution is trying to steer him towards the easy answer. As the “new man” in Galway (transferred from Dublin), he’s both insider and outsider, which gives the story some welcome tension. People talk to him because he’...

Talking to the Dead by Harry Bingham My rating: 3 of 5 stars This was an odd, sometimes compelling, sometimes exasperating mix of police procedural and psychological thriller, and it never quite decides which one it wants to be. The result, for me, is a book that kept pulling me along, then tripping itself up. The premise is undeniably strong: a "damaged", hyper-observant detective-in-training, a grim Welsh setting, a dead girl who does not stay neatly dead (at least, not in the way the narrative wants her to), and a mystery with enough hooks to keep the pages turning. When Bingham focuses on the investigation, the novel has that familiar genre satisfaction: clues, reversals, institutional friction - albeit with a slightly skewed angle that separates it from the more straightforward, momentum-first crime writing I usually enjoy. » I tell him that there’s one man dead, and four others, who might or might not be dead by the time help arrives. « My main problem with this novel...

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple My rating: 3 of 5 stars I went into Maria Semple's " Where'd You Go, Bernadette " expecting a clever, slightly chaotic satire with a warm centre. That’s mostly what I got, but I also got a structure that kept tripping me up. Bernadette is, by design, difficult: brilliant, prickly, and permanently on the verge of bolting. Semple captures the specific kind of marital whiplash where the person you love becomes unrecognisable, and you’re left staring across the table, wondering when it happened. » There was a terrifying chasm between the woman I fell in love with and the ungovernable one sitting across from me. « Bee, thankfully, is the emotional anchor. She’s smart, steady, and quietly funny, and I cared about her far more than I cared about the Seattle “eccentrics” circling her mother like gnats. » One of the gnats at Galer Street claims I ran over her foot at pickup. I would laugh at the whole thing, but I’m too bored. ...

Sherlock Holmes and the Missing Shakespeare by J.R. Rain My rating: 1 of 5 stars I learned to read by secretly snatching my mother’s early 20th-century editions of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Since then, the fascination with anything Holmes has never left me. Many have tried to spin further tales of Holmes and Watson; some did well, others failed miserably. This one, sadly, falls into the latter category. The story is rather convoluted, albeit light in detail. Watson is reduced to a mere admiring fan, trapped in a constant " reverie and renewed admiration for Mr. Holmes ", while Holmes himself is more of a generic action hero than a detective. In one particularly jarring scene, " Holmes delivered a punishing uppercut to the man’s jaw " so hard his feet left the ground, before the detective " delivered an unforgiving heel kick to his jaw to finish him off ". This isn't the Holmes of Baker Street; it's a Victorian John Wick. The writing is medio...

The Girl in the Ice by Robert Bryndza My rating: 3 of 5 stars A young high society woman is murdered and DCI Erika Foster from the London Metropolitan Police is sent to investigate. Foster has just returned from extended compassionate leave after her husband’s death, which she blames herself for - on basically every single page. Either because of that or because she has a completely annoying personality, Foster is pretty much constantly acting offensive, rude, and annoying. As if that weren’t enough in itself, she keeps making spectacularly stupid mistakes: She goes to the slummiest bars on her own, she searches a home she has to assume is life-threateningly dangerous on her own, even after having been assaulted by the murderer before. There doesn’t seem to be much more to her character either: Throughout the entire novel, Foster remains a sketch of herself. Apart from working, she doesn’t seem to do or reflect on anything. Since she gets suspended for insubordination relatively earl...

These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant My rating: 2 of 5 stars Gorgeous setup, then a miraculous theological derailment Wow, didn’t that blurb read great? And it started off well enough in the woods where Cooper and his daughter have been hiding for years. The atmosphere felt genuine and plausible, the prose was smart and elegant, the characters endearing - what could possibly go wrong? Cooper especially, and Finch to a lesser extent, live a tense but ultimately peaceful life: they hunt and gather, roam through the wilderness, and they do so frequently, extensively, and repeatedly. Yes, some of these excursions bring new information, but did we really need to hear about the “King of Trees” and each of its manifold brethren? Well, yes, I felt bored with large parts of this novel, but then it got worse: A certain character is introduced, and suddenly, drastically, the story springs into action. What ensues is completely unbelievable and seems to be the author’s traditionalist theo...

All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker My rating: 4 of 5 stars I went into “ All the Colors of the Dark ” by Chris Whitaker thinking it was a mystery or thriller which for the most part, it absolutely isn’t. “Colors” basically is the story of Patch, a one-eyed boy who helps a girl about to be abducted, and is abducted himself in the process. During his incarceration in absolute darkness, he’s joined by a girl, Grace, with whom he shares a year in captivity. He’s never going to get over her. » “I carved our initials in the oak tree by the graveyard,” he said. “Defacing nature for me, be still my beating heart,” she said, biting her lip to keep back her smile. « On the other hand, there’s Saint, a girl Patch’s age and his best friend. Even though she is a teenager when she meets Patch, it quickly becomes clear that Saint loves Patch boundlessly and unconditionally. After Patch’s abduction, Saint investigates tirelessly until she finds him. » To love and be loved was more than co...

The Wolf Tree by Laura McCluskey My rating: 3 of 5 stars She has a death wish, he’d rather retire than help—in “ The Wolf Tree ” by Laura McCluskey , Georgina “George” Lennox and Richard “Richie” Stewart make for a weird pairing in a complicated story about life and death on Eilean Eadar, an isolated Scottish island. After months of leave due to having been injured during an operation, George makes it back to the police force and her old partner, Richie. Their assignment is to look into the assumed suicide of a young man from the aforementioned island, due to “inconsistencies”. At the outset, everything seems fine and the small community of about 200 people is close-knit. And, yet, there is something “off” from early on that neither the reader nor the inspectors can exactly point to. Sounds good, eh? Sadly, this is just the promising beginning of a story that, for a long time, doesn’t seem to go anywhere. George is bold to a fault, but never hesitates to help if she’s needed. She does...