Book Talk Tuesday

Several months back, I read a book by Jennifer McMahon...Promise Not to Tell.  I realize now that I never did a review on here.  The writing and story remind me of Gillian Flynn and how her stories have a twisted nature to them.  Since then, I've read another Jennifer McMahon book...Island of Lost Girls.  Equally as twisted and complex.  They were both easy reads, but so dimensional in her story.

Promise Not to Tell is about a forty something woman, Kate, who returns to her hometown to help care for her mother who has Alzheimer's.  On her first day back home, a young girl is murdered...the murder is extremely similar to one that occurred when Kate was young.  The twisted story brings Kate back to the past she fled so many years before.

I easily give Promise Not to Tell four stars.  I like to read before bed and on one particular night, I had to keep going to get the creepiness out of my head and find out what was happening before I could turn the light off and go to sleep.

Island of Lost Girls is about Rhonda....and begins with her sitting at a gas station where time sits frozen as she watches a person in a white rabbit suit kidnap a young girl.  Distraught over the fact that she didn't do anything to help the girl, Rhonda joins the search party in hopes of finding the girl alive.  What she doesn't expect is for the evidence to lead her to her best friend's brother.

This one is another four star read.  If you like twisted, you'll love the stories that McMahon weaves.  And have I mentioned that both books have pictures of some pretty creepy girls on them.  All the more reason to read them.

frombarnesandnoble.com

Forty-one-year-old school nurse Kate Cypher has returned home to rural Vermont to care for her mother who's afflicted with Alzheimer's. On the night she arrives, a young girl is murdered—a horrific crime that eerily mirrors another from Kate's childhood. Three decades earlier, her dirt-poor friend Del—shunned and derided by classmates as "Potato Girl"—was brutally slain. Del's killer was never found, while the victim has since achieved immortality in local legends and ghost stories. Now, as this new murder investigation draws Kate irresistibly in, her past and present collide in terrifying, unexpected ways. Because nothing is quite what it seems . . . and the grim specters of her youth are far from forgotten.

More than just a murder mystery, Jennifer McMahon's extraordinary debut novel, Promise Not to Tell, is a story of friendship and family, devotion and betrayal—tautly written, deeply insightful, beautifully evocative, and utterly unforgettable.

frombarnesandnoble.com

While parked at a gas station, Rhonda sees something so incongruously surreal that at first she hardly recognizes it as a crime in progress. She watches, unmoving, as someone dressed in a rabbit costume kidnaps a young girl. Devastated over having done nothing, Rhonda joins the investigation. But the closer she comes to identifying the abductor, the nearer she gets to the troubling truth about another missing child: her best friend, Lizzy, who vanished years before.