Suspense

A murder mystery set in a post-apocalyptic world, The Last is a novel that surprises with its blend of genres, featuring a main character who is both infuriating and fascinating in the way he’s tied to the story’s central themes. You know the drill. A bunch of people are stranded in a faraway place – in this case, a hotel …

Written by Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply is a novel that tries to raise questions about identity but keeps forgetting to develop them, deciding instead to focus its attention on a boring group of static, shallow characters. The story is told through the eyes of three main characters: we follow Lucy, a student who ran away with her history professor, …

The Fireman is a suspenseful thriller deeply concerned about the ambivalence of tribal behavior, with its fantastical elements amplifying the alluring side of its powerful feeling of belonging, while also warning us of its many dangers: the things we do to be part of a group, after all, can be terrifying. The story revolves around an apocalyptic pandemic. There’s a …

“And they say marriage is such hard work,” someone ironically concludes in Gone Girl, a novel that employs a typical thriller structure to deconstruct the institution of marriage and, through the conflicts of deeply troubled characters, expose the difficulties of maintaining a long-lasting relationship. On his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne receives the news that his wife, Amy Dunne, has …

This review contains spoilers. Falling is a shallow thriller that heavily relies on overused tropes and stereotypes to tell a by-the-books story of a plane being hijacked by terrorists: full of one-note characters and predictable twists, the novel is also marred by a strong reluctance to delve into its own themes. The book opens with a shocking scene full of …

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is a competent, albeit problematic, conclusion to the Millennium series, written by Stieg Larsson. The book brings together the trilogy’s best features, with a narrative that is socially engaged and deeply concerned with violence against women, but also many of its worst flaws, such as useless plotlines and dialogues full of exposition. The …

The first volume of the Millennium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was very successful in being both an engaging thriller and a relevant social critique of the status of women in modern society. The Girl Who Played with Fire, however, despite keeping the social aspect intact, presents a very slow-paced narrative that doesn’t know which characters and threads …

The Water Knife, a sci-fi thriller written by Paolo Bacigalupi, presents a dystopian world that is disturbing in its verisimilitude. The novel, however, is ultimately dragged down by shallow main characters, having to resort to shock value to hold our attention. The story is built around three main points of view: there’s the journalist Lucy, who needs to find out …

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is both an effective detective story and a powerful cry about the situation of women in modern society. Stieg Larsson creates, in the first volume of the Millenium trilogy, a fascinating cast of characters and an engaging plot, but really excels when putting at the foundation of the story the problem of how women …

This review contains spoilers. A crime thriller written by Stephen King, The Outsider has a great start, pushing its characters to their limits while making them face questions regarding the limits of reason and, paradoxically, the terrible consequences of acting based on emotions alone. Its second half, however, brings the pacing to a halt, with the introduction of an uninteresting …