Recommended for your summer beach bag 

A couple of weeks ago I had knee surgery which left me with limited mobility and a lot of time to curl up with my ice machine and a book.  My reading choices were comfort food in the form of page-turner, quick reads, just the right titles for convalescing or for sitting under an umbrella with the sound of breaking waves nearby.  Here are some recommendations for your summer beach bag:

By far, the most inventive is The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastleby Stuart Turton.  The narrator wakes up at night in a forest.  He has no idea who he is or where he is or why he utters the name, “Anna” and feels a sense of alarm that she is in danger.  A woman’s cry and a gunshot occur in short order and soon a disheveled man appears, thrusting a compass in the narrator’s pocket and murmuring, “Go east,” before disappearing into the woods.  The bewildered narrator follows this direction, emerging finally in front of a large mansion where he is recognized and ushered in by the man answering the door.  Over the next hours, he learns that he’s at a house party with 50-some odd guests on the 19^thanniversary of the death of the owners’ young son on the property. Their daughter, Evelyn, returned from France where she has spent nearly two decades, is murdered on this evening. A man disguised as a plague doctor tells the narrator, who has had strange sensations of being more than one person, that he is, in fact, one Aidan Bishop, who will be provided with 8 different hosts, each time reliving this same day.  He must figure out who kills Evelyn by the end of his last host’s day or his memory will be wiped and he will start all over.  He can only escape by solving the mystery.  

The game is afoot as Aidan inhabits different characters, viewing scenes from various perspectives, adding together their assorted bits of knowledge, but he soon realizes that his sleuthing is not without peril.  It seems there are others also inhabiting hosts, competing with him to leave, and a strange footman who keeps trying to kill him.   Then there’s the elusive Anna, who is seemingly a friend, who works with Aidan to outwit the others and escape together.  The book is creatively inventive; there’s a lot of fun to be had in trying to solve the mystery as the day repeats through new eyes, but eventually the reader also wonders exactly what this world is and why Aidan is there. Who is the plague doctor?  His periodic appearances and warnings seem to suggest that he is on Aidan’s side, but is he? 

The Girl Before by J. P. Delaneyis a deliciously compelling mystery. Delaney’s narrative structure is part of what propels the story forward, alternating between the voices of Emma (in the past) and Jane (in the present).  Although they don’t know each other, they have several significant things in common:  they physically favor each other and both are residents of 1 Folgate Street, a beautiful house of minimalist architecture whose lease stipulates over 200 rules. They each end up renting the house after a traumatic event (a burglary and an assault in the case of Emma and the loss of a full-term baby for Jane), both desiring a change of environment.  And, most significantly, they each become romantically involved with the house’s owner and architect, Edward, a strangely compulsive man.  When Jane learns that Edward’s wife and child died in a freak accident and are buried under the house and that something also happened to Emma, she begins to investigate Emma and Edward.  As both narratives move forward in time, the reader watches as the mysterious architect and his strange house gradually cast spells over both women, and there’s an increasing sense of danger.  It turns out that Delaney is not only playing with time but also narrator reliability. A number of twists and turns surprise the reader.  This novel won’t win any big literary prizes, but it was a page-turner, equal to the best of Ruth Ware and Sophie Hannah.  

After I finished this one, I read Delaney’s second book, Believe Me,which reads more like a first book rather than a second one and indeed, the author acknowledges in the afterword that after the success of The Girl Before, he pulled out an old draft and reworked it. There are similar devices at play here:  an unreliable narrator, jumps in time, and dodgy characters who are not what they appear to be.  The premise is a good one:  an actress is hired by the police to play a role that will lure a serial killer into the open.  She spends time telling you about her method of immersing herself in the role and, after a while, the line between her and the role begins to blur.  She apparently keeps track of it but as the reader you are not privy to this.  The killer has a fascination with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire which – and I never knew this – is very erotic and concerned with ways to kill a lover.  The killer likes to base his death scenes on lines of verse.  

The second in Ann Cleeves’ Shetland series, White Nightsreturns to the tiny islands 80 miles off the northern coast of Scotland where a small, tight-knit community is shaken by the murder of a stranger.  Policeman Jimmy Perez is attending an art exhibition that features work by his new love interest when the reception is interrupted by a stranger who falls to the ground crying out and then suggests that he has no idea of who he is or what he is doing there.  The same stranger is found hanging from the rafters of a community boathouse the following morning.  When the pathologist confirms that the death is murder rather than suicide, Perez begins to investigate.  Who is the man?  Why was he found wearing a mask – the same mask that a costumed performer was wearing the day before as he handed out flyers indicating (falsely) that the art exhibition had been cancelled?  As with the first book in the series, Raven Nights, there’s more than one murder before it’s all over and the answers lie in the past.  Cleeves creates a highly believable setting in which the land itself is a character. 

Fitting right in with contemporary mysteries such as those by Delaney, in The Better Sisterby Alafair Burke, we are confronted with a female protagonist who is not the most reliable narrator.  For the first half of the book, the reader is firmly in the corner of Chloe Taylor, a highly successful magazine editor married to Adam Macintosh, a prosecutor turned criminal attorney.  Their marriage is a bit unusual – Adam is Chloe’s sister Nicky’s ex-husband and Adam and Chloe are raising Ethan, Adam’s son by his first marriage. Living on the Upper West Side, they are largely estranged from Nicky, a drug and alcohol abuser whom they have left behind in Cleveland.  Adam and Chloe appear to be happy; Nicky appears to be a family embarrassment and danger best forgotten; Ethan appears to be a normal teenager, reveling in his privileged upbringing.  The key word there is “appears,” as, it turns out, nothing is quite as it seems.  When Chloe returns to their East Hampton get-away home after attending a party, she finds her husband dead on the living room floor, murdered.  With the arrest of a suspect and the aftermath of a trial, appearances are stripped away to reveal a more complicated set of relationships. The writer’s decision to withhold information, only parsing it out gradually, is the key to the novel’s success. 

My Ex-Life by Stephen McCauley is an enjoyable read about regular people bravely making significant life changes as they reach middle-age.  David is a college prep coach living in San Francisco and the demands of the rich kids’ parents are wearing thin.  His younger boyfriend has thrown him over for another man and together they want to buy the cute carriage house where David lives, and evict him.  When his ex-wife, Julie, calls him out of the blue to solicit David’s help with her teenage daughter’s college applications, the circumstances seem right to flee to the East Coast for a few days.  Days turn into weeks as David and Julie rekindle their friendship and David becomes concerned for Julie’s daughter who is not making very good choices.  In an attempt to keep her house, Julie has turned it into an Air BNB, but it’s rather shabby and in need work.  Julie’s second ex-husband is trying to force the sale of the house for his half of the profits, a battle Julie seems to be losing.  Despite some of the serious issues that arise, the book is light enough to be turned into a Hallmark movie – maybe.  There’s some nice humor in the character of the next door neighbor whom I pictured as Melania Trump.

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Nigerian writer Oyinkan Braithwaite  begins with Korede, a 30ish nurse, getting a call from her younger sister Ayoola telling her that Ayoola’s latest boyfriend is dead and can Korede please come help clean up the mess.  Korede is prepared with bleach, rubber gloves and a strong stomach because this will be the third time she has gotten one of these calls about killing a boyfriend in self-defense.  The reader immediately wonders why Korede doesn’t go to the police rather than complicitly helping to cover up the murder, and this remains a mystery for most of the book.  How can she be so matter of fact about this, particularly when it’s the third time? Ayoola, for her part, always claims self-defense, but she never bears any physical signs of injury and exhibits no remorse or concern for what she has done.  As Korede wryly notes, three murders qualifies her sister as a serial killer.  

Korede, meanwhile, is up for a promotion at the hospital where she works and she is more than a little in love with one of the young staff doctors, Tade.  She’s also found a strange sense of peace with a comatose patient whom she sits with daily, spilling out the details of her life to the only person who will keep the secrets.  

Things begin to unravel when Ayoola, who is physically quite stunning, shows up at the medical office one day and Tade becomes smitten.  Korede’s attempts to dissuade his interests only serve to create friction in their friendship and she becomes increasingly concerned that he will meet the same eventual fate as Ayoola’s previous boyfriends.  Another interesting development is that the comatose patient wakes up after 5 months and remembers all of Korede’s secrets.  

There’s a huge aha moment towards the end that  puts the murders and the cover-ups into an understandable though hardly justified context. The novel is pitched as dark humor and there are some laughable moments and situations as credulity is sometimes stretched.  There’s a fair amount of suspense as the reader dreads the inevitable and wonders whether Korede will finally cease to protect Ayoola.