Ponder: Beautiful Ugly

Beautiful Ugly ©2024 by Alice Feeney has an eerie atmosphere permeating the entire novel, compelling me to turn page after page. I am befuddled, but intrigued, anxious to sort out just what is the truth. I enjoyed immersing myself in the mystery and curiosities of this thriller.

Author Grady Green is an author, his life revolves around his writing but he does deeply love his wife Abby. Abby also loves Grady but finds his reclusiveness and need to be alone when writing depressing— falling short of fulfilling her marital ideals. Grady is distraught when one night Abby disappears, less than one mile from where they live during her trip home. The road she travels is adjacent to a cliff; her car is found abandoned near the edge, doors open, but no trace of Abby is found. As time passes and the mystery of Abby's disappearance remains unsolved, Grady's acquaintances pity him but also begin to believe there was no foul play, rather that Abby left him.

From the front jacket flap of the book:

A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can't sleep, and he can't write, so he travels to a tiny remote Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. And then he sees the impossible; a women who looks exactly like his missing wife.

The author does an excellent job of maintaining tension throughout the book and making Grady's doubts and fears the reader's very own. These characteristics are the signs of an excellent thriller with an added bonus (for me) that there was an absence of blood and gore. My only misgiving was the very, very end. All loose ends tied up well, but I suspect I had wanted another outcome. On pondering the closure once again though, I conclude that —in light of the skillful combination of characters, plot, and mood — the final denouement of Beautiful Ugly was fitting and self consistent.

★★★★★ Great! Read it!

Ponder: The God of the Woods

The God of the Woods ©2024 by Liz Moore is a mystery with many intricacies and many characters that combine to be an intense and captivating novel. 

The action takes place on a nature preserve. Part of the land houses the expensive, ostentatious home of the entitled Van Laar family; part of the land is reserved for an overnight wilderness training camp for children. Barbara, the thirteen year old daughter of Peter III and Alice Van Laar, is placed in Camp Emerson there for the summer and goes missing one week before the final camp session. An odd (coincidental?) occurrence its that Barbara's eight-year-old brother, Bear, had similarly disappeared fourteen years earlier and had never been found.  

An additional ongoing conflict is a face off between the wealthy and privileged family, the Van Laars who own the land and camp versus those self-reliant employees who serve them and tend to the land. The Van Laars expansive mansion is ironically titled Self-Reliance. In this novel the reader gets the bonus of two mysteries being investigated for the time investment of immersion in one book. The reader also sees two lifestyles and attitudes juxtaposed.

I am not alone in my opinion for  this book. Amazon readers gave it 4.4 stars out of 5. Amazon reports some kudos as:

• ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2024
• A NEW YORK TIMES BEST THRILLER OF 2024
• A NEW YORK TIMES BEST CRIME NOVEL OF 2024
• PEOPLE MAGAZINE’S #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR
• ONE OF NPR’S “BOOKS WE LOVE” 2024
• ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S “100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024”

I did not understand all of the characters, although the majority of them were fairly well-developed. I hated some, sympathized with others, and smiled at the antics of a few. There were some characters with whom I had very little common ground, and I realized that therefore it would be difficult for me to grasp their motives or anticipate their actions. I could experience and empathize with the angst and struggles of the female investigator Judyta in a male-dominated world of the 1970's. Although this book jumps around between timelines and characters, the author does an excellent job in her chapter headings to keep the reader oriented as to precisely who is in focus and when. The year of Bear's disappearance is 1961 and fourteen years later, 1975, for Barbara. In the following example Judyta is the investigator on the Barbara case and it is her first day of inquiries.

This book intrigued me. I highly recommend The God of the Woods for mystery lovers or even those who just love investigating a cast of characters.

★★★★★ Great! Read it!