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Book Review: My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

cover for My Sister, the Serial Killer

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite ( Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com )

Doubleday, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0385544238

Available: Hardcover, paperback, audiobook, Kindle edition

 

My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Nigerian author Oyinkan Braithwaite, is set in Lagos, Nigeria. Korede is the dutiful, protective, perfectionist older sister to beautiful, selfish, lazy, and possibly sociopathic Ayoola. Ayoola has “accidentally” stabbed three different boyfriends to death, and each time she has called Korede to help with the cleanup. According to Ayoola, each time has been self-defense, but, Korede wonders, why is she always carrying a sharp knife if it’s accidental? Korede, following through in covering up the murder, reads his blog and sees his social media. He wrote poetry and obviously had friends and family who are worried about his disappearance. He seems like a nice guy, and Korede wonders if Ayoola really had to act in self-defense.

Korede is a nurse who is very good at her job.  She has a long-standing crush on one of the doctors,  who has always been a nice guy, and thinks she is finally getting somewhere with him when Ayoola breezes through the door,  making an unforgettable impression on him.  When Korede expresses her frustration with this, Ayoola tells her there’s no such thing; even so-called “nice guys”  like the doctor are after beauty more than they care about anything else, and she’ll prove it.  Ayoola then proceeds to sweep him away with her beauty, despite her selfishness, cheating on him, and criticism of him.  Korede, worried that he may become Ayoola’s next victim, attempts to warn him and instead of taking her seriously, he accuses her of jealousy, spite, and a lack of sisterly love, confirming Ayoola’s assertion that he isn’t really a “nice guy” after all.

Flashbacks to their childhood and current family relationships reveal that their father was an abusive man who punished Ayoola for being attractive to boys and men, and Korede has been protective of her since then. What’s going on now is clearly tied to the early damage done by the men in their lives. My Sister, the Serial Killer is darkly funny, but it’s also an indictment of the horrors caused by the patriarchy and a solid response to the frequent assertion that “not all men are bad guys”.  The nicest guy in this book is completely blind to the harm he’s doing to both Korede, with his accusations, and Ayoola, with his obsession over her beauty. A compelling, disturbing, perceptive, and satirical book, My Sister, the Serial Killer gets inside your head and stays there. Recommended.

 

Contains: murder, blood, violence, child abuse, implied sexual assault.

Posted on June 25, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix


The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

Quirk Books, 2020

ISBN-13: 9781683691433

Available: Hardback, Kindle edition, Audible audiobook

 

It’s the 1990s in Charleston, South Carolina. Patricia Campbell gave up her nursing career to do what proper Southern white women were expected to do: marry a successful man (in Patricia’s case, an ambitious doctor), and then soon after become a mother. She thought that with this little family she would have the perfect life. In reality, her husband spends long days and nights at work, her daughter seemingly doesn’t need her mother anymore, her son is obsessed with Nazis, and her mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who suffers from dementia, needs constant care. She can’t keep up with her to-do list, let alone finish anything. Even with a new caretaker, Mrs. Greene, in the picture, she is still overwhelmed with domestic life. She’s not alone.

Patricia joins a book club with fellow housewives Grace, Kitty, Maryellen, and Slick. They bond over true crime and domestic not-quite-bliss. In their meetings, the women indulge in conversation and friendly debate regarding the FBI’s siege of Waco, Ann Rule’s friendship with Ted Bundy before and after she discovered he was a serial killer, and more.

After one of their meetings, Patricia ventures outside in the dark to take the trash out, only to be attacked by an elderly neighbor, Mrs. Savage, who is digging through the garbage and snacking in the innards of a dead racoon. She charges and attacks Patricia, tearing off part of her ear. Patricia is left with graphic memories of the attack, as well as feeling terrible for the old woman who was responsible for it, despite her being rather disagreeable in life. Soon after, Mrs. Savage’s enigmatic and charismatic nephew, James Harris, moves into the neighborhood. Patricia is intrigued by the newcomer, especially being the first of the book club to meet him in a rather unconventional way. She notices red flags immediately, but ignores them, thinking that maybe she’s letting the true crime books get the better of her. Suddenly, the book club meeting topic changes from discussing true crime to speculating on this stranger in their midst. Everyone seems to be talking about him. Even Miss Mary has something to say about him, although she calls him by a different name and accuses him of horrible things.

Then, children on the other side of town in Six Mile, a struggling Black community, start to go missing. Police write off the cases, claiming suicides or drugs are behind the disappearances. Patricia, desperate to get to the bottom of the disappearances, makes her way into the community where her mother-in-law’s caretaker lives to get more information and discuss her suspicions about James. What she discovers as the story unfolds is that James is far more sinister than she realized, and a real monster.

The friendships depicted are strong, and they go through their ups and downs as any adult friendship does. It is refreshing to read that none of the women, or the men for that matter, are perfect, despite the culture telling them they need to be. Slick blurts out at a book club meeting that she freezes sandwiches for her children’s school lunches just to save time. Grace works to maintain order and cleanliness in her house to an agonizing degree. To get out of the house to attend the book club meetings, Slick tells her husband that it’s a Bible study group. Those are only a few examples of what is expected of the housewives.

The Southern Book Club to Slaying Vampires is a fast read, with interesting and realistic characters, a solid storyline, and well written horror with the right amount of humor mixed in. Hendrix has been a favorite author of mine since Horrorstör, and this novel does not disappoint.

Contains: blood, gore, implied domestic abuse, rats and roaches, sexual assault, dismemberment, body horror

Highly recommended

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Posted on June 6, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Nine Elms (Kate Marshall Book 1) by Robert Bryndza

Nine Elms by Robert Bryndza

Thomas & Mercer, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-542005-68-5

Availability: Hardcover,  paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

When it comes to reading choices, there are a LOT of crime thrillers featuring a female detective as the lead available, and many of them get turned into a series of books.  For a book to stand out from the competition, the story and writing has to be very good.  Robert Bryndza’s new book Nine Elms meets both of the criteria.  Excitement, good story development, solid characters, unexpected plot twists… all the elements are there.  It won’t be any surprise to see heroine Kate Marshall return for another go-around in a second book, and continue what looks to be a the start of yet another enjoyable series.

The book starts fifteen years prior, with a 26 page lead-in to the main story.  Kate is a detective, on the trail of a killer known as the Nine Elms Cannibal (although he doesn’t eat his victims, he simply takes a few bites out of each of them).  The author takes a nice swing at the media, when it’s revealed that despite the lack of actual cannibalism, the media hung the nickname on the killer in their never-ending quest for sensationalism.    Kate catches the killer and becomes a hero, but she quickly becomes the goat due to her relationship with the killer, and she resigns from the police force.

Jump ahead 15 years: Kate is a professor of criminology at a local college.  She receives a letter out of the blue from a family who found new evidence in the case of their daughter’s murder, which happened 20 years ago.  They want to hire her to look into it, since the police aren’t interested.  Kate and her academic assistant, Tristan, reluctantly agree.  Another string of grisly murders starts at the same time, and Kate sees similarities between the Nine Elms Cannibal killings, the new ones, and the cold case of the daughter.  Kate and Tristan are slowly but surely drawn into the fray.  It’s a race to track down the new killer, and find out how all three cases tie together.

Author Bryndza writes with a sure hand, like the seasoned literary veteran of detective writing he is.  No wasted words, no overdevelopment, and no slow parts: every chapter guns along at a fast clip and rolls right into the next chapter, guaranteed to keep you turning pages.  Of course, half the fun of these books is trying to guess the killer’s identity, and Bryndza does a good job keeping it hidden until close to the end.  It’s usually done one of two ways in crime thrillers: the killer was introduced as someone living behind a mask in the beginning, or he doesn’t make an actual appearance until partway through.  The author chooses the correct one here for maximum effect.  It helps that the story has three threads to work off of, as the original Nine Elms killer still does play a significant role throughout the book, and an important part in the climax.  For readers that always need the “why?” question answered as to the killer’s motives, Bryndza does provide enough explanation for both killers.  It’s not overly done, just enough to make sense and keep the story rolling.   His characters are also nicely done in shades of gray: they are not just one-dimensional, especially Kate.  She’s not perfect, and has her weaknesses like everyone else.

As Dabney Coleman famously said to Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, “what’s the bottom line here…?” The bottom line for Nine Elms is, if you like crime thrillers, you don’t want to miss this one.  It isn’t quite up to the gold standard that Graham Masterton set for detective novels with his Katie Maguire series, but it’s a strong contender for the silver.  Recommended.

 

Contains: violence, profanity, mild gore

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on January 7, 2020 by , Reply
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