haunted house mystery, and she’s also had many short stories published, some of which are included in her collection, The Woman Under the Ground. Taylor lives in Nottingham, UK, where she’s working on her next twisted thriller and a second collection.
At CrimeReads she tagged seven crime novels "steeped in the kind of eerie atmosphere that threatens to unsettle your perceptions and infect your dreams." One title on the list:
J. Robert Lennon, Broken RiverRead about the other entries on the list.
With Broken River, we have another house in the middle of nowhere, more brutality and senseless death, and something freakily ‘other’ going on. But in Lennon’s psychological thriller, the eeriness that surrounds a terrible crime and its equally tense aftermath is provided by an unusual and incredibly effective structuring device.
From the opening, in which a double murder is revealed (and rendered all the more horrible for the way it’s mostly presented off-screenthrough sounds and suggestion), the reader is accompanied by the Observer, an invisible, phantom-like, unexplained presence.
Years after the killings, when new residents Eleanor and her twelve-year-old daughter, Irena, become dangerously obsessed with the unsolved crime, the Observer sometimes seems to represent their morbid curiosity. And as the novel’s ominous action ramps up, it isn’t just the characters’ fascination that the Observer might reflect; this watching presence raises uneasy questions about complicity that possibly implicate the reader and the author too. But Broken River provides no easy answers, and perhaps it is that, as much as the gripping plot, which gives this book its unsettling power.
--Marshal Zeringue
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