Book Notices | The Prettiest One by James Hankins / The Murder Artist by John Case

James Hankins, The Prettiest One

Amazon   I got this book as a Kindle First selection apparently almost two years ago and finally got around to reading it. It was just okay. A woman wakes up from a fugue state with blood all over her and, weirdly, a bag of prosthetic hands. That's an intriguing opener, and the book eventually answers all our questions about how she came to be in that position. But the ultimate motivation of the bad guys is a little hard to believe, and the dynamics between the principals isn't that interesting. As I said, it's an okay thriller to pass the time (actually, this literally started as an airplane read for me), but it's ultimately forgettable.

John Case, The Murder Artist

Amazon   This is another okay but forgettable thriller. A separated dad's twin sons are abducted at a Renaissance fair, and he spends the rest of the book trying to find them. It's a lot of slogging through leads and a lot of exposition. There's origami and magic and voodoo involved, which you'd think would be exciting, but somehow just wasn't for me.