All Five Books I Read in April

 I didn't read quite as many books in April as I did in March, which is odd since I read an extremely long book in March, but I also did a lot more outside walking instead of treadmill walking, so I didn't read as much on the Kindle as I did in the colder months. Still, I finished five books, which puts me almost at the halfway mark for the year, so it's not like I've fallen behind.

Also, oddly, I seem to have accidentally had a theme for the month, which was thriller/horror. Two of the books were from the same author, though, so maybe not that surprising.

Anyway...

19/52: In Later, by Stephen King, Jamie is a young teen who sees dead people. They tell him things if he asks them questions, but his single mother has convinced him that he needs to keep his gift to himself, and he does until they day they have to use it to survive. Now a policewoman who knows his secret draws him into a confrontation with a dead serial killer, but the dead can't really hurt you, unless it turns out that they can.  This was a fast read, but a good one. Stephen King wrote some real clunkers for a few years there *stares in Dreamcatcher* but his recent ones have mostly been good, and a return to his classic level.

20/52: In Laurie Elizabeth Flynn's The Girls Are All So Nice Here, the girls are not actually that nice at Ambrosia's ten year college reunion. Instead, they have questions, which they've had all along since the night during freshman year when Amb was involved in some sort of incident that unfolds during flashbacks. Somebody wants to know what happened that night, and what happened leading up to it, but Ambrosia doesn't want to share, especially when it becomes clear that someone doesn't just want the truth. They also want revenge. 

This was a pretty good book, but I was irritated by one thing: it's not clear at the beginning who died on the fateful night, and this is obscured throughout the first half of the book. That's not what I object to, though. Part of the way the death is concealed is that one of the people Ambrosia describes seeing at the reunion isn't actually there. Ambrosia is seeing her face on memorial posters. It feels like a cheap trick rather than a plot twist to keep saying you see someone's staring eyes, but then once the flashbacks reveal they're dead to start adding, "On the memorial posters all over campus". 

21/52: I could not stop reading Riley Sager's Lock Every Door. Jules, broken up with and also broke, takes a job as an apartment sitter in one of Manhattan's most famous buildings, the Bartholomew. Jules is excited to move into the setting of one of her favorite novels, even more so when she finds out that the author of the book still lives there. Broke and needing this job, Jules ignores the stories about the building, but why isn't she allowed to tell anyone she's living there? Why are the residents so secretive and standoffish? What happened to Ingrid, the apartment sitter from downstairs who moved out in the middle of the night and can't be reached? And what happened to the apartment sitter before Jules? Will Jules figure out what's happening at the Bartholomew, or will she be the next story posted online in the middle of the night? Like I said, I could not stop reading this, and plowed through it in a weekend.

22/52: In Camilla Sten's The Lost Village, Alice and three friends travel to a remote Swedish mining town to spend a week filming a documentary on the famous "lost village". In 1959, everyone in Silvertjarn vanished, including Alice's grandmother's entire family, and the mystery has haunted Alice for her entire life. As soon as they arrive, though, things start to go wrong. Are they accidents? The supernatural? Sabotage from within the film crew itself? Or something none of them could have guessed? Alice is determined to find the secret of the lost village, but it may be the last thing she finds. This book was translated from the author's native language, so it can feel a little bit stilted at times, but that also just adds to the feeling of weirdness and things being just a little bit off kilter that pervades the tone of the book. I really enjoyed this.

23/52: I ended up grabbing the other Riley Sager book on my unread shelf, The Last Time I Lied, because I enjoyed the first one so much, and I enjoyed this one, too. During Emma's very first summer at Camp Nightingale, she got put into a cabin with three older girls. Adopted as a kind of younger sister by Vivian, the group leaders, Emma follows her cabinmates everywhere, right up until the night the three of them vanish into the woods and are never seen again. That night haunts Emma and her work as a painter for the next fifteen years, so when she is invited to return to a newly reopened Camp Nightingale as an art instructor, she takes the chance to find out what happened to her friends and finally close that chapter of her life. Someone else has returned to camp, though, someone who knows the truth and doesn't want Emma to find out, someone who will be more than happy to make Emma disappear, too. I really liked this book, too, although I read it a little slower than the one before it.

Coming up in May: I don't know. More books?