Book Review: I'll Never Tell by Catherine McKenzie

I'll Never Tell

by Catherine McKenzie

Amazon US / UK / AU / CA / B&N

 

What happened to Amanda Holmes?

Twenty years ago, she washed up on shore in a rowboat with a gash to the head after an overnight at Camp Macaw. No one was ever charged with a crime.

Now, the MacAllister children are all grown up. After their parents die suddenly, they return to Camp to read the will and decide what to do with the prime real estate it's sitting on. Ryan, the oldest, wants to sell. Margo, the family's center, hasn't made up her mind. Mary has her own horse farm to run, and believes in leaving well-enough alone. Kate and Liddie—the twins—have opposing views. And Sean Booth, the family groundskeeper, just hopes he still has a home when all is said and done.

But then the will is read and they learn that it's much more complicated than a simple vote. Until they unravel the mystery of what happened to Amanda, they can't move forward. Any one of them could have done it, and all of them are hiding key pieces of the puzzle. Will they work together to solve the mystery, or will their suspicions and secrets finally tear the family apart?

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:



She leaned toward Liddie. She smelled like her father used to, a mix of coffee and marijuana. “Waking and baking these days?”


“Have you ever thought about what they must’ve been like before all of us? … I think about it. They met. They fell in love. They were regular people once.” “And what? We made them into irregular people?”


They always got the leftovers. The things left in the lost and found. If Liddie wrote a biography of her childhood, it would be called Nothing Was Ever Mine.



That was the bargain of being a twin. You didn’t need to talk about it; you simply knew that sometime in the not too distant future, you’d be living together in some old-age home, dressed alike the way you’d been as children.


He always smelled the same— slightly refrigerated. It was a smell Mary liked because it meant coolness to her. Not in a fashion sense but in the temperature way. He was calm, steady.


Of everyone in their family, the person she’d understood the least had been her mother. When Kate thought of her, she always seemed diaphanous. Like one of those Instagram filters had been applied to her, washing her out, smoothing away the lines. Nothing ever seemed to stick to her, not criticism or her children, not even her husband. She simply floated around, photographing it all, removed.



My Review:



Quite a clever gal, that Catherine McKenzie! This well-crafted mystery was full of simply explained yet brilliantly placed twists and turns that kept me on edge and off-center. The storylines were highly eventful and ingeniously paced with tension and intrigue steadily ratcheting up the scale, and I was sucking it all in like the latest and greatest vacuum on the market. I enjoyed the shrewdly discerning tale as much as the skill and cunning in the telling of it.


This family was well beyond quirky, they were each oddly peculiar and self-absorbed. I didn’t care for any of them by the time I finished the book, yet I was driven to know all about them. I had great empathy for the stalwart employee and held my breath for him and cringed each time evidence pointed his direction. Each character was fascinatingly flawed and I enjoyed unearthing their many secrets. This was only my second time reading her work but I am eager to see what Ms. McKenzie comes up with next, she now has a rather rabid fangirl on her hands.

About the Author

Website
Amazon
Goodreads

a was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. A graduate of McGill in History and Law, Catherine practices law in Montreal. An avid runner and skier, she’s the author of numerous bestsellers including HIDDEN, SPIN, and SMOKE. Her works have been translated into multiple languages.

HIDDEN was a #1 Amazon bestseller and a Digital Bookworld bestseller for five weeks. SMOKE was a #1 Amazon bestseller and was named as a Best Book of October (Goodreads) and one of the Top 100 Books of 2015 (Amazon). FRACTURED was a Best Book of October 2016 (Goodreads). She is also the author of THE MURDER GAME under her pseudonym, Julie Apple (the protagonist of Fractured).

Book Review: The Good Liar by Catherine McKenzie

The Good Liar

by Catherine McKenzie 

Goodreads

Amazon

B&N

Can you hide a secret with the whole world watching?

When an explosion rips apart a Chicago building, the lives of three women are forever altered.

A year later, Cecily is in mourning. She was supposed to be in the building that day. Instead, she stood on the street and witnessed it going down, with her husband and best friend inside. Kate, now living thousands of miles away, fled the disaster and is hoping that her past won’t catch up with her. And Franny, a young woman in search of her birth mother, watched the horror unfold on the morning news, knowing that the woman she was so desperate to reconnect with was in the building.

Now, despite the marks left by the tragedy, they all seem safe. But as its anniversary dominates the media, the memories of that terrifying morning become dangerous triggers. All these women are guarding important secrets. Just how far will they go to keep them?

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

I avoid eye contact. Teo’s far too handsome for my current level of self-esteem.

I learned a while ago that when you woke up in the morning, there was no accounting for how long the day would take, because not all days are created equal. The day I got Tom’s texts, that day started out normally but then slowed down until it took up the space of a week.

My heart cracks. She’s never called me “Mother” before. I feel an urgent need to call my own mother and apologize for every time I did that as a teenager.

Disappointing? That’s all you’ve got to say? I find out my life is actually some Lifetime movie plot and that’s ‘disappointing’?

I don’t like it, but it’s going to be effective, I think, kill another two birds, or three in this case. It’s just sad that there are so many birds that need killing in the first place.

I don’t know the future. I only curate the past.

My Review:

The Good Liar was one of those slowly evolving, sneaky, and cleverly plotted books that I didn’t fully appreciate the ingeniousness of until I reached the conclusion.  The premise was unique and engaging and while the characters were not likable, they intrigued me and held my interest.  The writing was easy to follow yet multi-leveled and complex; this cunning author kept me guessing as she was busy hiding lots of undercurrents in the subtext.  This was my first experience reading Ms. McKenzie and I found her to be an insightful and thoughtfully observant writer as her book was well-crafted, maddeningly paced, well-textured, and had an ingeniously twisted ending that I never saw coming. I love when that happens.  

Empress DJ

About the Author 

Website

Amazon

Goodreads

Catherine McKenzie was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. A graduate of McGill in History and Law, Catherine practices law in Montreal. An avid runner and skier, she's the author of numerous bestsellers including HIDDEN, SPIN, and SMOKE. Her works have been translated into multiple languages.

HIDDEN was a #1 Amazon bestseller and a Digital Bookworld bestseller for five weeks. SMOKE was a #1 Amazon bestseller, and was named as a Best Book of October (Goodreads) and one of the Top 100 Books of 2015 (Amazon). FRACTURED was a Best Book of October 2016 (Goodreads). She is also the author of THE MURDER GAME under her pseudonym, Julie Apple (the protagonist of Fractured).