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Just finished binge listening to two brand-new books.
A Simple Favor, by Darcey Bell, narrated by Andi Arndt, Xe Sands, and Matthew Waterson, is a decent effort that ultimately falls short. Emily arranges for her son to go home with her friend Stephanie after school, and then vanishes.
Stephanie is a blogger about momhood, and a lot of the story is told through her annoying blog posts. Of course Stephanie has secrets, Emily has secrets, and Emily's husband has secrets. Stephanie's secrets are WAY off the ickiness scale, unnecessarily so--what was the author thinking? The book includes numerous references to novels and films (mostly Patricia Highsmith), which I enjoyed since they were familiar to me, but they also telegraphed some plot developments. The author seemed to be going for the same stylish Hitchcockian-Highsmith vibe as Peter Swanson's The Kind Worth Killing last year, but just didn't get there.
The second book, Find Me, by J.S. Monroe, narrated by Katharine McEwan, Derek Perkins, and Alex Wyndham, was one I wished I had in hardcover so I could throw it across the room. If it hadn't been a library book, I would certainly have asked for a refund.
The premise is that Jar keeps imagining he's seeing Rosa, who apparently committed suicide five years ago. Then a diary surfaces, and that makes him believe she really is still alive. Now, this sounds like it's going to be a fairly normal serving of suspense, not something that's going to dish up horrible scenes of animal abuse, torture, and international espionage, with a side of anti-Americanism (it's a British author). In addition to which, the story was so convoluted that it required a lengthy information dump to make some semblance of sense out of it. Even with that, I wasn't sure how a few things fit it, but I didn't care enough to try to figure them out. I just wanted the book to be done so I could return it.
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