Fright Shows

I woke from a vicious nightmare last night. I was attacked by an overwhelmingly strong baddie—a giant  hooligan. I couldn’t get away though I was def kicking and struggling. Talking too—trying to lull him into calmness so’s I could nail him in the balls and escape. I was utterly freaked but able to think, plot, scheme.

Still things looked majorly bleak for our hero (HEY, that’s me!). It was clear that there was just one possible escape path—waking up. I did. Yea me. Natch, I couldn’t get back to sleep. Actually, so certain the scary-ass, horrifying dream would continue, I didn’t dare try.

Where’d this fright show come from? I’ve just finished reading a flawed but, nonetheless, riveting book—The Forgotten Girls by Sara Blaedel.

In a forest in Denmark, a ranger discovers the fresh corpse of an unidentified woman.
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The woman proves to be Lise, who at the age of 3, along with her twin sister, Mette, was placed in a mental hospital because their widowed father couldn’t care for them. The hospital’s doctor eventually wrote death certificates saying that both girls died of pneumonia when they were 17. Thus, we have two mysteries: Where was Lise for the 30 years between her reported death and her actual death? And where is the missing Mette?
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The investigation is complicated by new murders and rapes in the same woods where Lise was found and where several other attacks took place years earlier. Could the crimes, separated by decades, be connected? The more we learn about these crimes, the darker the novel becomes.
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The whole truth, when revealed, is shocking in the extreme, all the more so because Blaedel has said that elements of her story reflect real events.

Taking away from the grab-you-by-the-throat conundrums of Lise's life and death AND the intrepid Detective Louise Ricks’ semi shrouded, intriguing back-story are two things.

1. Ricks’ BFF Camille.  Her character brings nothing more than a weird, jarring, utterly out of place AbFab tone. She’s Patsy but there’s no Edina. I loved Absolutely Fabulous BUT, within these pages…um…WRONG.
2. The stony, mega reserved Detective Ricks and her new partner, who she, of course, loathes at first, fall into bed together after a night of too many beers. This hook-up, plot device is WAY too fucking obvs as in, I need a sex scene right here in order to break up the tension and add some juicy color. The author couldn’t have been any more ham-handed unless she’d broken the fourth wall and just flat out TOLD us she thought we could all do with a little sexy-time action.

Still, even with these two large weak bits, I couldn’t put the book down. The story was compelling. Blaedel’s writing was generally engrossing. And yet, if I’d known all that the story entailed, I wouldn’t have read it. Why? There’s too much of this shit in real life. If I want to scare myself with stories like this, I can just buy the newspaper.

Yeah, screw this heavy mystery shit—I’m going back to scifi. I wonder if John Scalzi’s latest Old Man’s War installment is out in paperback yet.