Behind Her Eyes/ Sarah Pinborough/ 306 pgs

Unfortunately, this book languished on my wish list for quite a while. It has the most masterful ending I've read in quite some time. David and Adele are a married couple who've recently moved to a different London neighborhood. David is a psychiatrist; Adele stays at home. It's apparent from the beginning that their marriage is far from the usual. Louise is a single mom who works as an administrative assistant at David's new office. Before she knows it, Louise is having an affair with David while striking up a friendship with Adele. Things are awkward, to say the least. The chapters rotate between Louise, Adele, and Adele's past. It's clear that something dark is going on but it certainly wasn't what this reader expected at all! While this is a psychological suspense, there is a supernatural element that enters the story and as I said, the ending definitely surprised me.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things / Iain Reid / 224 pgs

This book was ridiculous. It was crazy. It was completely off-the-wall nuts! I can't even. I JUST CAN'T EVEN!! I blame Stacey Lynch at SP for telling me that I ought to read this book and keeping the twist ending to herself.

This book is just over 200 pages long, pretty short when you get down to it. The last couple lines of the book pretty much tell you in a sly sort of way that now that you've got a bit of an idea of what the heck just happened, you ought to read it again. Just to see the not-so-obvious big twisty reveal unfold before you. Just to get a handle on what was going on the entire time that was staring you in the face, but you just didn't allow your head to go there while reading it.

Man, this book is chilling! It's spooky to the Nth degree. DO NOT read this if you get nightmares. Or, at least, don't read it late at night if you get nightmares. It's not gory. It's not gross. It's just plain spooky. The story is of a young woman, just past college age, who has been dating a PhD student named Jake for the last 6 weeks and is on a 2 hour long road trip to meet his parents. Despite that, she is thinking about breaking up with Jake. She goes back and forth between telling us all about how she met Jake and how much she likes him to telling us about things he does that's weird, and other nit-picky things that don't seem so bad at first. The couple meets his odd parents who constantly bicker when they think no one is listening. Then Jack and the young woman head back, but what happens once they head home is pretty mind blowing.

Only one other warning: there's a lot of internal monologues and dialogues with very little action happening until the last third of the book.