Beautiful Bad is a taut, tightly plotted psychological thriller. The story begins with a murder. We don’t who the killer or the victim are; all we see is a police officer entering a house with blood-stained floors and a crying child. From that arresting opening, Ward hurtles us back years into the past, where a pair of best friends Maddie and Jo meet and fall in love with the same British soldier, Ian. Through flashbacks, we learn that Maddie and Ian end up getting married and having a son, that a camping accident has left Maddie physically and psychologically scarred, and that through therapy, Maddie reveals fears about Ian’s PTSD and concerns for their son’s safety.

Ward doles out her clues judiciously throughout the story. The questions about who had been killed, who had done the killing and why remain a mystery pretty much till the end of the book, but the murder itself sets a grim tone throughout all the flashbacks. Even when Maddie and Jo first meet Ian and fall in love, we know things are not going to end well. Darkness permeates even the most innocuous interactions, and at almost every step, we want to tell the characters to turn back before it’s too late.

I love that Ward doesn’t present the romance between the lead characters as idyllic at the beginning, then turning bad later on. Rather, even at the beginning of the flashbacks, we can see the emotional turmoil in each of the main characters, such that we can imagine any of them being capable of murder. The big reveal, when it came, was unexpected to me until fairly late in the novel, but the clues were peppered fairly heavily throughout, and I love how everything tied together at the end.

The one snag for me is that I found it difficult to understand what attracted both Maddie and Jo to Ian in the first place, beyond his good looks. He was charming, but he didn’t treat either woman very well from the beginning, especially considering that he knew of their friendship and their attraction to him. I realize that most of the flashbacks are told from Maddie’s perspective, and therefore coloured by later events, so in that sense, I’m glad the author kept it realistic. I also understand how a woman can get sucked into a relationship with a man she later on fears, but is unable to leave. But with this story, I couldn’t quite understand Ian’s appeal, or why either woman would get sucked into a relationship with him in the first place. The author does a great job of building up Jo and Maddie’s friendship, which makes their decision to risk their relationship over Ian even more baffling.

Fun fact: I had the opportunity to see the author speak about this book at a Harper Collins Canada event last year, and she said the love triangle aspect of the story was actually based on real life. She did end up marrying a man whom her best friend had been in love with. The real life stories played out much more happily than the novel’s — her husband was her sounding board while she wrote the novel, and her best friend was also really supportive.

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Thank you to Harper Collins Canada for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

I had expected The Perfect Girlfriend to be a story of obsessive romantic love, albeit gender-flipped with the woman being the obsessed stalker. To an extent, it is — Juliette becomes a flight attendant at the airline where her ex-boyfriend Nate is a pilot. She stalks him and gets super jealous of any new romantic interest in his life.

But I love that Karen Hamilton subverts the genre even further. Juliette’s obsession with Nate isn’t just because he was an amazing boyfriend that she can’t seem to let go, but rather, it’s tied to her experiences at school as a scholarship student longing to fit in with her wealthier classmates. Hamilton does a great job of crafting Juliette’s personality from childhood, so we see her aspiration towards a better life, and her pain and anger at being denied this. Even her attraction to Nate is tied to an earlier obsession with Nate’s sister, a popular girl at Juliette’s school and one of the wealthy students Juliette aspires to emulate. Hamilton does give us a solid reason for Juliette to consider Nate such a significant figure in her life, but even beyond that, we get a sense of Juliette being a Ripley-esque figure, more enamoured with the kind of life Nate represents than with Nate himself.

I also love that other characters sense something off about Juliette. Nate’s sister could have been a stereotypical mean girl at school, but she later admits it’s because she gets creepy vibes from Juliette. And even as an adult, Juliette’s efforts to fit in are hampered by other characters feeling something not quite right. This makes her a more tragic and a more human figure than the usual stalker trope, where the victim is often isolated because no one else in their life can see anything wrong with their relationship. We get the sense that even without Nate in her life, Juliette would still struggle to find happiness, because she tries really hard to fit in, and fails because of this very eagerness.

Finally, I love how Hamilton continuously ramps up the stakes throughout the novel. Just as you think Juliette has done something so egregious that she can’t possibly top it, Hamilton has her doing something even worse. Juliette’s master plan is both so utterly horrific and so utterly tragic that we find ourselves sympathetic to Juliette even as her actions make us recoil on a visceral level.

Juliette is a fantastic anti-heroine, one who creeps you out even as you reluctantly find yourself understanding where she comes from. I thought I knew what to expect when I began The Perfect Girlfriend, but Hamilton pleasantly surprised me with how the story actually turned out. I was totally hooked on this story and loved it.

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Thank you to Harper Collins Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Six months ago, Alex Moore is stuck in a dead-end job and surviving life more than actually living it. Then she wakes up with a brilliant idea for a business and suddenly, it’s as if every doubt she’s ever had about herself is gone. She’s become a supercharged version of herself, and creates an incredibly successful company from the ground up. Except her stratospheric rise is actually a symptom of something gone wrong with the way the world is set up, and when she is invited to the Orkney Islands for a research project, she realizes her recent experiences have far-reaching implications for the lives of many other people.

The Charmed Life of Alex Moore has a fascinating concept, and Molly Flatt has a lovely storytelling style. It did take me a while to get into the story — the somewhat frantic events of the first few chapters felt a bit disjointed and there was a lot of exposition that didn’t really make me connect to Alex at all. Still, once she gets to the Orkney Islands and the author reveals why Alex was brought there, things get a lot more interesting and all the disparate bits feel more cohesive.

I won’t go into detail about what’s going on at Orkney Islands, as I don’t want to spoil the reveal, but I will say that I think it’s a beautiful way of looking at life. And the idea that there are people like the Orkney Island residents who do what they do is also beautiful. At the risk of giving too much away, I admit that this bit of world-building appealed to my book-loving heart.

Where the book does fall short for me is near the end. A romantic subplot is introduced that perhaps the author had been building towards all along but that just felt really random to me. Alex also makes a decision at the end that, okay, I can kinda see the hints the author built in earlier, but also still felt disappointing to me, given the way the rest of the story was set up.

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Thank you to Publisher’s Group Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.