{"id":1009,"date":"2018-12-31T15:14:03","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:14:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1009"},"modified":"2018-12-31T15:14:03","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:14:03","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-105","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1009","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews<\/span> and Foreword Reviews, <\/span>writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine,<\/span> and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

MYSTERY\/THRILLER<\/p>\n

Jeff Abbott<\/span><\/p>\n

Blame: A Thriller<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Grand Central Publishing<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-1-4555-5843-8, (also available as an e-book, an audiobook, and on Audible), 384 pgs., $26.00<\/p>\n

July 18, 2017<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you lose your memory, it\u2019s a chance for the people around you to rewrite history.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she was seventeen, Jane Norton drove a SUV <\/span>off a twisty road in an affluent Austin suburb, killing her best friend and next-door neighbor, David Hall. Jane suffered a closed-head injury that put her in a coma for four days and erased her memory of the three years preceding the accident (\u201cThe old Jane died; every version of David died\u201d). Two years later, nineteen-year-old Jane is homeless, friendless, and family-less: she cannot bear to live in the house next door to David\u2019s parents, and her mother refuses to move; her former friends turned on her, blaming her for popular golden-boy David\u2019s death; she flunked out of college, unable to cope with the stress.<\/p>\n

On the second anniversary of David\u2019s death, Jane wakes to a message on social media: \u201cI know what you claim you don\u2019t remember, Jane. I know what happened that night. And I\u2019m going to tell. All will pay.\u201d When David\u2019s mother, Perri, arrives at his grave that morning, \u201cAll will pay\u201d is scrawled across the granite in white chalk. These taunts set in motion a chain of events prodding Jane\u2019s memory awake, an intolerable threat to those who never forgot.<\/p>\n

In Blame: A Thriller,<\/span> Austin\u2019s New York Times<\/span> best-selling author Jeff Abbott<\/span> explores the function of memory and its relation to identity, the corrosive effects of blame, the nature of regret, and the many forms of culpability. Jane says that \u201cmemories are the engines for our feelings.\u201d If our memories are us, what happens when we don\u2019t have memories?<\/p>\n

Abbott\u2019s characters are complex and diverse, and feel authentic. Technology is a character in Blame<\/span>. It\u2019s everywhere: Jane\u2019s mother\u2019s blog, the Dark Web, texting, social media, hackers. It\u2019s fascinating to watch people react when the blame begins to spread, no longer confined to Jane. Perri\u2019s paranoid descent is particularly affective as a study in grief. She is tightly-wound, brittle, ready to snap like a twig in cold weather. \u201c[Jane] murdered the person Perri used to be,\u201d Abbott writes.<\/p>\n

He uncannily conjures the interiority of a teenage girl, and Jane\u2019s flaws are refreshing\u2014Abbott has resisted the temptation to perfect his protagonist. What if you recover your memory and discover you don\u2019t like who you were? Blame<\/span> has elements of a procedural with Jane as the investigator, her amateur sleuthing putting her in ever more danger as she gets closer to the mystery. Abbot presents a buffet of suspects with competing agendas. Who wants what from Jane? And how reliable is our narrator?<\/p>\n

Writing with precision, Abbott concisely sets the stage in a page and a half, then incorporates twist after twist into a tight, fast-paced plot. The atmosphere is ominous, the sun-drenched gateway to the Texas hill country incongruously, viscerally creepy. Jane\u2019s third-person narrative places the breadcrumbs masterfully, the momentum steadily escalating until this psychological suspense becomes an action thriller in the last fifty pages.<\/p>\n

Abbott is a master craftsman, an architect, Racehorse Haynes building a case for reasonable doubt, brick by brick. Blame<\/span> left me shaking my head in admiration for his mad skills.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews, writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine, and The Collagist. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}