The Literate Kitty

Find someone special, settle down together, start a family; that’s always been, well… the dream, at best, or in any case, where life ends up, for most people.  Today—with a whole fabulous rainbow of possibilities for what a “family” unit might look like—having some variation on the theme is still what the majority of us seemingly want.  And, once we have the family, it’s only natural we feel the need to protect it—parents to safeguard their children, siblings to look out for each other, etc.—from all the things that can go wrong or bad in our world. But what would happen if a family discovered something completely unthinkable… like finding out that they weren’t, in fact, the family they thought they were? JP Delaney explores how that scenario might go down in his latest psychological thriller, Playing Nice . _______________ Pete Riley and his partner Maddie are more or less your average, struggling young parents. Things are a little tense, with Pete not getti...

One thing I’ve always loved about mountains is the abundance of twisty, narrow, little roads with all those hairpin curves, winding their way up and around and up… and entirely at their own pace (well, at the pace set by those souls who originally cut, blasted, and paved the treacherous paths, in the first place,,, but you get my meaning, I’m sure). That predilection for twisty things carries over to tales of suspense. I like to wonder what’s around the next bend… and the next page turn.  But, if mountain roads were like mazes—with endless wrong turns and wasted energies leading absolutely nowhere—I wouldn’t like them nearly so much.  The same holds true of mysteries. When an author fashions psychological twists into maddening dead ends over and over (and over ) again, at some point I grow weary of following along; there has to be some sort of payoff, here and there, to maintain enough commit to follow all of that incessant winding and meandering to the end. ...