All the Things You Are

April 21, 2014
As this slick but superficial thriller from Hughes (City of Lost Girls) begins, suburban housewife Clare Taylor returns to her Madison, Wis., home to find husband Danny Brogan and their daughters gone, and her beloved dog, Mr. Smith, savagely dismembered. By the time Clare brings the police back to her home, her slaughtered pet has vanished, replaced by something even more disquieting: the body of the man she knows only as a childhood friend of Danny’s, Gene Peterson. Stalked by determined killers, shocked by unexpected revelations about her family, Clare will have to unravel a mystery at whose core is Danny’s most closely guarded secret: that it was he who 35 years earlier set the fire that killed Clare’s parents and siblings. Hughes, who lives in Dublin, renders his Midwestern American setting with a specificity that somehow never quite becomes convincing. Though he has created an effective puzzle, rife with misdirection and unreliable protagonists, the work falls short.

May 15, 2014
The creator of private eye Ed Loy (City of Lost Girls, 2010, etc.) spins a stand-alone in which the fallout from a Halloween prank 35 years ago turns a perfect Wisconsin family's life into a nightmare.How do you tell your bride that you set the fire that killed her family? Danny Brogan has no idea, so he doesn't even try. Instead, he enters into holy matrimony with Claire Taylor, nee Bradberry, without saying anything about the Halloween night when he was 11 and he and the rest of his posse-Dave Ricks, Gene Peterson and Ralph Cowley-sneaked off to the home of Jackie Bradberry, the dull-witted schoolmate whose brothers bullied them unmercifully, bent on excitement, and one of the Four Horsemen-presumably Danny, who knocked himself cold and doesn't remember what happened-accidentally or deliberately tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window, burning the house to the ground. Now the past catches up with Danny and Claire in the form of a masked guest at a barbecue. The immediate upshot of Danny's encounter with the angel of death is that Claire, returning home from a trip to Chicago to see an old beau, finds her husband and two daughters vanished, their house stripped bare of furniture and their dog hacked to death. And that's only the beginning of the couple's tribulations as Claire searches for Danny and they separately search for the truth about what's happened and what's about to happen.Cutting back and forth from Claire to Danny to a Madison police officer to an assassin who's been hired by a shadowy Mr. Big, Hughes sticks so close to each one that he manages to create a threatening, baffling world that feels both kaleidoscopic and claustrophobic.

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May 1, 2014
Clare Taylor gave up her fledgling acting career to be a wife and mother, but after a wild week away from her family, she returns home to find an empty house, her family missing, everything gone. As she walks through the empty house to the yard, she finds the body of the family dog, eviscerated. Thinking it is a Halloween prank gone terribly wrong, she awakens the next morning to find the sheriff waiting to padlock the foreclosed home that she believed was owned free and clear. Then a childhood friend of her husband, Danny, is found dead in the yard, and things become even more frightening and complicated. The plot moves back and forth from a Halloween fire when Danny was in high school to the present day, with mistaken identities at the crux of the story. These are complex characters in a story that seems to circumvent logic, yet Hughes makes it all work. Readers who appreciate family thrillers from such writers as Harlan Coben and Linwood Barclay will find much to enjoy here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)