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kimlynn77's review
3.0
booklovinalicia's review
5.0
Thanks to Netgalley and Atria Books for allowing me the egalley to read and review.
rmarcin's review
3.0
dafnif's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
5.0
judithdcollins's review
5.0
Christchurch, New Zealand, international bestseller crime author, Paul Cleave delivers TRUST NO ONE, a deliciously clever, witty, and wickedly evil psychological mystery suspense thriller-- when the horror of mental illness--Alzheimer’s, takes over a crime writer’s brain, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. A potent blend of suspense, paranoia, reality, and pure creepiness.
A haunting tale, which could almost be ripped from today’s headlines, where we read of older adults with dementia unwittingly committing crimes like theft or trespassing, sexual acts, losing blocks of time, or worse, more serious ones such as murder with no recollection of events. For a small number--it can be the first sign of their mental decline, as studies reveal.
While Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s can provoke a neural dysfunction that affects the patient’s behavior, leading to criminality—Cleave accelerates the complexity tenfold, by adding a bestselling crime author and its characters, to the mix.
Henry Cutter (the cutting man) is the pseudonym for the bestselling author, Jerry Grey, a successful crime writer. Grey’s twelve books have earned him much success, delivery murder mysteries for years satisfying readers and fans, worldwide.
Married for twenty-four years, Sandra, his wife, forty-eight years old—he can barely now remember, and a daughter, Eva which he recalls as ten years old, not the twentysomething woman? They have a life. They have a future. He does not.
At the early age of forty-nine, the evil disease, the monster of Alzheimer’s has taken over his life. Doctor Goodstory gave him the news of the Big A, Captain A-- on the Big F (Friday). After all, dementia (Big D) is uncommon in persons under sixty-five. As he approaches age fifty, bad days are coming. Dark days are coming. Madness is approaching.
Some days Jerry is in control, and the next minute without any notice, he goes into dark mode; he has lost his car, his phone, his family, his thoughts, and his mind. Worst of all, he recalls killings; murders. Is he a killer, or is he thinking through the mind of his characters? What is real?
He now resides in an old nursing home and for some odd reason, he recalls Suzan with a “z” - always on his mind. How he felt when he killed her, back before he wrote about it. Why is his daughter acting strange? He goes back as he embraces the darkness. Who is Suzan?
Did he write thirteen books, an unlucky number? However, his thirteenth book is not a diary, but his Madness Journal. A journal for his future. Maybe one day there will be a pill to make the Big A go away. The Big A, a time bomb, tick, ticking . . . Will he be able to look back through the pages to figure out what he missed. However, now there is a mystery to solve. The present. People are being murdered.
“The devil is in the details.” Back then the devil was him and those days, those details are hard to hang on to. His mind is wandering, it is continually doing that thing it does that he hates. “Dignity is only one of the things the Big A has taken away from him.” He is losing his marbles. Every author has the last book—however, he had no clue it would be a stupid journal. His descent into madness!
“My name is Jerry Grey and it’s been five days since I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Hi Jerry. And it’s been two days since I last forgot something. Well done, Jerry.”
Flashing back from the past to present, Jerry begins writing in his journal, he discovers creepy things. There was a gun. There are items hidden, possibly mementos from victims, money, the hiding place, a knife, the spray paint, and the items hidden in a floorboard? There is crazy Jerry mode and there are stages. Present, The Past, and Future Jerry. Where is the journal now?
Stage one–denial, Stage two–anger, Stage three–bargaining, Stage four–grief? Acceptance–never!
Good news, if he cannot recall how his books go, he can read them if new. It would be great if he could tap into the dementia patient market—they buy his books, forget they’ve read them, and buy them again! Dementia has an awful way of rewriting your past. It is making stories from his novels feel like real life. “Write what you know. Fake the rest.”
Presently, there are new murders, and Jerry is always close by. How did he escape the nursing home? He cannot remember. Is he being set up? Made to look crazy, or is he crazy? Jerry or Henry, which one is the murderer? Or possibly neither one? Who can he trust?
Suspects: What about Nurse Hamilton from the nursing home, Hans, his best friend, who brings his gin, his wife, Sandra, his daughter, Eva; Rick his son-in-law-- the wedding, the video, the florist? The lawyer, Nicholas, the neighbor, Mrs. Smith, the orderly, or Terrace, the fan, want- to- be- writer who has purchased his old home? What happened to his house? Where is his wife? Did he kill her too? What happens when he escapes the nursing home? How does he escape? The sense he has killed somebody is too real. Whodunit? If he gets arrested, how will he use his crime-writing skills to figure out what happened?
Is he picking up his character’s dirty habits, from each of his novels, or his own evil thoughts, or actions? He has to solve this mystery. The universe is punishing him. For what? Did he happen to base his character on a live real person? Is he a convicted killer?
WOW what a ride! Cleave takes readers into the mind, fears, and darkness of his troubled confused character, Jerry—as his life unravels and spirals into a nightmare from hell. Brilliantly crafted, TRUST NO ONE is hilarious, maddening, and chilling. Unpredictable!
Even though I have read other books about Alzheimer’s, and other books about crime writers taking on identities of their characters; however, this is the first book I have read, which takes a real illness, Alzheimer’s— paired with a crime writer character, seamlessly creating a psychological horror world of madness, combining the two with a gripping day-by-day account from sanity to insanity, from past to present; Deliciously evil!
I was swooning when discovering award-winning Paul Cleave, last year after reading FIVE MINUTES ALONE, landing on my Top 30 Books for 2014 and Thriller Authors to Watch.
TRUST NO ONE is outstanding, another bestseller. Would make a fabulous movie (my prediction)… Now, the dilemma, please hurry and get all his back list on audio, (in English) as dying to read them all. I hear they are coming, so anxiously awaiting.
When I read this book back in April (holding off on the review until closer to pub date), I had to tweet Cleave, about the difficulty of writing this complex book. It had to to be a total bear to write, getting into the mind of his complex character. Cleave pulls it off masterfully; with his ferocious storytelling of the highest order, with corkscrew twists and turns, holding your breath, as the evil secrets unfold. As I mentioned, to the author, if he ever gets the Big A, he can always be a stand-up comedian, proven he can handle the task. Please do not give up your day job, yet.
Psychological suspense, and crime mystery thriller fans will find this cleverly twisted tale difficult to put down while laughing out loud for endless hours of entertainment. You will be left with a feeling of madness by the time you get to the twisted ending, sending you racing out the door to a medical specialist, to be tested for the lurking monster, Cleave calls the Big A.
A special thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. As always, Atria delivers "winners!
JDCMustReadBooks
jacki_f's review against another edition
2.0
The book kicks off with a hiss and a roar and the early chapters keep the tension high. However as the plot develops, it all starts to get so far-fetched that I struggled to suspend my belief. There are also some glaring plotholes which severely detracted from the story. For example, the way that Nick was forced onto the run makes little sense, and the fact that he has never told anyone about what happened but suddenly starts confiding in people now when the stakes are higher than they have ever been.
I like the way Hurwitz writes and this is a decent enough holiday thriller, but it pales in comparison to similar writers.
kcfromaustcrime's review against another edition
4.0
You really have to remember that WE KNOW is a thriller. The central character Nick Horrigan obviously has a secret which is obviously going to be slowly revealed as the book progresses (well it becomes obvious after a seat of the pants opening scene). Not everyone with a secret, however, gets a SWAT team descending from a Black Hawk helicopter in the middle of the night to smash their way into their apartment. What on earth sort of a secret is it that would make Nick the sort of person that a terrorist, threatening to blow up a nuclear power station, ask to speak to? Alone.
WE KNOW is quite simply a wow of a thriller. It must be, as it does a number of things that normally would annoy this reader, and yet I was hooked. The cliffhanger at the end of each chapter normally annoys. There's a few completely unlikely scenarios (let's face it, for example, even with a HUGE secret, if the authorities wanted you to help out in a terrorist threat, they'd probably knock on the door before they sent in the Black Hawks). But really, the point of a good thriller is that it shouldn't matter if things get a little squiffy plot wise. If there's some obvious manipulation going on - well bring it on, pass the chocolates, pour a glass of wine and let's get stuck in here.
And this really is one of those tremendous thrillers. Simply couldn't put it down. Went out and bought the next book in the series the next day. You can't get better than that.
kcfromaustcrime's review
5.0
For reasons that escape me, Paul Cleave doesn't seem to have the profile, or the world-wide awareness that he absolutely and utterly deserves. He's one of those authors that consistently turns out something different, something that is designed to challenge the reader, and always something that's absolutely impossible to put down.
With TRUST NO ONE he's come up with an absolutely stunning plot: an author of crime fiction, with early onset Alzheimer's who has now been moved to a nursing home, somehow connected to an ongoing series of murders. As the blurb puts it:
"His twelve books tell stories of brutal murders committed by bad men, of a world out of balance, of victims finding the darkest forms of justice. As his dementia begins to break down the wall between his life and the lives of the characters he has created, Jerry confesses his worst secret: The stories are real."
The problem with his confession is his Alzheimer's diagnosis. His life is now completely muddled between the fictional and the real, between the unexplained deaths of people, and his increasing confusion over reality and fantasy. He can't understand why it is that nobody believes his fictional stories are real, that he's a killer and why it is that those close to him seem to refuse to acknowledge this.
The concept of an unreliable narrator is nothing new in crime fiction, but in TRUST NO ONE, the complication is that Jerry doesn't even know if he's unreliable. Jerry also doesn't trust anyone around him, including his own daughter or the nurses who care for him. As convinced as he is of his own guilt, he doesn't even really trust himself. Of course, everyone knows that the outcomes of Alzheimer's are difficult to understand or predict. Sufferers can forget the last few moments, but remember their childhoods as clear as if a movie playing before them. Even people not suffering from this disease can find themselves in a less permanent version of that situation. On the other hand there are those memories that we all swear we have, that logically we can't have experienced. A favourite relative who died before we were old enough to have known them, an event we feel we've experienced, when we've only had it described to us. Memory plays tricks on everyone, and Alzheimer's wrecks that most fundamental of human abilities in ways that you can't always predict. So is Jerry remembering himself committing crimes, or is his mind playing tricks on him. Is somebody else involved?
This sort of scenario plays with a reader's perceptions and conclusions. It's a minefield of assumptions and assertions that are tipped on their heads as quickly as they are made. It's cleverly done. The pace is fast enough to keep you off kilter, slow enough to give you a feeling of connection with a character who has not got a lot of connection to his own world. In consequence the reader is also slightly uncomfortable - are you feeling this connection with a murderer? Is that man a murderer in full possession of his faculties?
Ever since the first book I've been a huge fan of Paul Cleave's work. Some of his books have frightened me so much lights have been left on in the house all night. Some of them have troubled and confused me. Always they have engaged. Always they have entertained, and always they have made me think. Not just about why it is that this incredibly talented author isn't always sitting at the top of the bestseller lists.
https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-trust-no-one-paul-cleave