WWW.WEDNESDAY

WWW. WEDNESDAY asks three questions to prompt you to speak bookishly. To participate, and to see how other book lovers responded, click here.  

1. What are you currently reading? Last Girl Ghosted by Lisa Unger. "Think twice before you swipe," is the warning on the cover, and the book goes on to paint a very dark picture of dating apps.

28-year-old Wren has it all: money, career, friends. All she needs now is a man. Her best friend keeps encouraging her to get out there, meet men! And so she downloads Torch, a dating app.

The first half of this book is terrific. Unger chose a very specific time to set her story: 2019/2020. In the background, our heroine keeps hearing news stories about a highly contagious virus in China that may be making its way here. It lends a nice (and real!) sense of menace to the already mysterious story of computer dating.

 

Wren falls madly in love with the third guy she meets. He "gets" her, the first man to see and understand her as she is. Which is why it's so shocking and cruel when he disappears.

 

The second half takes a very different turn and feels like a different book. It's more conventional. I feel like I've figured out, and that disappoints me. I like when the characters are smarter than me and I'm surprised.

Here's hoping it picks up and I enjoy it more. I loved Confessions on the 7:45, Unger's previous thriller. I want to love this one, too.

 

2. What did you recently finish reading? Written in Blood by Diane Fanning. In 2001, Michael Peterson called 911. His wife, Kathleen, was dead at the foot of the basement stairs. He insisted she fell after downing a Valium and too many glasses of wine. The police didn't believe this for a moment.

This real-life murder case had absolutely everything: family dysfunction, corporate intrigue, infidelity, local politics, tabloid TV, prosecutorial misconduct, even a hurricane and a gay hustler. If I didn't know it all really happened, I'd say it was too fantastic. 

I wanted to revisit the case before the movie (with Colin Firth as Peterson) comes out. This book is comprehensive and accurate, but it is insanely slanted toward the prosecution. I don't know why Fanning chose to do this. After all, the cold, hard evidence as she presented is pretty damning. I was uncomfortable with the way she pressed her finger so firmly on scale.

3. What will you read next? A biography.