Recent Reads | Only If You’re Lucky and Lost Man’s Lane

Posted January 16, 2025 / Book Reviews, Recent Reads / 0 Comments

Recent Reads | Only If You’re Lucky and Lost Man’s LaneOnly If You're Lucky by Stacy Willingham
Genres: Adult, Mystery/Thriller
Published by St. Martin's Publishing Group on January 16, 2024
Format: Audio/Physical (384 pages) • Source: Book of the Month, Everand
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four-stars

A sharp and twisty exploration of female friendship from the New York Times bestselling author of A Flicker in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things.

Lucy Sharpe is larger than life. Magnetic, addictive. Bold and dangerous. Especially for Margot, who meets Lucy at the end of their freshman year at a liberal arts college in South Carolina. Margot is the shy one, the careful one, always the sidekick and never the center of attention. But when Lucy singles her out at the end of the year, a year Margot spent studying and playing it safe, and asks her to room together, something in Margot can't say no—something daring, or starved, or maybe even envious.

And so Margot finds herself living in an off-campus house with three other girls, Lucy, the ringleader; Sloane, the sarcastic one; and Nicole, the nice one, the three of them opposites but also deeply intertwined. It's a year that finds Margot finally coming out of the shell she's been in since the end of high school, when her best friend Eliza died three weeks after graduation. Margot and Lucy have become the closest of friends, but by the middle of their sophomore year, one of the fraternity boys from the house next door has been brutally murdered... and Lucy Sharpe is missing without a trace.

From the author of A Flicker in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things comes a tantalizing thriller about the nature of friendship and belonging, about loyalty, envy, and betrayal—another gripping novel from an author quickly becoming the gold standard in psychological suspense.

I’ve been meaning to read this author forever and I’m pleased that I think I’ll enjoy her other books – maybe even more than this one based on reviews!

This story follows Margot at the end of her freshman year of college – she lost her best friend Eliza before school and is just trying to get through the year. When enigmatic Lucy randomly invites Margot to live with her and her two friends, she jumps at the chance to forge some real friendships again. The book flashes “before” and “after” – in the after, Lucy is missing and a frat boy from Margot’s hometown is dead. How is everything connected?

The author did a great job of making me wonder that the entire story, but my biggest complaint is around pacing. The story starts and builds pretty slow. There’s a lot of “privileged kids getting drunk and doing drugs” to build up the friendship dynamics, which made sense, but it didn’t feel like a mystery/thriller for the bulk of it. Don’t get me wrong: the college setting was super fun and I want more books there… but the beginning felt like a YA contemporary.

However! Once the twists started, I was enthralled. There were a number of reveals I absolutely didn’t see coming, though there were a couple I had predicted. The ending was really surprising and enjoyable. I feel like some pieces were unbelievable but I didn’t really care – it was well-plotted in many ways. Willingham will make it on my TBR in the future and I’ll hopefully get to her other backlist titles soon!

Recent Reads | Only If You’re Lucky and Lost Man’s LaneLost Man's Lane by Scott Carson
Genres: Adult, Horror, Mystery/Thriller, Paranormal
Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on February 4, 2025
Format: Audio/Physical (544 pages) • Source: Everand, Library
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two-half-stars

A teenager explores the darkness hidden within his hometown in this spellbinding thriller that will “make you a Scott Carson fan for life” (Joe Hill, #1 New York Times bestselling author).

Marshall Miller would’ve remembered her face even if he hadn’t seen it on a MISSING poster.

When a young woman goes missing in his small town, the investigation hinges on Marshall’s haunted sighting of her, crying in the back seat of a police car driven by a cop named Maddox.

There’s only one problem: no local cop named Maddox exists.

But the speeding ticket he handed to Marshall certainly does.

Dealing with police and media is heady stuff for a teenager, the son of a single mother, but Marshall is sure he can handle it, until the shocking day when his reliability as a witness implodes. Now scorned and shamed, he finds unlikely allies as he confronts the ancient secrets behind his small town’s peaceful façade—and learns the truth about his own family.

Lost Man’s Lane is a coming-of-age tale that proves why its author has been hailed as “a master” by Stephen King who consistently offers “eerie, gripping storytelling” (Dean Koontz).

I’m working on reading out of my comfort zone and participating in my monthly mystery/thriller book club even if the book wasn’t already on my TBR lol. (Until now, all of the books were already on my TBR!) LOST MAN’S LANE was not on my radar for a few reasons. I just don’t read lot of books by men, about men. Just not my thing. I love the girlies. The other main reason is because it veers into horror, not just mystery/thriller.

I went in with high hopes, despite those things – the average rating on Goodreads is over 4 stars! I truly don’t know what I’m missing with this one. I know it’s partially “it’s not you, it’s me” – again, this is not a book for Lauren. The book itself is really not bad… I actually enjoyed a lot of the “coming of age” elements of this and the ride. Where it lost me is the ending.

The book follows Marshall as he gets pulled over the first day he gets his drivers license. The cop is mysterious and a dickhead to him, plus he has a crying girl in the backseat of his car. He’s shook for a little while but otherwise moves on… until he sees a missing poster for the girl he saw in the police cruiser.

Marshall begins his quest to find this cop and figure out what happened to the missing girl. He loses some credibility, teams up with a local private investigator, and continues with his normal teenage life. I actually liked the bildungsroman aspect of this more than the mystery. There were a lot of plot points that felt pointless and never paid off into anything, which is annoying in a book over 500 pages. I need a good reason for your mystery to be that long! Just a basic example: at one point the main character gets a couple of pets… just for them to never be brought up or make ANY impact on the story at all. I’m not saying I wanted things to happen to them, but again… don’t make your book 500 pages long and introduce scenes like that for no reason at all.

I enjoyed that this was set in 1999 because the author did a good job of setting the scene and time. (Honestly, it was a little too good – he would reference things like Columbine and other major events in DEPTH as if they were going to affect the rest of the story.)

The ending was super anticlimactic and weird. I also like my mysteries to be solvable if I tried; this one didn’t seem like it was? There was a ton of buildup and story threads that just disappeared, only for the ending and resolution to everything to be super rushed. I won’t spoil it but it’s basically the equivalent of the criminal just writing a letter confessing to everything without the main character having any revelations of their own. Overall, I don’t really understand the high ratings because I don’t get how this book could really be impactful.

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