Book briefs

The first few tales in Days of Awe could be read as a parodic comment on the modern American short story. If what you want from your reading is insight into the lives of the disconnected, disaffected rich, or the lives of too-connected and too-affected intellectuals, then the opening quartet announces that this is the book for you. On the side of the moneyed and empty, “Brother on Sunday” unfolds in a plastic surgeon’s beach house, the venue for collapsing marriages and fraternal angst; “Whose Story Is It, and Why Is It Always on Her Mind?” on the psychiatrist’s couch, where a young woman rehearses her emotional breakdown; “Hello Everybody” in a hillside LA mansion and a restaurant that exclusively serves dishes of 10 calories or fewer. On the side of the artistic and overfull, meanwhile, the title story follows a successful novelist to a conference on genocide, where she falls into an adulterous fling with a handsome war correspondent.

What saves, and more than saves, Days of Awe is Homes’ knack of drawing a straight line from A to B that somehow passes through Z on the way. Readers of Homes’s other stories and novels - especially 2012’s May We Be Forgiven - will recognise the particular quality of deft weirdness that animates her prose.

Writing like this treads a fine line between idiosyncratic brilliance and kookiness for kookiness’ sake, and at times Homes does cross over. At its best, Days of Awe is superb. When the quality dips it can be baffling. But on both sides, it is very much an A M Homes book - and worth reading on that basis alone.

Last year’s “Final Girls,” the first novel by the pseudonymous author Riley Sager, was praised by the thriller masters Stephen King and Karin Slaughter, earning comparisons to Gillian Flynn, the gold standard for smart psychological suspense. Sager’s follow-up, “The Last Time I Lied,” has what it takes to deliver the same chills: a creepy premise, a narrator with a haunted past and a series of delicious hints that portend a final, jaw-dropping bombshell that connects long-buried secrets to the present.

The premise: Fifteen years ago, three teenage girls - Vivian, Natalie and Allison - sneaked out of their cabin at Camp Nightingale and were never seen again. Now the wealthy, well-connected camp owner is reopening Nightingale with a staff populated by the prior generation of campers, providing plenty of potential witnesses and suspects.

The narrator, Emma Davis, the sole cabinmate of the three vanished girls, returns to Nightingale, supposedly to teach art but also to find closure.

While Sager attempts to explore the intense dynamics within adolescent female friendships, an overly large cast of thinly sketched characters undermines the effort, and genre fans searching for more than the requisite ingredients of a solid thriller may find themselves unsatisfied.

With each partial reveal - even when we’re led to believe that we know everything Emma knows - Sager hints that there’s more to come. And in the end, the author delivers the kind of unpredictable conclusion that all thriller readers crave - utterly shocking yet craftily foreshadowed. For some readers, though, these might be the only pages that linger.