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    They All Fall Down: A Thriller
    Unavailable
    They All Fall Down: A Thriller
    Unavailable
    They All Fall Down: A Thriller
    Ebook360 pages5 hours

    They All Fall Down: A Thriller

    By Rachel Howzell Hall

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    For fans of thrilling contemporary suspense, Rachel Howzell Hall’s brilliant stand-alone novel brings seven sinners to a private island for a reckoning that will leave you breathless.

    It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime.

    Delighted by a surprise invitation, Miriam Macy sails off to a luxurious private island off the coast of Mexico with six other strangers. Surrounded by miles of open water in the gloriously green Sea of Cortez, Miriam is soon shocked to discover that she and the rest of her companions have been brought to the remote island under false pretenses—and all seven strangers harbor a secret.

    Danger lurks in the lush forest and in the halls and bedrooms of the lonely mansion. Sporadic cell-phone coverage and miles of ocean keeps the group trapped in paradise. And strange accidents stir suspicions, as one by one . . .

    They all fall down


    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 9, 2019
    ISBN9780765398161
    Unavailable
    They All Fall Down: A Thriller
    Author

    Rachel Howzell Hall

    RACHEL HOWZELL HALL is the author of the acclaimed Lou Norton series, the standalone thriller They All Fall Down, and co-author of The Good Sister with James Patterson, which appeared in the New York Times bestselling anthology The Family Lawyer. She is the senior development officer for the Donor Relations Department at Cedars Sinai. Currently she serves on the Board of Directors for the Mystery Writers of America, is a member of Sisters in Crime, and has participated as a mentor in the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Writer-to-Writer Program. She lives in Los Angeles.

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    Reviews for They All Fall Down

    3/5

    70 ratings11 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Nice pace and small details that paid off in the end! But, not overly intriguing.
    • 3/5
      ARC of a thriller due out April 2019. It dragged a bit for me, tbh, and I got a little impatient with the main character. But the setting was cool, as was the premise.
    • 3/5
      Strangers on a luxurious private island, danger, murder, secrets...the possibility for a great story is there, but this isn't it. Read like a rehash of previous books & movies with a liberal dose of domestic woes and trendy ethnicity.
    • 2/5
      A modern And Then There Were None, but without Christie's master mystery-weaving.
    • 4/5
      A great reimagining of Agatha Christie’s classic. The characters were well drawn and the plot skipped along nicely. It wasn’t predictable despite having read Christie’s book. Some of the drama got a little over the top, but was still generally believable. There’s a twist that is satisfying. I listened on audio and it really brought the story alive. Highly recommend!
    • 1/5
      1.5 stars Best of an island is once you get there—you can’t go any further … you’ve come to the end of things. AGATHA CHRISTIE, AND THEN THERE WERE NONEThis is supposed to be inspired by/reimagining of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, I've never read that book, so I can't speak to any of that. I can speak to my own likes and dislikes and I greatly disliked the style and structure of the writing and story. It's in first person pov, not my favorite but I can handle it, but what I couldn't handle was the stream of consciousness writing paired with an unreliable narrator. Both are styles and techniques that I struggle with, if you don't have the same dislike, your mileage would greatly vary and be better than mine with this book. We Have a Winner!Our pov character is Miriam and she is getting ready to take off to vacation on an island off Mexico, Mictlan Island. She won a vacation through her email and will be joining six other contestants on a reality tv show competition. The whole thing isn't quite clear and Miriam must not have watched as many horror movies as me because she doesn't see anything wrong with surprise free vacations to islands off Mexico. But, the author does set-up Miriam as a woman looking for an escape. It's murky in the beginning but Miriam is recently divorced (caught her husband cheating on her with their daughter's ballet teacher), just was found not guilty in a bullying case that involved a high school girl who was bullying her daughter, is an unreliable narrator to us, the reader, and in her own life, and has lost her job. Yeah, Miriam's life is a mess. A sick man. A country chick. A shaggy nurse. A cokehead cook. An uppity banker. And a mass shooter. My competition, ladies and gentlemen.We meet the other six contestants when she gets down to Mexico and they take the boat to the island that is 40miles away and has spotty wi-fi and phone service. The first 50% was all about getting Miriam to the island and introducing us to the characters but the stream of consciousness writing, Miriam having, quick, but annoying (to me, anyway), additive comments about their clothing or some such, her job was writing short fun copy for luxury items on second hand websites, made the first half feel chaotic and dragged out in pointlessness all at the same time. If you're looking for characters to like, root for, or even intriguing, I don't think you're going to find them here. The author even put in her acknowledgments that she wrote a story about awful people. I don't have a problem reading about awful characters but they all were that way and the story structure of personal dislikes didn't make up for it. Detective Giorgio Hurley had left me a voicemail: “Ms. Macy, hi. Just checking in with you. We need to talk, either at your home or here at the station. Sounds like there was some type of altercation last night? Sounds like folks were hurt, you included? Sounds like—”50% is when we get our first murder and from there on out its pretty fast paced, because of how slow the first half was, felt manic when bodies started dropping like flies. Miriam and the other six learn that the reality tv contest and lure of winning money was all a ruse and they were actually brought there by their lawyer. The lawyer got them all off on their cases but apparently had a come to Jesus moment on his deathbed and now wants to punish them for their crimes they committed that he got them off on. There's a diorama of the seven deadly sins in the house's foyer that they're staying on and as each person gets murdered, the statue of the sin that their crime corresponds with, disappears. It's a locked room mystery because of the island setting and with a storm keeping communication out to the outside world, they are on their own to survive. This is what you do: lie. Make up stories. Create something out of nothing.While the murders are going on, we have Miriam thinking about her own case, we get some flashbacks and reveals to what she did to the girl that was bullying her daughter but it's cloaked in Miriam's unreliable narrator, the constant alluding to her “cry wolf” personality, and at first she's taking Valium at a decent clip and drinking. There's some discussion of racism, Miriam being a black woman and the “angry black woman” stereotype but the author mostly (there's more social commentary on one of the other six who is a cop who killed a black man) stays away from higher social commentary as Miriam, yes, contorts instances in her own mind. There was also two components added in, the island being formerly owned by a notorious drug dealer and Miriam keeps seeing(?) the ghost of a young girl, that I guess are supposed to be red-herrings and add to mystery. All they did for me was help to the chaos feel of the story and how none of the ideas the author had seemed to be fully formed to gel together. I wanted her to lose. That’s all. To lose for once in her life.The last 80% was speedy and messy in giving the ending, at one point Miriam just takes a nap??? while on the run/hiding from a murderer. There's no one to cheer for or like in this, usually not a problem for me, but my personal dislikes and the messy storytelling structure made me not a fan of this. One thing I did like was that after someone was murdered, the next page had a newspaper clipping of their court case, what they were accused of and how they got off. I liked how their murders had a tie-ins with their crimes, a' la the movie Saw. As far as thriller, never felt on the edge of my seat, as far as mystery, meh-fairly easy to work out what is happening, and as far as ghost story, mostly a non-entity.
    • 3/5
      Reviews referred to this as a modern adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. I felt like it fell a little flat. I remember being shocked as the action's of Christie's characters were revealed, but the characters in They All Fall Down were pretty unpleasant to begin with. And the main character's constant medications, drinking, and dizziness were described a little too well, I actually felt nauseous reading parts!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      3.75 rounded up. I usually struggle to finish books with unlikable characters, but Rachel Howzell Hall crafted a story that was fun enough to keep going. She absolutely knows how to write truly despicable characters! Not a perfect re-imagining of Christie's classic, but a fun, twisty mystery none the less.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Surprised by the ending, this was a page turner although I really did not like the main character, actually all the main characters were despicable people! Hall did a great job letting you feel the isolation and fear of the characters.
    • 1/5
      I wanted to read this book but the main character was just too much for me. Most of the characters were a bit much but the main character was so over the top then add her dizzy spells and pill addiction....took my attention elsewhere.
    • 4/5
      I did not see that coming! Wow - this one was interesting. Several people are lured to a remote island in Mexico, all with different reasons to be there. Miriam is there, thinking that she is going to be on a reality TV show. Miriam is struggling with her relationship with her daughter due to something that happened to one of her daughter's friends. Once on the island, communication is cut off to the outside world. The people find out that they were lured to the island under false pretenses. What then unfolds provides lots of red herrings and unique twists. The ending is pretty surprising when you find out who did it and why. Interesting!#TheyAllFallDown #RachelHowzellHall