Unexpected endings... books with a twist

 Everyone loves a happy ending...or maybe not. Check out these books with an unexpected ending.

In the blood by Lisa Unger
Lana Granger lives a life of lies. She has told so many lies about where she comes from and who she is that the truth is like a cloudy nightmare she can't quite recall. About to graduate from college and with her trust fund almost tapped out, she takes a job babysitting a troubled boy named Luke. Expelled from schools all over the country, the manipulative young Luke is accustomed to controlling the people in his life. But, in Lana, he may have met his match. Or has Lana met hers? When Lana's closest friend, Beck, mysteriously disappears, Lana resumes her lying ways - to friends, to the police, to herself. The police have a lot of questions for Lana when the story about her whereabouts the night Beck disappeared doesn't jibe with eyewitness accounts. Lana will do anything to hide the truth, but it might not be enough to keep her ominous secrets buried: someone else knows about Lana's lies. And he's dying to tell.
Darkness, darkness by John Harvey
Thirty years ago, the Miners' Strike threatened to tear the country apart, turning neighbour against neighbour, husband against wife, father against son - enmities which smoulder still. Resnick, recently made up to inspector, and ambivalent at best about some of the police tactics, had run an information gathering unit at the heart of the dispute. Now, in virtual retirement, and still grieving over the violent death of his former partner, the discovery of the body of a young woman who disappeared during the Strike brings Resnick back to the front line to assist in the investigation into the woman's murder - forcing him to confront his past in what will assuredly be his last case.


A spy among friends: Kim Philby and the great betrayal  by Ben McIntyre
Kim Philby was the most notorious British defector and Soviet mole in history. Agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War.

Philby's two closest friends in the intelligence world, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Jesus Angleton, the CIA intelligence chief, thought they knew Philby better than anyone, and then discovered they had not known him at all. This is a story of intimate duplicity; of loyalty, trust and treachery, class and conscience; of an ideological battle waged by men with cut-glass accents and well-made suits in the comfortable clubs and restaurants of London and Washington; of male friendships forged, and then systematically betrayed.

With access to newly released MI5 files and previously unseen family papers, and with the cooperation of former officers of MI6 and the CIA, this definitive biography unlocks what is perhaps the last great secret of the Cold War.
Gods and beasts by Denise Mina
A Glasgow post office one week before Christmas. Martin Pavel cowers on the floor, his eyes locked on those of a terrified child. Above them a masked gunman wields an AK47 while the boy's grandfather calmly volunteers to help the robber gather the money.







We were liars by E.Lockhart
A beautiful and distinguished family. A private island. A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy. A group of four friends - the Liars - whose friendship turns destructive. A revolution. An accident. A secret. Lies upon lies. True love. The truth. This deeply charged psychological thriller by National Book Award finalist and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart captures the complexities of intergenerational family relationships, the intensity of romantic love, and the heartbreak that both can inflict. Read it. And if anyone ask you how it ends, LIE.



Crooked letter, crooked letter by Tom Franklin
Amos, Mississippi, is a quiet town. Silas Jones is its sole law enforcement officer. The last excitement here was nearly twenty years ago, when a teenage girl disappeared on a date with Larry Ott, Silas' one-time boyhood friend. The law couldn't prove Larry guilty, but the whole town has shunned him ever since. Then the town's peace is shattered when someone tries to kill the reclusive Ott, another young woman goes missing, and the town's drug dealer is murdered. Woven through the tautly written murder story is the unspoken secret that hangs over the lives of two men - one black, one white. "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter" is a masterful crime novel, sizzling with deep Southern menace, and distinguished by brilliant plotting and unforgettable characters.

A kiss before dying by Ira Levin
Dorothy meets a handsome young man with an eye for her inheritance while at university. They are to be married, but Dorothy is pregnant and would be disinherited if her father discovers the truth. The young man provides some pills that will solve the problem, but maybe takes Dorothy's life too.







Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this remote and barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane relentlessly bears down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades—with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems. But then neither is Teddy Daniels.

The Devotion of Suspect X by  Keigo Higashino ; translated by Alexander O. Smith with Elye J. Alexander
Yasuko lives a quiet life, working in a Tokyo bento shop, a good mother to her only child. But when her ex-husband appears at her door without warning one day, her comfortable world is shattered." "When Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police tries to piece together the events of that day, he finds himself confronted by the most puzzling, mysterious circumstances he has ever investigated. Nothing quite makes sense, and it will take a genius to understand the genius behind this particular crime..

It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.

 Life or death by Michael Robotham
 Why would a man escape from prison the day before he's due to be released? Audie Palmer has spent a decade in prison for an armed robbery in which four people died, including two of his gang. Seven million dollars has never been recovered and everybody believes that Audie knows where the money is. For ten years he has been beaten, stabbed, throttled and threatened almost daily by fellow inmates and prison guards, who all want to answer this same question - but suddenly Audie vanishes, the day before he's due to be released. Everybody wants to find Audie, but he's not running. Instead he's trying to save a life ...and not just his own.