Rating: WORTHY!
This is an advance review copy of a "murder mystery" novel, although technically no murder occurs. It’s set in 2010 in Britain and uses a lot of colloquialisms, so if you're not British and not a Brit-o-phile, you may find this a little obscure in places, but overall, I think this is well-written and a worthy read. I had some issues with it which I will mention, but overall, the characters are complex, flawed, realistic, and well portrayed, and in general terms it was well-written.
One example which tripped me up more than once (since it involved the same verb) was where the author would write something like "his parents rowed in sharp little bursts." The word I read as rowed, as in 'they rowed the boat across the lake', was actually a British word meaning argued and is pronounced to rhyme with "Ow!" such as a person would say if they hurt themselves. I think the author would have a better chance of transatlantic success if she changed that out.
On another occasion the author wrote "told Any that I was getting married" where she meant, I assume, 'Amy' rather than 'Any'. A spellchecker isn't going to catch hat! Only a good beta reader or editor will. One sentence which made me wonder was the one which ended thus: " and scorched some guesses where they lay." I think the word the author intended here was 'scotched' (meaning to end or to foil rather than 'scorched' meaning to destroy by fire. There's only one letter difference, and 'scorched' did make some sort of sense, so maybe I'm wrong here and the usage was intentional, but it didn't read right to me.
The story has changing PoVs (although thankfully only one of them is first person!). There are flashbacks which I normally do not like. In this case they were not bad to begin with, but frankly became a little tedious as the story progressed. The story is told from three perspectives: Amy, the girl who is raped, Jacob, the guy who dated her in high school, and Alex, the alcoholic journalist who is trying to get back on the rails, and to discover what really happened to Amy fifteen years before.
I'm not a huge fan of murder mysteries although I've read a few and once in a while find one that looks interesting. This one was interesting because it wasn't a murder mystery - it was an attempted murder mystery - and the victim, Amy, is in a vegetative state and has been since she was attacked when she was fifteen.
The rapist/would-be murderer was never caught, and Alex is trying to sell this story to a national newspaper for which she used to work many years before, and which she left in disgrace. They won't buy it without some new breakthrough in the story - like other murders or attempted murders done in a similar style, or new evidence showing up. The police have pretty much abandoned this since it's so old.
The alcoholism works in that at one point, Alex thinks that someone has broken into her house and stolen a look at her notebook where she's writing down the results of her investigation. She was sleeping upstairs at the time and thought she heard noises, but was too paralyzed with fear to investigate, and now, because of her alcoholic fuzz, she can't be sure anyone broke in at all. There was a window open and nothing was stolen, so she doesn't report it to the police, thinking they won't believe her. Her ex, who is a police officer in a different area, doesn't believe her. He's pretty much lost patience with her because of her past alcohol abuse. The idea of the break in itself made no sense to me, but that aside, it was well-written.
The novel is set in 2010 for reasons I did not grasp. For a good story, one year is as good as another, but why 2010 instead of 2015, or 2001, or whatever, I can only wonder. The story flashes back often to Amy, who is a disaffected fifteen-year-old who lusts after an older man. The problem is that when a chance finally comes for her to get it on with this guy, he (or perhaps someone else!) attempts post-coital murder. He fails in that, but leaves Amy hospitalized in a vegetative state. This was one of the problems for me. I don't want to post any spoilers, but I simply did not get the motive for this guy to do what he did. It made no sense at all to me, and to have it come down to him when he's hardly been in the story at all, felt like a real let-down.
Alex encounters Amy in the hospital, still uncommunicative, but apparently with some brain function. She also encounters Jacob, who is a volunteer visitor. Jacob has his own set of issues. He married his ideal partner, Fiona, but ever since then, the marriage seems to have slipped somehow and now is more fricassee than fantasy. Intent upon getting something out of her encounter with Amy that she could turn into a sale-able article, Alex starts delicately investigating what happened, and manages to get an interview with her father and some of her school friends.
I had a small issue with part of the story where Amy's father talks to Alex about his life before Amy was raped and nearly murdered. He is very slightly older than his wife: “Yeah, Jo was twenty-two when I met her. We had about eighteen months between us..." yet this is made out to be some sort of huge gap, whereas it really isn’t. I don't know of any young people of that age who could consider eighteen months to be such a yawning chasm, so I'm not sure whether the author got the age discrepancy wrong, or changed it later and didn’t adjust the text to compensate, or if she really does consider it to be a huge difference. It just seemed like a complete non-entity to me.
That said, there were very few problems with the writing in this novel, which was impressive and made for a nice read, although as I said, it started to drag towards the end. This was seventy-nine chapters, and although the novel itself was not really long, it felt like it was maybe twenty-nine chapters too long. I can't tell you how long this book actually is because there was no page numbering, not even in the iPad version. This is another failing of ebooks. The kindle app version was screwed up, too. For example, when I was sixty-one percent into the book, the little notification at the bottom of the screen told me I had six minutes left in the book - not the chapter, but the entire book! - which was pure nonsense.
But every book has problems, and this one, in general was a worthy read, so I recommend it, keeping the above-mentioned caveats in mind.
