Amy Ashe

The plotting was tight, and we are immediately warned about the unreliability of the narrator. Sadly none of the characters truly came to life for me,but that might have been due to the extreme solipsistic narrator. And, with less than 50 pages to go, I stopped reading for the night. Not a good sign! To tell the absolute truth, the whole time I was reading this book, I kept thinking about Agatha Christie and how under-rated she is. I’ll probably be re-reading And Then There Were None shortly!

I am a very good reader but I had trouble at the beginning of this book with the characters - and that trouble, even with two separate lists of characters, continued throughout. I already guessed at many of the secrets; I continued reading just to find out the murderer. And that itself seemed quite arbitrary. I think my problem with the book was that the emails etc. did not lend themselves to character development, so everyone pretty much sounded like everyone else. That added to my not remembering who was who. My copy of the book has a review on the back suggesting this is a modern Agatha Christie. Oh no! Agatha Christie had a gift for distilling a character’s personality in a few brief lines. That was missing here. Dear Agatha, you are still unparalleled!

I bought this book awhile back, started it, but put it away. A very unlikeable main character and violence were not for me. Luckily, quite some time later, I tried again, and this time, I couldn’t put it down. It kept me guessing which of the appalling, yet heartbreaking characters, did “it.” The picture this paints of middle America makes vivid the problems facing our country especially concerning drug abuse and visions of a future with no hope or promise. But it’s not at all preachy - just a damned good mystery!