This book was recommended to me by some people at a school-sponsored luncheon after we started talking about favorite books. They had high praises for it, and since I was in the mood for a light read, I decided to pick it up.
I suppose this review has some light spoilers, but nothing worth redacting. I do not have high praise for this book, so I will not encourage you to read it yourself anyway. It's a psychological thriller set in modern-day London, the protagonist is a psychotherapist deadset on treating the subject of a violent crime that occured six years prior. The problem is she refuses to speak, and this was reason enough to send her to a psych ward instead of prison.
Despite what any biography might say, the author is not a mental health professional and with what little I know about mental health services in the England, I am confident he has never been to therapy. I would also venture to guess he has never been to a contemporary art museum. He is, however, a screenwriter, and it shows. Most scenes in the book are just back and forth yapping between two cardboard cutouts barely even trying to be convincing humans.
The narrator, our protagonist, has a particular fixation with people's nationalities and is unintentionally racist enough that he can deduce this information upon his first encounter with each character. He can differentiate Canadians from Americans with ease and, because it's such a defining characteristic, hardly anyone is given further description, physical or otherwise. And it doesn't even matter! Their purpose is hardly even set-dressing. Each interaction. without exaggeration, is solely to deliver exposition, if even that. I don't remember their names anyway, so they might as well be the Greek, the Indian, the Russian and so on.
I am convinced that this author mistakenly wrote a book instead of a r/nosleep post. Or maybe it's a better fit for AITA. Although it obviously has never tried to parade itself as anything other than fiction, it has the same core ingredients as every other bullshit story that breeches its R*ddit containment zone, grammatically competent enough to confidently garnish itself with too many em-dashes, standard stock archetypes and overused set phrases. Also, the pacing of events feels really rushed for no reason in particular, like how in video games the passage of time is entirely reliant on the player checking of a list of tasks. Our protagonist is a certified whiny man and when asking his therapist what to do about his evil cheating lying bitch wife (whose greatest transgression up until this point is cringe email cybersex l33tspeak which cannot believably exist in the decade the it takes place), she legitimately responds NTA, I don't know if persistent sexual and emotional betrayal with another human being is on the same level as getting stoned every now and then. I think it points to a very different kind of individual—someone who is able to lie repeatedly and lie well, who can betray their partner without feeling any remorse—is a narcissistic bitch. Even though you lied about your drug habits, love that doesn't include honestly doesn't deserve to be called love. Lawyer up and go no contact.
The novel bills itself as a thriller, but the reader is really given the runaround with no payoff when the twist is revealed. You could read the first three chapters and immediately skip to the last three, and still essentially have a complete story. Cutting out everything in the middle might even be an improvement. In other reviews, a lot of people call it a page turner, but that's hardly a positive in the context of speeding through mediocre writing while waiting for anything, anything at all to happen, and then it just ends.
An unreliable narrator is a cheap crutch when the only way you can build mystery and suspense is by outright lying to your reader, without giving them anything of substance to chew on, and then acting like you're clever for doing so. I won't say that it's complete garbage, but I feel like the author wanted to rely more on visual cues that he isn't skilled enough to convey through writing. It'd probably be fine as a movie or a mini series, but as a book this is a rough draft at best. I'll give you a sample of the writing:
A couple of students were braving the wind, sitting outside with their pints in the beer garden, wrapped up in scarves, smoking. Inside, the temperature was much warmer, thanks to several roaring fires, which provided a welcome relief from the cold. Thanks for explaining how temperature works! I had no idea. I will also add that these details did not even serve to set up the scene as the characters encountering fire for the first time left the pub in as many pages as it took to get there.
Don't waste your time with this one.