⭐⭐ 2/5 Stars – A good premise that soon ran out of steam. I don’t think this author is for me.
Format: Audiobook (BorrowBox)
Read: Nov 2024
This is my second Claire Douglas and sadly, like Then She Vanished, it left me underwhelmed and frustrated.
The premise is intriguing – Emilia Ward is the bestselling author of a long-running series of detective novels, and as she’s just handed in her draft of the final instalment to the series, disturbing incidents from her books begin to occur in her real life. And when, somebody in her life is found dead, killed in the same way as the victim in her latest unpublished tenth novel the murder has to be somebody in her inner circle.
It started fairly strong but then took a very long time for the plot to get any momentum. I was seriously questioning whether I wanted to keep going with it when the title of the novel finally became relevant. Unfortunately at this point, the author really lays it on thick that Emilia “lied” about something without telling the audience what exactly she lied about or why for bloody ages. When an author drags a story out in this way I don’t think it is ever a good sign, I’m always worried the reason is going to be weak, and it was…
I’ll say generally the writing tends towards repetition and really fucking spelling things out which I found slows everything down. It almost feels like the author was trying to boost the word count in places! There are also chapters inserted, I think, from Emilia’s draft but it’s not clear that’s what they are, which was confusing even in audio format with a different narrator! The second half also gets a POV from the real-life detective and I didn’t enjoy that either because the character is so cliché I initially thought it was meant to be the fictional detective (and the performance of the narrator doesn’t help matters)!
As with Then She Vanishes, I didn’t care about any of the characters or find them particularly relatable. Nobody was given much depth, and I would include Emilia in that. They all felt like stock characters and not individuals.
The second half gets stuck in a holding pattern of finger-pointing. Emilia does a loop around all her friends and family to accuse everyone in turn. It’s quite exhausting, especially as I found it was disappointingly obvious very early on who the main culprit was (though the why took a bit longer!). This meant by the time the full mystery was solved, in a very convoluted way, I’d had more than enough of Emilia and was dying for it to be over! So I don’t think I was ever going to feel satisfied by the conclusion!
So yeah, this was a disappointing one! Maybe Claire Douglas isn’t for me.
REVIEW SUMMARY
I LIKED
- The premise.
I DIDN’T LIKE
- The writing tended towards repetition and spelling things out in such a way that I found it a bit patronising at times. This also bogged down the pacing.
- It took too long to get going and then got stuck in a repetitive loop of exhausting finger pointing.
- The main culprit was my original suspect, the clues were a bit too heavy-handed, I thought they stuck out like a sore thumb!
- Additional POV chapters were confusing and I’m not sure necessary or perhaps they just needed better framing.
