Rating: 3/5
Review:
A decent beach read
I thought this was a well written book which had its
moments, but overall I found it rather implausible and unsatisfying.
Dear Amy is a psychological thriller: Margot is an English teacher in Cambridge
who also writes the "Dear Amy" agony column for the local
newspaper. One of the students at her
school goes missing, and "Amy" begins to receive distressed requests
for help…but from a different girl who disappeared many years ago. It's an ingenious set-up and is quite well
done, but the implausibilities and clichés did begin to become too much for
me. The sceptical police, the sexy,
attractive (and, of course, entirely unattached) investigator, the Not Knowing
Whom To Trust…and so on. There are also
quite long periods of irrelevant tedium at times (a description of the making
of a reconstruction which goes on for pages and pages, for example), and I'm
afraid I found both the explanation of the mystery of the letters and the
inevitable Confrontation With The Killer In A Deserted Location Climax pretty
hard to swallow.
That said, Helen Callaghan writes well, Margot is an
engaging protagonist, the book is easy to read and I found the closing scene
genuinely touching. It's certainly not a
bad book and plenty of others have enjoyed this more than I did; for me,
though, it's a decent beach read but not much more.
(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)
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