Rating: 4/5
Review:
Not Brookmyre's best
Fallen Angel is pretty good but not brilliant, I think. I love Chris
Brookmyre’s Parlabane series, but I don’t think this is quite in
the same league.
It’s a pretty
familiar set-up, as an extended family arrives at their Portugese
holiday villas shortly after the death of the famous intellectual who
was patriarch of the family. Sixteen years before, they had endured
a tragedy there as a young child was killed falling over a nearby
cliff and her body was never found. We get a number of points of
view (including one first person narrative) and the story cuts
between the present and the time of the child’s death. Dark
currents swirl and secrets begin to emerge…
Brookmyre is a good
enough writer to make a decent, quite fresh-seeming story out of a
rather hackneyed scenario; his characters are well drawn and the
surprises are generally well hidden and fairly plausible. However,
I did find that not much happened for a very long time and there are
quite long digressions into dreadful parenting, the iniquities of PR
companies and so on which, while accurate and shrewd, did feel a bit
polemical and slowed things down even further. Add to this a very
large cast which was hard to keep track of and consists of of almost
entirely repellent characters and I began to struggle and to skim.
I don’t want to
carp too much because this is a lot better than an awful lot of
“twisty psychological thrillers”, but it does have its faults and
I can only give it a rather qualified recommendation.
(My thanks to
Little, Brown for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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