Rating: 4/5
Review:
A good, gripping thriller
I enjoyed this psychological thriller. It is very well written, it has a very
well-painted backdrop and it was very engrossing for most of its length.
The story is set in the Falkland Islands
in 1994. The story is told in three
successive first-person voices: Catrin, whose children died three years ago
because of her best friend's carelessness; Callum, an ex-soldier now living on
the Islands; and Rachel, Catrin's (ex-) best
friend. Catrin is plotting some terrible
revenge on Rachel, and meanwhile a child goes missing on the Islands
– the third to do so in three years.
Memory lapses, misguided loyalties and other complications mean that a
very tense situation develops.
The narrative voices are well done, I think, and the sense
of place is excellently developed with that slightly paradoxical mixture of a
small community where everyone knows your business, but with great uninhabited
areas and very isolated from the rest of the world. The characters' internal states are plausibly
developed, and I found Catrin's desolation and hatred very convincing, as was
the all-pervading depth of Rachel's sense of shame and self-loathing. The plot developed well and I was largely
gripped.
Sharon Bolton does go in for some rather stagey cliff-hangers
at times, and the climaxes to her books can be a little overdone for my
taste. For me, the confrontations and
revelations here would have been even more effective without the extra external
shenanigans, and I could have done without the frankly absurd final paragraphs,
but these are minor reservations and they aren't shared by a lot of
people. Certainly Sharon Bolton writes
very well and I thought this was a good, gripping thriller which I can
recommend.
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