Rating: 2/5
Review:
Not for me
Oh dear. Almost
everyone else seems to have loved Cold Cold Heart, but I'm afraid I couldn't
get on with it at all.
The plot is in effect a classic Country House Murder
mystery, moved to an Antarctic research station in winter: ten characters
completely cut off from the outside world, one of whom is a killer. Katie Flanagan, a young medical research
scientist is flown in to replace someone after an accident just as winter cuts
the station off for months.
Claustrophobic and sinister things begin to happen, and we are left to
try to spot the killer.
My problem with the book is that it all just seems so clunky
and even crudely done sometimes so I just didn’t believe in the characters or
the plot and couldn’t get involved at all.
We get bits of the story from far too many points of view (even that of
a cat, believe it or not, which is wholly unnecessary and horribly twee) and
everything is spelled out in plodding chunks of unconvincing exposition. There is a lot of forced and sometimes patronisingly
unnecessarily spelling out of obvious details, like "Anything she didn't have now she'd have
to do without, because where she was going, there were no shops, no mail, no
Amazon." Gosh, thanks - I'd never
have known if you hadn't said!
Elsewhere, characters give each other great swathes of
information which they already know. For
example, early on Katie is talking to her best friend with whom, we are told,
she has "talked it over so many times," but we still get:
"What'll you be doing there?" Rachel asked.
"I'll be taking over this guy's research project – I'm
well qualified for it. It's about the
way human beings adapt to darkness and isolation. Lack of light suppresses the action of the
pineal gland with the result…" etc. etc etc.
Two close friends having a farewell chat about something
they have "talked over so many times"? Really?
The whole book reads like this and it all felt false to me; I felt I was
just being clumsily set up for a puzzle (with "twists", of course)
but wasn't the slightest bit convinced by the characters or the setting – which
meant I wasn't very interested in the puzzle.
I'm afraid I got very fed up with the book and ended up
skimming quite large chunks without feeling I'd missed much. I'm plainly out of step with the huge
majority of reviewers so don't let me put you off before reading other reviews,
but I'm afraid I really didn't like Cold Cold Heart.
(I received an ARC vis NetGalley.)
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