Chris Brookmyre - The Cliff House

 

Rating: 2/5

 

Review: 

Not for me 

 

I became heartily fed up with The Cliff House and eventually bailed out, I’m afraid. I have very much enjoyed Chris Brookmyre’s Jack Parlabane series, but I haven’t got on nearly so well with his other work and this was no exception. To be fair, it’s not a genre I’m normally keen on but I tried it because it’s Brookmyre. That was a mistake.

The whole thing felt pretty stale from the start to be honest; a party in a cut-off island location where several people have “history” and the organiser is worried about how everyone will get on...seriously? Again? And then the first part of the book seemed to go on forever as each person arrived and we very slowly learned a bit more about them, their relationship to the others and that each one has a Dark Secret and is worried about That Thing They Did being exposed – without, of course, telling us what the Secret or the Thing is. I got to the eye-rolling stage fairly early on in the book – and it got worse as absurdities and clichéd situations mounted up, so I was muttering “for heaven’s sake” (I paraphrase) pretty regularly until eventually I gave up because life was too short.

I’m sorry to be so critical. The prose is good and others who enjoy this genre may well like the book, but for me it was just a string of stale, implausible characters and situations. I hope that Brookmyre will hive us another Parlabane book, but it seems that his other fiction is really not for me.

(My thanks to Little, Brown for an ARC via NetGalley.)