My Rating: 4 stars
The summary for this book describes it as an “original,
chilling, twisty mystery,” which I definitely feel is fitting, however I would
also add one more word to that description:
clever! This is one of those books where it’s best to
go in knowing as little as possible and let the flow of the story take you on a
ride that is at once thrilling and completely unpredictable!
I’ve read my fair share of thrillers / psychological
suspense novels the past few years, but none of them have been quite as unique
as this one. At the heart of the story
are two murder investigations that take place 20 years apart: human remains are found at a construction
site where a new shopping center was to be installed and almost immediately,
when it is discovered that the remains were excavated from the exact same spot
where the bodies of Charlie Paige and Scott Ashby -- two 11-year-old boys from
a nearby housing estate who had been brutally murdered -- were found 20 years
ago, a long-closed murder investigation is brought back into the spotlight. At the same time, the boys’ childhood best
friend Cody Swift, who narrowly escaped the same fate that Charlie and Scott
endured, returns to Bristol – the town where he grew up and also where the
murders took place – in a search for answers after being haunted by the deaths
of his two friends for most of his life. He decides to use his experience as a
filmmaker to produce a true crime podcast documenting his search in the hopes
that people who might have been involved or knew anything about the case but were
afraid to speak up previously would now come forth and set things straight. Presented as entire chapters interspersed throughout
the story, each episode of the podcast was narrated by Cody and featured
interviews with people who had been involved with the investigation several
decades ago as well as residents of the housing estate that was forever changed
after the murders. The rest of the chapters
alternated between the perspectives of two other central characters in the
story – Charlie’s mother Jessica Paige, who tries desperately to keep long-held
secrets about the case buried, and also Detective John Fletcher, who had been
the lead investigator on the original case and coincidentally was also the one
who discovered the remains in the new case.
In addition to these alternating perspectives, the narrative also features
a dual timeline, with each chapter covering both the case in the present as
well as the one that took place in the past.
Despite the many threads to the story, the author Gilly
Macmillan was able to tie everything together brilliantly, creating a tautly-written
page-turner that I honestly found very hard to put down. As with most books from this genre, I picked
up the clues throughout the story and thought I had everything all figured out,
but then I got to the end and, well, all I am going to say is that I was
completely wrong. I don’t want to say
too much about the ending of course, but I was definitely floored by the “surprise
twist” (though admittedly there was also some “follow up” to the ending that I
was expecting but never got so in that sense, it was a little less satisfying).
The other unique aspect with this story
was the way the characters were written – I’m not going to go into much detail
on this for fear of spoiling the story, but I will say that this was not the
typical “protagonist vs antagonist” setup that we are used to seeing with these
stories…with this one, the roles were far from clearly defined, which, for me,
added another layer of complexity to the story. A word of caution – don’t be
surprised if, by the time you get to the ending, you end up disliking every
single character in this story….
Overall, I definitely enjoyed this one, though I did have
a slight problem with the way the transitions were done between the dual
timelines, which confused me at first (and since I read an ARC version, it didn’t
help that the formatting was already a bit off). I had to read the first two non-podcast
chapters twice, but after I figured out the pattern, I was able to plow through
the rest of the book without much issue.
Needless to say, this one is highly recommended! I have not read Gilly Macmillan’s previous
works but rest assured that I will be adding her other books to my TBR to read
at a later date!
Received ARC from
Harper Collins / William Morrow via Edelweiss.
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