CBR 15 Bing0 – Politics
This is my first Alice Feeney and it is a good book for spoooooky season. Feeney does her own spin on an Agatha Christie-style “And Then There Were None” story, in that she sort of cribbed from it entirely in a number of key ways. Britain? Check. Isolated group on an island? Check. Creepy rhymes (in this case, poems)? Check. People starting dying one by one? Check. That said, her take on the construct was refreshing and kept me turning the pages.
Nana is a famous author and the members of her estranged family have reunited to celebrate her 80th birthday. After arriving at her home in the evening, the tide goes out as always and no one will be able to leave until the morning. Shortly after a charming and whimsical dinner with tense family politics, Nana is found dead and the accusations begin to fly. Is it her son, the pianist who abandoned his children? His ex-wife, also a middling parent? Or could it be one of their three daughters or their precocious teen granddaughter? Or is there someone else on the island? As Nana’s collection on the cuckoo clocks chimes every hour, more clues and creepy poems are found, and family secrets are relived and revealed.
I often say that sometimes a book “went off the rails for me” in the end. I use that phrase when I feel like the author wrapped things up too conveniently or threw in too many plot twists in the final chapters. This one didn’t go off of the rails entirely, but it was like in Indiana Jones when they are careening around the mineshaft: for sure wobbly, and a bit unbelievable in its execution.
Overall, it was an interesting story and I would recommend it for autumnal reading, but don’t be like me and power through the last five chapters after dark, unless you also wanted to get out of bed at midnight and search your hose for prowlers.