Anna Johnson is home alone with her eight week old daughter. It’s nearly Christmas, and Anna is struggling. Around this time last year, her mother took her own life. She jumped off the cliff in a copycat move that also took the life of Anna’s father several months prior to that. Anna’s partner Mark is loving and supportive, but when Anna receives a mysterious note that tells her her parents’ death may not have been suicide after all, he tries to talk her out of the idea. Undeterred, Anna takes the note to the police, but she may not be prepared for what she finds.
Well, this book wasn’t predictable, I’ll give it that. There are so many red herrings and twists that it’s hard to keep up the pace. It also means that we get lots of ridiculous turns in the story that I personally could have done without.
The thing with twists is that they are great if they work, but more often than not they don’t for the simple reason that twists need to be unpredictable and the logical is often, by definition, predictable. That leaves the illogical, and illogical twists are just harder to sell. That’s where this book came off the rails for me. It’s very good at leaving you guessing who is and isn’t involved and to which degree, and to be fair it uses a check-your-prejudice twist that I appreciated, but it’s also a bit too in love with its own cleverness. The main plot itself is just nonsensical and the ending made me actively angry. It just can’t help itself.
The other problem I had with it was the characters. By and large, they’re paper thin. Anna is the grieving new mother, Mark is the supportive but possibly shady partner. There’s the token butch lesbian coworker, the snobby neighbour, the supportive uncle with a secret, the overbearing mother in law. None of them are particularly interesting, though I’ll make an exception for Murray, the cop who investigates the note that Anna receives. He’s a retired detective who now works at the force as a civilian. I like it when police in books aren’t the aggressively gung-ho types, but are instead calm, thoughtful and insightful.
The novel also tries to cram way too much extraneous stuff into the plot that just doesn’t match the rest of what’s going on. There’s something about Murray’s chronically depressed slash bipolar wife that didn’t at all fit the rest of the book and yes, I get that it is meant to give Murray a bit more depth, but for me it just didn’t work at all.
I finished the novel pretty quickly, but it’s one of those books that’s just entertaining enough to finish, but that will also leave you feeling dissatisfied. It’s a lacklustre effort. Mackintosh does it better than this.