Finished Things - the next Saturday Slaughters book

 

It's ages before the next meeting but I got this early and then read it really quickly because there aren't as many copies as there are would-be readers, so I rattled through it so I could return it for someone else to get  hold of it. 

Good things first. It was a quick and easy read. There were two good twists in it that I didn't see coming. The author is very good at slowly revealing the real character of his two narrators, I  thought that was excellently done. 

Not so good things. Naturally none of the characters were particularly nice people. There was an angle to the relationship of two of them that appeared towards the end and came out of nowhere and psychologically just didn't fit. But the main problem that I had was the problem that I have with all books of this type, which is that I never find the set-up from which all else flows, at all credible. Here it was a house being offered at a ridiculously cheap rent with 200 rules attached for the tenant to keep (including, after the relatively normal no children, no pets, such things as no pictures, no soft furnishings, no books, putting everything away as soon as it was finished with, washing down the shower walls as soon as you'd showered etc etc) plus an application form to which you had to attach three recent photographs. In whose mind, however desperate they were to find somewhere to live, is this not a wee bit odd? In fact who would not take one ok and run for the hills as fast as they could? 

So summing up, this isn't my sort of book, so I wont be searching out any more by this author. However I don't  resent the time I took to reading it as totally wasted, unlike the hours I spent reading Gone Girl of ridiculous and  predictable memory,   so that's something. And I think, if it is your sort of book, you would find it good of its kind.