I wasn't looking forward to reading this. Sharon Bolton also writes, or used to write, as S J Bolton, in which guise she had a series of police - almost - procedurals which were based on truly bizarre and grotesque ideas and after the second one I decided I couldn't take any more and stopped looking for them in the library. So I was a bit nervous about this one.
But I needn't have been. It's a thriller set on the Falkland's, revolving around three main characters. Catrin, who was married to Ben, and whose children died in a terrible car accident, Rachel, Catrin's best friend, who was responsible for it, and Callum, a former soldier who served in the Falklands campaign and now suffers from PTSD (which I thought was a bit shoehorned in for the sake of fashion. Other people probably thought differently.) The PTSD to my mind didn't make Callum any more interesting as a character, he could have stood as worthwhile without it. as for plot, there are children going missing on the islands and although the local police chief plays this down and insists the disappearances are all tragic accidents Callum is convinced there is a serial killer of children living in the community. Then Rachel's youngest son goes missing and the police find Catrin's diary in which she has sworn revenge on Rachel and ....
There you go. I really enjoyed this actually. A tad too much stuff about the Falklands campaign for my taste but I suppose if she had gone to all the trouble and expense of visiting she might as well make use of everything she found there. The three main characters all held my interest for different reasons, the psychology of their actions was usually credible and always plausible, there were twists and turns galore, and a heart stopping ending - one of those where you go 'Yes, of course, why did I NOT see that coming?
We do not meet again until September by which time I will probably have forgotten a lot of the discussable detail of the book, but at least I've written it up here so that I won't totally forget. Given that we have an almost three month break I thought I might also read over the summer the book selected for what I refer to as The Posh Reading Group, where they generally go in for literary fiction of the sort I suspect I do not care for. The current pick though is a historical novel called The Lady of the Ravens and it looks like it won't be too heavy so I might treat myself to it on Kindle and then tip my toe into the waters of the Other Group in September.
Sounds good!
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