I wasn’t sure about this book as it’s a bit outside of my usual reading genre. I don’t read a lot of women’s fiction and stay far far away from historical fiction.
I do however, often read books that alternate between the past and present (a la Natasha Lester, Kate Morton etc), which this book does and I was thankfully engaged in this story and drawn to the characters from the get-go.
The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen was a book I rated highly last year (4.5 stars which is rare for me). It was delightfully twisty and offered up some complex (and not always likeable) characters.
I can’t quite fathom how two authors can co-write a novel. Indeed, my childhood bestie and I attempted that very thing when we were 8 or 9 years old and it didn’t end well. (I ripped up the book and threw it away. Thankfully she resurrected it from our rubbish bin and stuck it back together and it became a gift we ‘gave’ each other every few years. And I’m fairly certain she must still have it as I last gifted it to her in the 1990s sometime!)
Anyhoo… Hendricks and Pekkanen seem to make it work.
I read Jessica Knoll’s popular novel, Luckiest Girl Alive when it was released in 2015. I enjoyed the book but HATED the lead character. I mean, we were supposed to dislike her but it almost became a case of me disliking her so much I just wanted to be done with her and the book.
Knoll’s new release again mixes it with contemporary and popular culture as it’s based around a reality TV show – Goal Diggers – which appears to be a mash up of Real Housewives of whatever and Shark Tank. Either way you know you’re in for some faux and real: bitchiness; friendships; and rivalries, as well as some posturing and pouting added for good measure.
I happily admitted I fell a little in love with Amos Decker when I met him in Memory Man – David Baldacci’s first book in the series featuring the man who experienced a head injury giving him perfect recall (hence the title #obvs).
The Fallen is the fourth book in the series and probably my second favourite to the original as it’s very much about Decker and his investigation skills and there’s probably less workplace / territorial game-playing in the background.
I suspect this book will be very popular as it’s one featuring a clever and conniving narrative… like good ol’ Gone Girl, The Girl on The Train, The Girl Before and more recently Anatomy of a Scandal.
And – we know it’s twisty, because the back cover blurb tells us so.
I mentioned in my review of David Baldacci’s previous Will Robie book, The Guilty (published in 2015), that it wasn’t a series I knew well. In fact, I was a latecomer to the series but that book took Will (and his erstwhile partner Jessica Reel) out of his usual spy / assassin / government agent role and had a more personal twist.
At the time I appreciated the deviation because I was worried having not read previous books in the series may have been a disadvantage. It wasn’t. Similarly, it doesn’t matter if you’re meeting these characters for the first time in this latest installment as Baldacci does a great job at introducing them to us via James Bond-esque style opening sequences.
I didn’t actually request this book and wasn’t too sure about it as: 1. I haven’t read anything by Jeffrey Archer for quite some time; and 2. I’m not usually a fan of short stories.
However, I’d had a bit of a lull in new book arrivals and figured the best thing about short stories is that you can leap into them when you have time, then put the book aside when one story comes to an end rather than getting stuck in the middle of something.
I was at a writers conference last weekend and one or two publishers mentioned the fact they were after novels featuring mixed media or compiled via a mix of emails or text or similar. Are You Sleeping by Kathleen Barber would have made those publishers very happy because, not only is it about something very topical (ie. podcasts and true crimes), it includes tweets, online forum chats and podcast transcripts.
I was exceedingly tempted to leave this review until 2nd May to publish because apparently I posted my review of the first book in the Amos Decker series, Memory Man, on that date in 2015; and the second, The Last Mile on the same day last year.
But, well… what can I say? I’m impatient and couldn’t really be arsed holding off for another week or two.
What I will say however is that I seriously LOVED this book.
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