Although the narration, jumping back and forwards from Beatrice's confessional-style testimony at the Crown Prosecution Service to telling the story of her sleuthing, is rather off-putting there is plenty in this twisting tale to grip hold of. Until the end. I'd guessed what happened about a quarter of the way through and there was a lot of subsequent evidence that confirmed my solution. But I was wrong. Really? I don't think so. My solution was far better. There were a number of pieces of evidence that the author's thrilleresque solution simply failed to address. So I still think I was right and the author wrong. Perhaps there should be a sequel about this appalling miscarriage of justice.
And before that there were a lot of moments when professional people really didn't behave anything like the way professional people would behave.
Some great lines:
- "The Big Apple with no core." (p 6)
- "A siren is the sound of the twenty-first-century cavalry on its way." (p 52)
- Psychiatrists are "a hot cycle for the personality, shrinking you down to something that fits a category in a textbook" (I guess that's why they're called shrinks).
- "A hospital world with its own no-weather and no-time in which the aberrant crises of pain, illness and death were Kafka-like turned ordinary." (p 159)
- "For me life has always been a mountain - sheer-faced and perilous." (p 227)
- "I saw compassion on some faces as they looked at me, and its poorer cousin pity on others." (p 248)
April 2018; 358 pages
Rosamund Lupton has also written the brilliant and tautly-paced Three Hours.
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