The Catch by T M Logan - Review

I read The Holiday by T M Logan last year, and I'd been seeing people in a book group I'm in raving about The Catch, so I got it on my ereader and read it in just one day. That's not because it's very good, but it is compelling and I did want to know what happened. Like in The Holiday, most people in this book are terrible humans with too many privileges who do not deserve your sympathy.

The book starts when Ed, aged nearly fifty, is sitting in his back garden (where he just happens to have a badminton court) watching his daughter Abbie play her new boyfriend, Ryan. Abbie is around 24 and Ryan is a decade older than her. Abbie lives with her parents. Ed is very unsure of Ryan, suspecting that there's something 'off' about him, some kind of deadness about the eyes. At the end of the afternoon, Abbie and Ryan reveal that not only are they engaged, but they are going to get married in just five weeks' time.

On paper Ryan seems perfect - he got a first class degree from Manchester University, he served five years in the army including two tours of Afghanistan, and he volunteers in a hospice because his mother died of cancer and he wants to give something back. But Ed still doesn't trust him. Claire, his wife, tells him to not be so stupid, and says he'll upset Abbie if he carries on behaving irrationally.  

Ed decides that he must move fast and begins leaving work early to stalk Ryan. He puts a GPS tracker on Ryan's car and finds out that Ryan a) visits a 'dodgy' house on a 'dodgy' estate on the outskirts of Nottingham, visits a red light area, and also doesn't visit Manchester every second Sunday of the month like he says he does. He still can't find any concrete proof, so he hires a private investigator to do the work for him. He also begins to suspect that things aren't right at home - the cat is skittish, there seems to be eau de cologne in the air, and he can't find things. 

The first half of the book shows Ed spiralling, and the reader does believe him and he does find out some dodgy things about Ryan. The second half of the book got stupid and unbelievable and I didn't enjoy it. I'm giving this three out of five.