The It Girl by Ruth Ware - Review

As you may remember, I've set myself a challenge to read the books on this page excluding the ones I've already read (and possibly minus the Kate Mosse one because I just don't fancy it), so I got this one on my Kindle. I have been mostly reading on my Kindle in May because I've been away a bit and it's much easier to take my tablet with me rather than schlepp books around. It also means that if I'm not gelling with something while I'm away I can just choose something else. 

I have read a couple of Ruth Ware books before and thought they were okay, but with problems. I absolutely feel the same about this one, too. It's an interesting premise and I'm glad to have read it, but I do have criticisms. It's a shame because I wanted to like the book, but the criticisms were quite big. 

So the story. In the present day Hannah lives in Scotland, works in a bookshop, and is pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Will, in an accountant. Hannah is at work one day, around twenty weeks pregnant, when she gets a phone call from her mum to tell her that John Neville has died.

You see, Hannah was at university in Oxford ten years ago when her best friend and roommate, April, was brutally murdered in their 'set' (eg their suite of rooms). Hannah and their friend Hugh were walking back towards the staircase at the time and saw John Neville, one of the college's porters, leaving the staircase. Hannah's evidence was instrumental in putting Neville in jail, and now he has died, while protesting his innocence. 

The 'before' parts of the novel tell about Hannah arriving at Oxford, meeting April, and making friends. There's Will and Hugh, who April already knows, reserved Emily, and Ryan, who is from Sheffield and who therefore stands in as the comedy northerner (this is one of my criticisms because his accent is done terribly in parts). Hannah and Will have a spark between them, but Will and April start a relationship so Hannah tries to squash her feelings. The before parts of the book take us right through to April's murder. Hannah has forgotten a lot of what happened to April. 

So ten years later, in the 'after' parts of the book, she is married to Will and happily expecting her baby. But then Neville dies and reporters start to get in touch with Hannah again. Emily encourages her to speak to a reporter called Geraint, who is also friends with Ryan. Hannah does, and Geraint tells her that he believes Neville was innocent. Hannah starts to think about the night in question again, going over everything. Will wants her to stop - but what is he scared of her finding out? Hannah sees all her old friends - Emily still in Oxford, Hugh who lives in Edinburgh and who she's always been friends with, and Ryan, who has had a stroke and is recovering. 

I did like the mystery. April is a really unlikable character and it's interesting to learn how she manipulated all her friends, giving all of them a motive for killing her. But Hannah knows what she saw. She had had previous problems with Neville on a few occasions when he was creepy towards her. It's not such a stretch to imagine he could have been a killer, is it? Then there was Hannah's professor Dr Myers, who had taken an interest in April, but he was miles away, surely. 

But, I found that the characters didn't overly ring true to me in a number of ways. As I said, the comedy northerner shtick is really annoying, I wish authors would stop doing this just to show how northern and different someone is. Then the new students, aged 18 or 19 years old, just didn't speak like teenagers. The early parts of the book are supposed to be set in around 2011 but they utterly didn't act like teenagers then at all. I felt like actually the early parts of the book were set around 2002/2003, but the author wanted there to be Instagram and stuff, so had to change. 

Similarly, I felt like the characters in the later part of the book didn't ring true as 29 year olds either. Hugh is supposed to be a famous plastic surgeon despite the fact that he would have only qualified as a doctor a few years earlier? Will is worried about making 'partner' at his accountancy firm which didn't ring true either. And Emily is a renowned professor... Mmm. This bit felt like the characters were coming up to forty years old, but for some reason the author had made them a decade younger. Maybe she didn't want there to be a huge gap between the murder and the events of 'today', but I can't work out why. All of this really jarred me and make me give this book three out of five. 

When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole - Review

You may remember that I'm doing a challenge this year where I am reading books by all the authors included in the new Marple book that I read last year, so in April I picked up When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole. I'm not familiar with the author but I was excited to read this as the premise sounded good. 

So, Sydney is a Black woman in her early thirties who lives in a historically Black neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Her mum owned a brownstone house, where she lived on one floor, Sydney lived on another, and Sydney's friend Drea lived on another. The house is clearly worth a lot of money now, especially since the neighbourhood is in the process of being gentrified. A medical research company has battled local protests to be allowed to use the old mental hospital as its new premises. This promises jobs and money in the area, but locals are unimpressed. The estate agent vultures have started to move in, promising to buy people out of their houses for good money. Sydney keeps batting them away, but her mother is really ill and she is worried about the medical debts and other stuff, so she's losing the will. 

One day she attends a walking tour of the area which goes through the historical inhabitants, but Sydney gets annoyed that they're ignoring the current inhabitants. She decides to put on a walking tour showcasing current people, and she's encouraged by some of the other residents, so she starts doing some research. On the first tour two new neighbours have arrived - Kim and Theo. They have a lot of money and have paid top dollar for their new house. Kim is immediately antagonistic towards her neighbours, being quite racist towards them. Sydney's new neighbours are similar, crowing about the steal of the house. 

Some of the book is told from Theo's point of view and we learn that things are not rosy between he and Kim. Kim's family is very wealthy and has put most of the money in to the house and renovations. It's easy to like Theo and feel sympathetic towards him, but he has dark secrets too, which he does end up spilling Sydney but it takes a while. Theo starts to help Sugney with her research. Strange things are happening around the neighbourhood. Sydney and Drea had had an argument but Sydney can't contact her friend at all.

This is an excellent thriller and I enjoyed the neighbourhood and all the different characters who lived in it. I like Sydney and wanted her to succeed at what she was doing. It also has some science fiction elements which I liked too. I'm giving this four out of five. 

1989 by Val McDermid - Review

You may remember that I read Marple last year - it's a collection of twelve new stories about Miss Marple by some of today's best authors. I really enjoyed it and was glad I read it. Then around Christmas I saw this reading list featuring all the authors, and I thought it sounded like a fun reading challenge for me for 2023. I have already read four of the books on the list - The Power, Nothing More to Tell, The Locked Room, and The Paris Apartment, and I'm not sure about the Kate Mosse book Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries, although I might give it a go. We'll see! But that left seven books to read, and I picked up 1989 last week as it was on my Kindle. 

I haven't read a lot of Val McDermid books but when I do I always enjoy them. I didn't realise this was the second in a new series featuring journalist Allie Burns to start off with, but I would definitely be interested in reading the first one. This book is partially set in parts of Manchester that I know, so that was fun to read about. The book is set is 1989 which makes it quite weird - it is long enough ago to be historical but close enough to remember. I was five in 1989 so do remember parts of it, especially the big news stories of the year like the Hillsborough Disaster and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Val talks a little bit about writing historical fiction set in the recent past at the end of the book, which I found interesting too. 

So much happens in this book that it felt wacky to me as I was reading as it just kept going! But it's testament to Val's skill as a writer that it never felt clunky or out of place. 

So, Allie Burns is an investigative journalist. She's currently the northern correspondant for a big paper, owned by Ace Lockhart, a media mogul who is clearly based on Robert Maxwell. Allie lives in Manchester with her girlfriend, Rona, who is also a journalist. Allie starts investigating why so many of Scotland's HIV and Aids patients have moved to Manchester. She discovers that there had been a drug trial in Edinburgh that got stopped abruptly; she goes there to discover why and finds out that the trial has been moved to East Berlin, in the Soviet bloc. She goes to Berlin to talk to a scientist and finds herself embroiled in a scandal there. 

Meanwhile, Ace Lockhart is having financial problems. After buying a New York newspaper he has almost no money to spend on the rest of his empire, so he borrows from the pension fund to bankroll everything (which is what Maxwell did!). His daughter, Genevieve, is head of their science publishing arm, Pythagoras, and she is insure about the loan from the pension fund. But she is keen to keep her father on side, so she keeps quiet. Ace knows that revolution is coming to the Soviet bloc and thinks it needs facillitating from West Berlin, so he sends Genevieve there to do some digging. 

There's lots more, including the Hillsborough Disaster, the reading of which absolutely floored me as I wasn't expecting it. It's done in a completely respectful and brilliant way and the experience makes Allie rethink her life and whether she wants to be a journalist. 

I really enjoyed the book, I am giving it five out of five. A worthy addition to the Marple challenge!