This was a popular choice for my Dorset Book Group, Splinter, and was suggested by Gina, as we had all read The Dry by Jane Harper as a set book for an earlier meeting. That was Harper's debut novel and won awards. We enjoyed that read although I seem to recall we had some minor quibbles with it. But essentially the plotting was good and we did not guess the perpetrator of the crime.
Sadly I found Jane Harper's second novel a disappointment, a damp squib of a crime thriller. The premise seemed to start well, five women go into The Bush and four come out. In a nutshell you have a plot and the potential to build engagement with characters and suspense. But it was such a slow boiler and the narrative got bogged down in minutiae both in terms of conversations between characters, and the flitting between chapters, the Searched and the Searchers, far from building suspense just became frustrating. I wanted to get on with it, after all this was no great work of literature. It was a whodunnit, let's keep it moving. So it was all rather dull.
When a body did not turn up fairly promptly I thought well this is getting interesting, there is a mystery to unpick. You can usually expect the body fairly early on, then it is about solving the identity of the perpetrator. But no, just the unrelenting squabbling and bitching going on between the women with some fuzzy sub-plots relating to the company they all worked for. Throw in a history of substance abuse and drinking on the part of the one flawed twin, an anorexic daughter, an explicit video shared by teenage schoolchildren on their mobile phones. Some of the usual suspects to inject a bit of drama. But it did not spice up an essentially very plain dish. Even the death of Alice, had to be a composite effort by the various women in the party. It seemed to me that the author was trying to make the denouement a bit complex but it did not work for me. And ultimately I thought the showdown at the waterfall was just silly.
Oh dear, I do sound rather pompous about this but I just feel it was all a disappointment.
No comments:
Post a Comment