I've read far less in recent years than I would like. To help remedy this, I've set myself the modest target of reading twenty books in 2020. When I finish one, a thumbnail review here will follow.
8/20: Drowning With Others by Linda Keir
The blurb: They have the perfect marriage. Did one of them kill to get it?
Prep school sweethearts Ian and Andi Copeland are envied by everyone they know. They have successful businesses, a beautiful house in St. Louis, and their eldest daughter, Cassidy, is following in their footsteps by attending prestigious Glenlake Academy. Then, a submerged car is dredged from the bottom of a swimming hole near the campus. So are the remains of a former writer-in-residence who vanished twenty years ago—during Ian and Andi’s senior year.
When Cassidy’s journalism class begins investigating the death, Ian and Andi’s high school secrets rise to the surface. Each has a troubled link to the man whose arrival and sudden disappearance once set the school on edge. And each had a reason to want him gone. As Cassidy unwittingly edges closer to the truth, unspoken words, locked away for decades, will force Ian and Andi to question what they really know—about themselves, about the past, and about a marriage built on a murderous lie.
The review: I need to start by saying that I didn't buy this book. I got it as a freebie e-book from Amazon. And the fact that I feel the need to make it clear I didn't part with my hard-earned to read this probably gives you an idea of how this review is going to go.
Maybe that's a harsh way to start a review so, to redress the balance, I should make it clear that the authors (plural, for Linda Keir is actually a collaboration between Linda Joffe Hull and Keir Graff) have produced a perfectly serviceable pot-boiler that keeps the pages turning. It feels a bit like they looked at the success of books like Gone Girl and The Girl On The Train, and tried to write something in a similar vein. Nothing wrong with that. They aren't the first to try it, and they won't be the last either. The thing is... whilst I'm not holding Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins up as literary gods or anything (though Hawkins definitely has something), Hull and Graff don't measure up.
There are times, for example, when the prose is just too expository, too often. In my view all good fiction should allow the reader to join the dots, and this is especially true in the kind of suspense/whodunnit thriller that Drowning With Others aspires to be. And there are places, here, where Linda Keir hasn't just joined the dots but done so with a Sharpie. It's a shame... and I couldn't help but wonder whether Hull or Graff was the culprit. Maybe they were both at it!
It isn't all bad, of course. Handling the flashbacks with extracts from the protagonists' high school journals is a neat device, and works well. And despite a distinct lack of likeable or relatable characters (honestly, they're a rotten bunch of spoilt rich kids), the pages do keep on turning, so some of the basics of storytelling must be there. But surely it's fundamental for a whodunnit to keep you guessing, right to the end? And this didn't, unfortunately - I had the big reveal sussed quite early on. I'm glad, then, that I got this for free, because Drowning With Others just isn't a book I feel I could honestly recommend to anyone who had to pay for it. As an aspiring writer, I have the utmost admiration for anyone that writes a novel, and I don't begrudge Hull and Graff their success... but I won't be rushing out to sample their other work, put it that way.
The bottom line: serviceable but unremarkable page-turning pot-boiler; the sort of book you'd take on holiday and deliberately leave in the hotel at the end of the week.
Since everything online is rated these days: ★★★☆☆☆
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