I pre-ordered this book and it was delivered to my Kindle on January 22nd, just as I finished my previous book. Perfect timing. Fiona Barton is a UK author and the book is set in the UK and Thailand. Two 18 year old girls go backpacking in Thailand at the start of their Gap Year. A Gap Year is largely an English “thing” (although South Africans and Australians tend to do it too), where teenagers take a year off between school and college. They work for a while to save money and then spend some months backpacking around places like South East Asia. I have friends whose kids have done it and I live in a tourist destination (albeit the Caribbean and not SE Asia) so I was interested in the concept of this book.
Kate Waters is a journalist who is put on the story by her newspaper and covers the disappearance of the two girls. She is sent to Thailand to cover the story and finds out that her son is involved. Her son dropped out of college unexpectedly and has been in Thailand for a couple years and only stays in touch sporadically. So she is shocked to find that he is involved. Whilst I enjoyed the writing I do have some caveats.
The book is told from three points of view, the journalist; the mother and the detective. At the beginning of each chapter it tells you which it is although it’s pretty obvious once you start reading. And don’t worry first-person haters, the story is told in third person, no matter the chapter POV. Diary entries/emails from one of the girls is also used to move the plot along. The date is mentioned in the chapter heading. This is irritating for Kindle readers like myself, as you can’t flick a few pages back to double check where you are in the timeline. However after a few chapters I made sure to mentally stop and look at the date stamp. I am not a huge fan of timelines that jump around, or rather that don’t jump around well.
A couple of major plot points happened earlier in the book in such a low key way that I didn’t even remember reading them. I’m all for not telegraphing the ending but a couple of times I found myself questioning whether I’d even read that bit. Given I read it over the course of a couple of days, I don’t normally forget that quickly! Same for a couple of characters, when they reappeared later in the book, I genuinely had no idea where they’d come from and had to piece it together from context.
It was also clear from the book that the detective and journalist character had featured in at least one other book together, possibly both the previous books written by Ms. Barton. I could only find one on Amazon US and it did not mention the character names. However this did not affect the story at all.
I enjoyed the backpacking part of the book, the break down of the relationship between the girls as they realise they are very different and have different expectations of their time whilst traveling. I know this to be true from experiences of friends. Something about grimy hostels and foreign countries test even the strongest of friendships!