“You’ll light your own bloody self on fire if you have to. And then you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you knew it all along. Congratulations.”

Short review for a book that has too much to talk about for me without writing a dissertation. I just find Antoinette Conway to be such an interesting narrator, and I love the way French plays off Conway’s weaknesses with the murder of Aislinn Murray. I had actually forgotten almost everything about this book, except how thorny Conway was as a narrator, and how her paranoia SPOILERS ended up being mostly unjustified END SPOILERS.

I had also forgotten how angry Conway made me in her contempt for other people showing what she views as weakness: desire to connect, showing emotions, needing other people. She is utterly dismissive of anyone who even shows a smidgen of vulnerability. What I like about French’s execution of this character is that she doesn’t learn some very special lesson. At the end of the book, she’s still the same person, but her perspective has shifted a little. There’s a great contrast between the boy’s club atmosphere of the Murder Squad, and how insular it feels, and Conway’s extreme insistence on independence.

There’s a lot in here about how the stories we have in our heads affect the way we view other people, and situations. And then French takes that to another level when she ties it in with how the idea of how your actions can write somebody else’s story, with what happened to Aislinn as a child, and with what she in turn did to SPOILERS Detective McCann END SPOILERS.

Five star book is still five stars.