Are you a woman? Do you enjoy REAL MEN explaining things to you that your incompetent little lady brain made you think you understood? Then look no further, because if male condescension is your kink then this book is going to moisten your loins.
It’d also mean you had terrible taste in books, but whatever. I try not to kinkshame.
Weeks after the death of her twin sister Cambry, Lena Nguyen asks officer Raymond Raycevic (the fact that someone thought this was a good name to use should tell you many things) to take her to the spot where her sister committed suicide: an abandoned bridge over a deep ravine. Raycevic is all too happy to help out. What he does not know, though, is that Lena is anything but convinced that Cambry killed herself, and that she intends to convince Raycevic to tell her the truth – if not the easy way, then the hard one.
I read Adams’s previous outing, No Exit. I didn’t think very highly of it, mostly because the protagonist had the IQ of a potato and the villain had all the subtlety of a rhinoceros in a pink tutu. Where the main character in this book could have solved the issue at hand with one simple phone call, things are a little bit hairier here. Lena is convinced Raycevic had a hand in Cambry’s death, but it’s not as if calling the police would have convinced anyone so there is some (not a lot) of logic in trying to convince him to cough up the truth. And Raycevic – because of the mansplaining – clearly underestimates Lena. Lena, meanwhile, has her strengths, but she’s hardly a genius either. She does plenty of dumb things. One of them is to make sure she’s alone with her sister’s potential killer in a place where literally nobody will come to her aid.
All that could be forgiven though, and to be fair to Adams the novel does start as a decent cat-and-mouse game. Lena’s narrative alternates with Cambry’s story. Adams tries to feed us a tale that sows enough doubt about Raycevic to keep us on our toes. Unfortunately this only lasts for a couple of chapters. Raycevic isn’t a very subtle guy. He’s also dumb as fuck. I won’t go into detail in case any of you still want to read this book (please don’t) but his assumptions about Lena are laughably naive.
But that’s not the worst about the novel by far; no, the worst is the endless stream of forced plot twists. I suppose Adams called his novel Hairpin Bridge because he thought it’d be a funny title for such a twisty book; I’m all about a bit of literary self-indulgence but this is just ridiculous. Raycevic tries to keep Lena guessing as to what happened to her sister by constantly changing the narrative, all the while mansplaining her relationship with her sister to her. It’s fine the first time he does it – they don’t call it a psychological thriller for no reason – but the entire book is basically him saying “No, actually, what really happened is…” and changing his story every time. The first time, it’s interesting. The second time it’s annoying. The third time it’s grating. And by then I’d only reached the book’s halfway point; I basically skimmed the last chapters. Like last time, Adams feels the need to add some extra cruelty into the mix to make Raycevic even more of a baddie – he did the same thing with his previous novel – which is entirely unnecessary; all it does it tack on another twist that the novel didn’t need. It’s bad. It’s annoying. And with that, and the mansplaining, and the fact that both main characters appear to have the brain of a semi-sentient quail egg, made me want to hurl the book off a bridge. I didn’t because I read it on my e-reader. Feel my pain, people.
Also, don’t read this book.