… but then again I don’t read a lot of fiction so I didn’t really know what to expect. I picked this book up from the display near the library entrance. Not gonna lie, I can’t remember what drove me to pick it up, but it was a good distraction for a few days.
It goes like this: girl meets guy in supermarket. Whirlwind romance moves more quickly than usual due to the beginning of Covid-19 lockdowns. They move in together after only a few weeks. One of them ends up dead, called in to the police by a nosy neighbour. Secrets.
So what I was expecting was for this to be a typical ‘young woman murdered by boyfriend’ story and I was about ready to give it up quite quickly except in this case it’s the guy that is found dead and no one even knew he had a girlfriend. The backdrop of the Covid-19 outbreak and first lockdowns provides extra opaqueness to the curtain of anonymity that protects city-dwellers from nosy neighbours.
The story begins in the present and then unfolds alternately from his ‘n’ hers point of view in relation to the current time, e.g. ’56 days ago’; ’31 days ago; etc. I found it an interesting format that kept the plot moving and allowed for the suspense to build as secrets were intermittently revealed.
The book is set in Ireland and I enjoyed looking up some of the Irish vocabulary sprinkled throughout.
Overall a good read that saw me up late a couple of nights while I kept having to read ‘just one more chapter’.