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Content warnings: murder, sex, pedophilia
This book is very slow to start and doesn’t get to the mystery until just about halfway through. It’s unfortunately not terribly interesting leading up to that point, although it is an easy read at least. The majority of words used are common ones and the author reuses their turns of phrase quite a bit so the few flowery bits of speech are repeated often.
I didn’t find the mystery terribly compelling and while I think the build up was intended to have an eerie, tense air it didn’t deliver on that for me. The mystery as the main character solved it was pretty easy to figure out, and the parts I didn’t get he also didn’t because we simply didn’t have enough information.
The MC had a self pitying streak I found annoying, and his main ‘sympathetic arc’ was…that he’s a pedophile. It was stressed he never touched her, and later there was a one sentence acknowledgement that it was wrong of him to force his affections (his emotional ones, even if he refrained from his sexual ones) onto a ten year old, but pretty much everything about how that arc was handled felt bizarre to me. I kind of wonder if the author chose to pair him with an older woman to drive home that his longing for this child wasn’t just sexual, but again, it didn’t work for me.
I don’t really recommend this book, but I read it on an airplane and it’s definitely an airplane novel. If you find yourself with a long flight, you will likely at least get through it and can move on with your life.