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laislinns's review against another edition
4.0
Angela Meadon is the queen of thriller. I knew this before picking up Strong Medicine as I'd read one or two of her short stories in the past, but Strong Medicine only serves to confirm it in my mind. There's very little gore, but buckets of suspense and the constant sense that there's something terrifying about the corner.
Strong Medicine follows Erin du Toit as she searches for her daughter, Lindsay, using any means necessary. I found Erin's character to be entirely believable as her life disintegrates around her as she comes to terms with what has happened to Lindsay, and how everything has changed because of it. She's hardly a hero in the common sense of the world - she is flawed to the point where if she had been a side-character, she likely would have been overlooked - but she is a mother willing to do anything for her child, and she forces herself into the fore in every possible way, both in the story and in the novel itself.
Interspersed with Erin's story are quotations from victims of mooti murders and their families, and segments of interviews with a known mooti-murderer, and these are what lend the novel its chill factor. Without them, it would have felt as though Lindsay had simply been taken, never to be seen again. With them, without having to be directly told, the reader gets a sense of what she is experiencing and what is yet to come. They lend an air of terror to the book that the storyline benefits from, and these provided the points of no-return for me, the points where I had to close the book and finish reading for the night for fear that I might not be able to sleep if I pushed on.
There were aspects that I thought could be improved upon, and places that I thought the story could have been taken to, and these are preventing me from giving the book the full five stars, but considering that it is sitting with me days later, and that I compare it to the better thrillers that I've read in the past few years, I think that it certainly deserves a 4/5.
Strong Medicine follows Erin du Toit as she searches for her daughter, Lindsay, using any means necessary. I found Erin's character to be entirely believable as her life disintegrates around her as she comes to terms with what has happened to Lindsay, and how everything has changed because of it. She's hardly a hero in the common sense of the world - she is flawed to the point where if she had been a side-character, she likely would have been overlooked - but she is a mother willing to do anything for her child, and she forces herself into the fore in every possible way, both in the story and in the novel itself.
Interspersed with Erin's story are quotations from victims of mooti murders and their families, and segments of interviews with a known mooti-murderer, and these are what lend the novel its chill factor. Without them, it would have felt as though Lindsay had simply been taken, never to be seen again. With them, without having to be directly told, the reader gets a sense of what she is experiencing and what is yet to come. They lend an air of terror to the book that the storyline benefits from, and these provided the points of no-return for me, the points where I had to close the book and finish reading for the night for fear that I might not be able to sleep if I pushed on.
There were aspects that I thought could be improved upon, and places that I thought the story could have been taken to, and these are preventing me from giving the book the full five stars, but considering that it is sitting with me days later, and that I compare it to the better thrillers that I've read in the past few years, I think that it certainly deserves a 4/5.
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