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tympestbooks 's review for:
The Finalists
by David Bell
For decades every spring Hyde College chooses six students, students with serious financial need and outstanding academic performances, to take part in the process. To gather at the old Hyde House, a once glorious Victorian mansion, and compete for the prestigious Hyde Fellowship. The king of scholarships, loan forgiveness, housing, a job after graduation. Six students will enter the house, along with an administrator for the college and the current scion of the Hyde family, an infamously irresponsible son of privilege, but after one of the students dies suddenly it becomes a question of how many will survive the eight hour process or if they will chose to leave early and lose it all.
With The Finalists David Bell makes it clear that he is a skilled writer with a good eye for balancing tension. His character work is largely solid allowing different students to feel more and less guilty as rumors and information on them is revealed. There is a place where Bell sort of falls through on the character work though.
The sort of bouncing back and forth on the sympathy for the son of wealth and privilege proctor of the Process, Nicholas Hyde. There are moments where the reader is told that Nicholas Hyde is the worst, racist, uncaring, or shown that he is ready to hold the whole Hyde Scholarship over the finalists’ heads to get his way even as someone has been murdered during proceedings. But then there are points where the protagonist, the reader’s view into the story, is left feeling more sympathetic to this guy and his complaints about how the students just do not seem to respect everything his family has done and more, or where his grief over losing his mother is used as a humanizing point to him, and the aspects that the reader has been informed of wind up feeling far more distant that the parts that are being shown. To some degree this is understandable, The Finalists is a locked room mystery where anyone could be a suspect, so wanting to ensure that there is a human element to the rich jerk is important. But it does also mean that it can feel like Bell wants the reader to sympathize more with him than with the students, who are allowed to be messier with a wider mix of traits and flaws shown across the book.
Likewise, it can get tiring seeing the students play dark backstory bingo as they try to figure out who the killer is. It makes sense, given that four of the five are young and that all of them are scared both for their safety and for their futures and the future of the scholarship. Fighting and back biting works to a degree with that and with the characters as they are presented. But the book stubbornly refuses to go anywhere with it, leading to a carousel of character reveals and arguing amid the Process continuing despite all good sense suggesting that an exception should be made for this year’s scholarship and that circumstances are, in fact, so far different than anything that could be readily considered that to punish them for breaking the rules would be madness. It makes the book really easy to set down in favor of something else.
Which, of course, leads to the one thing in the book that I just cannot find it in me to forgive, the ending. Despite my previous complaints, The Finalists is a solidly written closed room mystery with good tension and character work that is, on the whole, solid. The ending throws that away entirely in favor of a reveal that was perhaps vaguely hinted at, but not strongly enough to be seriously considered. It looks the reader in the eye and informs them that their time means nothing. And that frustrates me deeply. I think I would read Bell’s work again, but it will be a long time before I trust him with a mystery again. The Finalists gets a two out of five from me entirely for that ending.
This book was provided to me through netGalley for honest review. Review was previously posted at https://tympestbooks.wordpress.com/2022/12/07/the-finalists/
With The Finalists David Bell makes it clear that he is a skilled writer with a good eye for balancing tension. His character work is largely solid allowing different students to feel more and less guilty as rumors and information on them is revealed. There is a place where Bell sort of falls through on the character work though.
The sort of bouncing back and forth on the sympathy for the son of wealth and privilege proctor of the Process, Nicholas Hyde. There are moments where the reader is told that Nicholas Hyde is the worst, racist, uncaring, or shown that he is ready to hold the whole Hyde Scholarship over the finalists’ heads to get his way even as someone has been murdered during proceedings. But then there are points where the protagonist, the reader’s view into the story, is left feeling more sympathetic to this guy and his complaints about how the students just do not seem to respect everything his family has done and more, or where his grief over losing his mother is used as a humanizing point to him, and the aspects that the reader has been informed of wind up feeling far more distant that the parts that are being shown. To some degree this is understandable, The Finalists is a locked room mystery where anyone could be a suspect, so wanting to ensure that there is a human element to the rich jerk is important. But it does also mean that it can feel like Bell wants the reader to sympathize more with him than with the students, who are allowed to be messier with a wider mix of traits and flaws shown across the book.
Likewise, it can get tiring seeing the students play dark backstory bingo as they try to figure out who the killer is. It makes sense, given that four of the five are young and that all of them are scared both for their safety and for their futures and the future of the scholarship. Fighting and back biting works to a degree with that and with the characters as they are presented. But the book stubbornly refuses to go anywhere with it, leading to a carousel of character reveals and arguing amid the Process continuing despite all good sense suggesting that an exception should be made for this year’s scholarship and that circumstances are, in fact, so far different than anything that could be readily considered that to punish them for breaking the rules would be madness. It makes the book really easy to set down in favor of something else.
Which, of course, leads to the one thing in the book that I just cannot find it in me to forgive, the ending. Despite my previous complaints, The Finalists is a solidly written closed room mystery with good tension and character work that is, on the whole, solid. The ending throws that away entirely in favor of a reveal that was perhaps vaguely hinted at, but not strongly enough to be seriously considered. It looks the reader in the eye and informs them that their time means nothing. And that frustrates me deeply. I think I would read Bell’s work again, but it will be a long time before I trust him with a mystery again. The Finalists gets a two out of five from me entirely for that ending.
This book was provided to me through netGalley for honest review. Review was previously posted at https://tympestbooks.wordpress.com/2022/12/07/the-finalists/