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A review by lazygal
Darling Jim by Christian Mørk
5.0
I have to thank my friend Lisa for blogging about her ARC and that more were available - I immediately wrote away and asked for one for myself.
Wow. What a great, dark mystery. It's the story of three women, found dead in a home in Ireland. Police discover that the older woman appears to have been killed by one of the younger ones; the younger girls seem to have been poisoned and kept prisoner. There's also a missing third person.
The rest of the story is told by Neill, who finds one of the women's diaries in the dead letter box (he's a postal worker, but not for long). His fascination with the story leads him into trouble with his job, trouble in the town where this all started, and trouble as he searches for the ending of the story.
I did get that "the ending was rushed" feeling, but not to the extent I did when reading, say, [b:The Lovely Bones|536|The Lovely Bones|Alice Sebold|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156980627s/536.jpg|1145090] or [b:The Da Vinci Code|968|The Da Vinci Code|Dan Brown|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31LMee1o1CL._SL75_.jpg|2982101]. Beyond that slight (and I do mean slight) niggle, the tale and the mystery were well written. The diary device was not as annoying as it might have been, and the surrounding "search for the full story" was well written. Yes, there are a few loose ends, but I'm not a huge believer in wrapping everything up - let the reader have some fun imagining things for themselves.
Deeply psychological, deeply dark, and deeply satisfying as a read.
Wow. What a great, dark mystery. It's the story of three women, found dead in a home in Ireland. Police discover that the older woman appears to have been killed by one of the younger ones; the younger girls seem to have been poisoned and kept prisoner. There's also a missing third person.
The rest of the story is told by Neill, who finds one of the women's diaries in the dead letter box (he's a postal worker, but not for long). His fascination with the story leads him into trouble with his job, trouble in the town where this all started, and trouble as he searches for the ending of the story.
I did get that "the ending was rushed" feeling, but not to the extent I did when reading, say, [b:The Lovely Bones|536|The Lovely Bones|Alice Sebold|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156980627s/536.jpg|1145090] or [b:The Da Vinci Code|968|The Da Vinci Code|Dan Brown|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31LMee1o1CL._SL75_.jpg|2982101]. Beyond that slight (and I do mean slight) niggle, the tale and the mystery were well written. The diary device was not as annoying as it might have been, and the surrounding "search for the full story" was well written. Yes, there are a few loose ends, but I'm not a huge believer in wrapping everything up - let the reader have some fun imagining things for themselves.
Deeply psychological, deeply dark, and deeply satisfying as a read.