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annrawson 's review for:
A Game for All the Family
by Sophie Hannah
Some spoilers ahead.
I usually love Sophie Hannah's series crime novels, but this one disappointed. It's a stand alone psychological thriller, and in theory ought to be right up my alley. But it was lacking something.
The series novels very cleverly combine the genres of psychological thriller and police procedural, in alternating chapters. It's a complex structure but very satisfying, and I enjoy the long and slowly developing backstory involving the personal lives of the police series characters.
This one also has an intriguing structure - it contains a novel within a novel.
The novel within the novel is a locked room mystery - except it isn't. It's based on truth - except it isn't. It's written by the daughter of the narrator as homework. Except it turns out that the story was invented by the person who is stalking and threatening the main character...
Structurally it's a tour de force. There's a huge amount of complexity that kept me guessing. There's a very weird co-incidence at the beginning of the novel, that turns out to be just a weird co-incidence at the end of the novel, which is rather perplexing, but the only real weakness in the plotting that leapt out at me.
Where it failed for me was that it was pretty much an intellectual exercise. I didn't much like the narrator - the main character. She had an interesting backstory and there was reason to be sympathetic to her - but I didn't get to know much about it until it was too late for me to care. I'd just seen her obnoxious defensive persona that she's adopted to cope with the aftermath. The fact that her husband is physically and emotionally absent and her daughter finds it really easy to distrust her doesn't help either.
The stalker is convincingly, crazily, a bad person so by the time we find that out I suppose I started to sympathise more. But for too long I wondered if the narrator was unreliable - if she might have done all the bad stuff that she was accused of in the threatening phone calls.
The novel within the novel is full of deliberately stereotypical characters and the mystery hinges on a weird piece of trivial with-held information that turns out to the be the key to the stalker's psyche - and to require the existence of the annoying coincidence.
So by the time of the showdown I was distracted by the failures in the plotting, and I didn't care about the narrator and her family and what happened to them - which considering how horrible the stalker turns out to be was quite an achievement.
I am disappointed, and maybe that's pertly because my expectations were so high.
I usually love Sophie Hannah's series crime novels, but this one disappointed. It's a stand alone psychological thriller, and in theory ought to be right up my alley. But it was lacking something.
The series novels very cleverly combine the genres of psychological thriller and police procedural, in alternating chapters. It's a complex structure but very satisfying, and I enjoy the long and slowly developing backstory involving the personal lives of the police series characters.
This one also has an intriguing structure - it contains a novel within a novel.
The novel within the novel is a locked room mystery - except it isn't. It's based on truth - except it isn't. It's written by the daughter of the narrator as homework. Except it turns out that the story was invented by the person who is stalking and threatening the main character...
Structurally it's a tour de force. There's a huge amount of complexity that kept me guessing. There's a very weird co-incidence at the beginning of the novel, that turns out to be just a weird co-incidence at the end of the novel, which is rather perplexing, but the only real weakness in the plotting that leapt out at me.
Where it failed for me was that it was pretty much an intellectual exercise. I didn't much like the narrator - the main character. She had an interesting backstory and there was reason to be sympathetic to her - but I didn't get to know much about it until it was too late for me to care. I'd just seen her obnoxious defensive persona that she's adopted to cope with the aftermath. The fact that her husband is physically and emotionally absent and her daughter finds it really easy to distrust her doesn't help either.
The stalker is convincingly, crazily, a bad person so by the time we find that out I suppose I started to sympathise more. But for too long I wondered if the narrator was unreliable - if she might have done all the bad stuff that she was accused of in the threatening phone calls.
The novel within the novel is full of deliberately stereotypical characters and the mystery hinges on a weird piece of trivial with-held information that turns out to the be the key to the stalker's psyche - and to require the existence of the annoying coincidence.
So by the time of the showdown I was distracted by the failures in the plotting, and I didn't care about the narrator and her family and what happened to them - which considering how horrible the stalker turns out to be was quite an achievement.
I am disappointed, and maybe that's pertly because my expectations were so high.