A review by frickative
The Other Half Lives by Sophie Hannah

3.0

This is a borderline 2/3, though throughout the first half it was probably a 1. The characters in this book are infuriating. Sophie Hannah has some ideas that sound great in blurbs, but then bogs them down with her frankly awful, loathsome detective characters who could both drown in a ditch and leave the literary world a better place IMO. I think the plot in this one might have been a bit too ambitious. It all paid off nicely in the end and rewarded my perseverance, which is why I eventually settled on a 3, but there were many many points in the beginning/middle where I considered giving up on it entirely because it was just so convoluted and irritatingly smug. It's one thing to dangle a massive secret in front of your readers from page one, it's quite another to keep re-iterating it over and over again without taking them any nearer to any sense of understanding. Still, it was all resolved satisfactorily in the end. I'll definitely think long and hard before starting another Spilling CID book though.