Take a photo of a barcode or cover
slighte 's review for:
The Secretary
by Renée Knight
I liked the premise of this book but unfortunately was disappointed.
What I liked: The story was about two women in a workplace environment rather than the usual domestic setting of husband and wife. And with that, no boring romantic drama, no sex for the sake of including sex. It was a quick read that was easy to get through.
What I didn’t like: …everything else.
The first half of the book keeps hinting at a trial, and then you discover the trial is for the dull charges of perjury and hiding evidence. Boring! The book is more a character study than a thriller, and even then the characters are underdeveloped, boring, and unlikeable. I wish we learned more about why the characters were the way they were and turned out the way they did. The ending didn’t make any sense to me as we had seen no hint of that in Christine before. I didn’t care enough about the two characters to worry about how it ended.
The pace was slow with little suspense and there wasn’t a lot happening but it’s labelled as a thriller so the ending was not really a surprise. When significant things were mentioned earlier on the narrator clearly states they’d be important later… very obvious foreshadowing, so there’s no exciting aha moment. The end was exciting but a let down, it came way too late and didn’t really fit with the rest of the book… it read more like an epilogue.
Overall, it was an okay book. It was quick and easy, and I kept reading because I felt sure something was eventually going to happen. It would be good for someone who doesn’t want an intense thriller and willing to ride out some slow stuff for a kind of exciting end.
What I liked: The story was about two women in a workplace environment rather than the usual domestic setting of husband and wife. And with that, no boring romantic drama, no sex for the sake of including sex. It was a quick read that was easy to get through.
What I didn’t like: …everything else.
The first half of the book keeps hinting at a trial, and then you discover the trial is for the dull charges of perjury and hiding evidence. Boring! The book is more a character study than a thriller, and even then the characters are underdeveloped, boring, and unlikeable. I wish we learned more about why the characters were the way they were and turned out the way they did. The ending didn’t make any sense to me as we had seen no hint of that in Christine before. I didn’t care enough about the two characters to worry about how it ended.
The pace was slow with little suspense and there wasn’t a lot happening but it’s labelled as a thriller so the ending was not really a surprise. When significant things were mentioned earlier on the narrator clearly states they’d be important later… very obvious foreshadowing, so there’s no exciting aha moment. The end was exciting but a let down, it came way too late and didn’t really fit with the rest of the book… it read more like an epilogue.
Overall, it was an okay book. It was quick and easy, and I kept reading because I felt sure something was eventually going to happen. It would be good for someone who doesn’t want an intense thriller and willing to ride out some slow stuff for a kind of exciting end.