Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by apechild
A Lovely Way to Burn by Louise Welsh
4.0
Oh, so good but I'm glad I didn't decide to start this series at the breakout of covid, ha ha. Realistic end-of-the-world cross crime drama page turner, and an extremely addictive read. Number one in a trilogy I will have to quickly return to.
The pandemic that looks set to take out the world is some kind of aggressive flu people refer to as "the sweats". Made me think of that mystery sweating sickness that hit England during Tudor times. (The random places your brain can wander). Welsh describes the insidieous nature of these things well, the disbelief of people, the need to cling to pointless every day routines as if these will convince us that nothing is really wrong. And how quickly people turn nasty. Granted Welsh didn't predict the toilet paper obsession, but otherwise this feels chillingly accurate. And so whilst this is just breaking out, we also meet Stevie Flint, Londoner and currently working as a presenter on one of the shopping channels. She's been dating a surgeon for four or five months, all is looking promising and then he doesn't turn up for a date. She marks it down to it being over, heads over to his flat to take back her things and makes the awful discovery of his corpse in bed. Was it the sweats, or did someone do him in? Then there's a letter he wrote to her as an insurance to let her know he'd hidden a laptop in her flat. The people attacking her, the break in to her flat and so forth. And the ex journalist in her is determined to find out what on earth her short-lived boyfriend was involved it - perhaps distracting herself from grief and the frightening fact that the world seems to be rapidly sinking - and sets off to find the answer.
The pandemic that looks set to take out the world is some kind of aggressive flu people refer to as "the sweats". Made me think of that mystery sweating sickness that hit England during Tudor times. (The random places your brain can wander). Welsh describes the insidieous nature of these things well, the disbelief of people, the need to cling to pointless every day routines as if these will convince us that nothing is really wrong. And how quickly people turn nasty. Granted Welsh didn't predict the toilet paper obsession, but otherwise this feels chillingly accurate. And so whilst this is just breaking out, we also meet Stevie Flint, Londoner and currently working as a presenter on one of the shopping channels. She's been dating a surgeon for four or five months, all is looking promising and then he doesn't turn up for a date. She marks it down to it being over, heads over to his flat to take back her things and makes the awful discovery of his corpse in bed. Was it the sweats, or did someone do him in? Then there's a letter he wrote to her as an insurance to let her know he'd hidden a laptop in her flat. The people attacking her, the break in to her flat and so forth. And the ex journalist in her is determined to find out what on earth her short-lived boyfriend was involved it - perhaps distracting herself from grief and the frightening fact that the world seems to be rapidly sinking - and sets off to find the answer.