Author : Sally Hepworth
Narrators : Barrie Kreinik
Genre : Mystery
Publisher : Macmillan Audio
Listening Length : 9 hours 12 minutes
Rating : 1/5
Narrator Rating : 2/5
Lucy is married to Ollie. Diana and Tom are Ollie’s parents. While Tom is loving and forgiving towards his children (Ollie also has a sister Antoinette) Diana appears cold and at a remove. Lucy who’d hoped to find a mother figure in her mother-in-law after marriage, is disappointed by Diana’s reserved demeanor. The rift deepens with a couple of other altercations between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law. When Diana turns up dead, Lucy isn’t quite drowning in grief.
I’ve seen this book listed in so many bestseller lists, and I can’t figure out why. I’d expected a thriller when I picked it up – it is not that. I’d anticipated a murder mystery which it definitely is not – it moves too slowly for that. It is more of a contemporary tale, about people and their differences, with a murder thrown in – and even that it doesn’t do well.
Firstly there’s too much telling and not enough showing here. Secondly, everything is explained and underscored. The book is told through alternative viewpoints – Lucy’s and Diana’s. And even their narratives are divided up into the past, and the current time. During a conversation, the conversation just doesn’t happen and sit there, for the reader to mull through. No, it is explained to an inch of its life, which robs the telling of any intrigue or charm it might have had otherwise.
The characters are pretty inconsistent. They appear to be one way, and behave in just the opposite manner without rhyme and reason, which really threw me. For example, the mother-in-law Diana runs a charity to help new immigrants/refugees and goes out of her way to help them. But then to her family she is cold and unhelpful, which seems so out of character for a normally empathetic woman.
This book is drowning in minutiae – I feel like I learned so many useless details that I didn’t care about and which didn’t help flesh out the characters or their motivations. The ending was weak and absurd, and the plot had gaping logical holes.
When it started out, the book seemed interesting, but at Part 4 (of this 8 part audiobook) I was very tempted to just not finish it. I only kept going because I wanted to find out the identity of the killer. Narrator Kreinik sounded monotonous and similar in all the characters she portrayed.
I’d expected so much out of this set-in-Australia book; my experiences with other Australian authors (Liane Moriarty, Jane Harper) have been quite good. The Mother-in-law was a disappointment.
