#Bookvent – Celebrating my high reads of 2024
My day twelve #bookvent is by an writer who’s an outdated favorite of mine. I cherished their police based mostly sequence of books, however having branched out into extra psychological thriller kinds of books, it’s truthful to say there’s most likely nothing they couldn’t flip their hand to. This ebook is claustrophobic, tense, typically surprising and nothing such as you would possibly first consider it to be. With a gap chapter that units up the apprehension and uncertainty that may draw us by the story, it has an depth that by no means fades. My day twelve choose is …
by Sarah Hilary
The very last thing she remembers is standing outdoors the empty home. One she was employed to pack, prepared for removing. Her job is her life. It’s her compulsion to care for an proprietor’s valuable possessions, to do no matter it takes to assist them transfer on. Now she is chilly, soiled, damp, trapped in its cellar with no likelihood of escape, miles from anyplace. His prisoner.
After which he returns.
Her captor believes she holds the solutions to why a younger lady was murdered a 12 months in the past. He refuses to let her go till she reveals her secrets and techniques. However he doesn’t know she has hidden depths, and an anger she works laborious to regulate.
The battle traces are drawn. They’re the one two individuals who can remedy the thriller of the useless lady. However when the reality is revealed, whose life will shatter?
I’ve by no means actually thought of {that a} profession as a ‘skilled packer’ could be a factor. Having now learn Sharp Glass by Sarah Hilary, I’m questioning if it really ought to be. For the narrator of this story it could give her the emotional connection she craves, that closeness to folks within the hardest moments of their lives following the dying of a cherished one, but it surely additionally places her within the final jeopardy, a truth that’s cemented from the very starting of this ebook. Attacked and kidnapped earlier than she will be able to even pack her first field, she is held in a basement by an unknown assailant for causes that we, and he or she, can not perceive, at the least to start out. The longer she is there, the extra she understands, however that’s nonetheless held secret from us as readers, and it was this that captured my consideration. It intrigued me. Why all of the secrecy? Why wouldn’t we be taught our narrator’s identify? Effectively, that query and extra as slowly and punctiliously answered by Sarah Hilary, and the explanations have been the type that make you sit up and take be aware. This can be a very intelligent ebook, the darkness of the basement a precursor for a number of the revelations to come back. Now we have many extra questions than solutions to start with, and it was clear from the beginning that nothing was what I used to be anticipating, or had been led to consider. Constructing on a sort of Stockholm syndrome sort of relationship that develops between the narrator and her abductor, you’d be forgiven for questioning simply who takes on which function on this very intense state of affairs. There’s a darkish undercurrent to the ebook as effectively, glimpses of which we’re handled to as we delve into the previous of the assailant by some very emotional scenes. It’s suspenseful with pitch excellent pacing. It options the writer’s typical superbly literary writing model, evocative and vivid in imagery. It elicits a complete raft of feelings, from sympathy to rage, however, maybe most significantly, as soon as it catches your consideration it by no means lets go. Obsessive, darkish and with characters who’re compelling if not totally sympathetic, it’s a particular advisable learn.
You possibly can learn my full overview of Sharp Glass right here.
Completely happy #bookvent studying all
Jen