Jennifer Palmer has read crime fiction since her teenage years & enjoys reviewing within the many sub-genres that now exist; as a historian who lectures on real life historical mysteries she particularly appreciates historical cime fiction.
This prescient narrative details
the murder of a popular sixth-form pupil and the search for the perpetrator.
The narrative is told by six sources striated together and delivered as
description, or through the medium of the Internet.
The Sixth-formers who are in Eva’s
group are obviously horrified at the news of her disappearance and then of her
death, especially when suspicion falls upon one of their number. The tale
is told with six alternating narrative strands, illustrating the attitudes of
the protagonists, and showing how their views change as various revelations are
made.
Eva was a beautiful clever girl (from
a family with money) whose body is found in a ditch in a wood. She had been
stabbed.
Her boyfriend, Luke, is accused of
the murder. He is a boy from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ but his character
is far more complex than that description would suggest. His thoughts
provide one of the narrative strands revealing his inner attitudes and the
effect of Eva’s death, upon him; the revelations about her and the experiences
of being accused of her murder – and being held on remand and being on trial.
It is impossible to trust anyone’s
account as many issues of the lives of young people come to the fore, with drugs,
sex, friendships, peer pressure and the secrets that lie hidden within groups
of young people.
This is a book intended for the YA market and therefore it concerns a group of 17 to 18 year olds. It is also a powerful story of a disappearance followed by a death, and the aftermath (as many grapple to try and uncover out what happened).
Though the story is mesmerising with
its many twists and turns (and I understand that I am not the target audience),
but that being said, I did have issues with the dénouement.
