COMPLICIT

Music teacher Bonnie Graham, an annoying person from beginning, is house-sitting in a friend's flat. At the beginning of the book Bonnie is alone in the flat with a corpse and is frantically cleaning up. Why? Who? What? And when?

The narrative and action is split between passages marked "before" and "after" which can be confusing. To help the reader Nicci French uses two different fonts.

A group of old associates form a band to play at a friend's wedding and problems begin. When a professional musician is thrown into the mix the tensions mount. The past begins to impinge on the present.

I was an early fan and loved Killing Me Softly and Secret Smile but sad to say, I feel Nicci French has ‘gone off the boil’ somewhat. Over time the novels have become formulaic; a female protagonist with a problem, two main male characters and a gaggle of female friends. At the beginning of this book the main character gets her friend to help dispose of a body, no question asked, unbelievable. Usually I am hooked from the beginning but found it hard to persevere. The characters were unlikeable, hard to empathise with and many had little or no point, making it hard to care just who the guilty party was and I guessed the utterly contrived and disappointing ending early on.

If you are a complete fan of Nicci French you will probably like Complicit but they can write with so much more skill than this.