His & Hers

His & Hers

by Alice Feeney

Blurb:  

There are two sides to every story: yours and mine, ours and theirs, His & Hers. Which means someone is always lying.

When a woman is murdered in Blackdown, a quintessentially British village, newsreader Anna Andrews is reluctant to cover the case. Detective Jack Harper is suspicious of her involvement, until he becomes a suspect in his own murder investigation. Someone isn’t telling the truth, and some secrets are worth killing to keep.

My Reaction:

This novel kept me guessing right until the end!  I developed a theory, changed it, then changed it again.  The final reveal took me back to one of my earliest suspicions, but hey, the author did a good job of luring me away from it!  You just can't be sure what's really going on, because there are too many equally good possible solutions.  

On the downside, there are some coincidences that are honestly too big to swallow, and most of these characters are fairly repugnant in one way or another—but I can't deny that I enjoyed reading most of the book.  (It always feels weird to say you "enjoyed" a book of this sort!  It's pretty dark in spots, not to mention enraging.)

I'll be keeping this author in mind for future reads.

Random Thoughts:

• There's an odd mix of UK and US English here... My guess is that whoever was responsible for editing the book for the American edition missed a few things.  We have American "candy bars", "chips" that are clearly the American version (as opposed to "crisps"), yet there are "biscuits" that really ought to be "cookies" in US English.  There are other examples of this strange blending of terms, but those are the only ones I bothered noting.
• Based on this and Daisy Darker, this author has a weakness for deep / meaningful / clever comments.  Here's one that didn't quite land for me:  "Lives are like light bulbs; they’re not as hard to change as people think."  Only... Do people think changing light bulbs is difficult?  Maybe the ones that you can't reach without a ladder...

These last two are a bit spoilery (I guess), so here's your spoiler warning, if you're worried about it...

• "Jack accused me of a few bad things when we were married, and a few more when we weren’t, but never murder. It makes me wonder whether he always had a negative view of me, even when we were together."  Sorry, but that just made me burst out laughing!  He'd never accused her of murder?  Well, I should hope not!  
• I'm not buying that the teenage craft-queen character would have known how to prepare fur.  I mean, you have to do something to the skin, right?  Tan them?  You don't just skin an animal, dry out the pelt, and use it as a fur, do you?  (Well, maybe it works for the short-term.  I could be wrong here.)  That whole part of the story felt really odd to me.  I can't picture that character being all excited about skinning dead pets... 

Don't Let Her Stay

Don't Let Her Stay

by Nicola Sanders

Blurb:

Joanne knows how lucky she is. Richard is a wonderful husband, Evie is the most gorgeous baby girl, they live in a beautiful house… Life couldn’t be better.

Until Richard’s twenty-year-old daughter Chloe turns up. Chloe hasn’t spoken to her father since the day he married Joanne two years ago. But Chloe wants to make peace. She’ll even move in for a few weeks to help Joanne with the new baby.

It sounds perfect, but when things happen that make Joanne feel like she’s losing her mind, she begins to wonder: Is Chloe really here to help? Or has Joanne made a terrible mistake by letting her move in?

And is it too late to ask her to leave?

My Reaction:

Oh. My. Gosh.  Look, I know people have different tastes, but I cannot fathom why this book has such a high collective rating!  It's simply inexplicable, except for the fact that it is/was included in Kindle Unlimited, which I suspect often bumps a book's ratings by virtue of the sheer number of people reading it.

This took much longer to read than it should have because I kept having to put it down in annoyance.  I knew I should've made it a DNF, but at that point, I wanted to see just how irritating it could be (and yes, what would happen).  I really should have just stopped.  It wasn't worth the frustration.  

These are some of the most infuriating, stupidest, worst-written characters I've ever come across.  As another reviewer put it, the only characters you can remotely care about are the dog and the baby (and even the baby kind of annoys me, if I'm honest).  

If you enjoy spite-reading, give this a try.  If you get a sick thrill out of reading about characters that you actively dislike—characters so excruciatingly idiotic and weak that you want to reach into the book and slap some sense into them—you're in for a real treat with this one.  Otherwise, save yourself the annoyance!

(I don't think this would be something 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back would ever go for, but there's certainly plenty to talk about, assuming you don't mind a ton of "OMG, this is so stupid"...)