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fl303's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
breannehakey's review against another edition
4.0
Thank goodness for this book!! It totally brought me out of my reading slump. I feel lately a lot of things are just distracting me from reading but this one really brought back my enjoyment for reading and I was able to emerge myself completely into the story line.
In the beginning, I wasn't really a fan of the flash back sequences. I felt like it wasn't really adding to the store, it was just fluff. However, as I got deeper and deeper into the book and Erin & Maggie's history, it all started to make sense.
I feel like this could be a slow burn for some people but they definitely need to give it a chance.
I loved the characters in this story. Some were the ones you love to hate and others you could definitely relate to. I felt deep down the emotions Maggie was going through with the loss of her cousin, loss of people close to her and so many other feelings.
This book really gave me FOMO for travelling. Every time the description of Ireland's roads, hillsides, food, shopping etc. came up, it was like my heart was aching for Ireland. I have never been, but it is definitely at the top of my list. Hopefully once all this COVID 19 stuff dies down, we will be able to travel again.
The end was a bit... confusing to me. I felt like it happened really suddenly and we found out a lot about multiple people all at once. I wish the build up to the ending would have been a little longer. Things did wrap up pretty well in the end, which is definitely my favorite. I feel like each character resolved some issues in the end.
In the beginning, I wasn't really a fan of the flash back sequences. I felt like it wasn't really adding to the store, it was just fluff. However, as I got deeper and deeper into the book and Erin & Maggie's history, it all started to make sense.
I feel like this could be a slow burn for some people but they definitely need to give it a chance.
I loved the characters in this story. Some were the ones you love to hate and others you could definitely relate to. I felt deep down the emotions Maggie was going through with the loss of her cousin, loss of people close to her and so many other feelings.
This book really gave me FOMO for travelling. Every time the description of Ireland's roads, hillsides, food, shopping etc. came up, it was like my heart was aching for Ireland. I have never been, but it is definitely at the top of my list. Hopefully once all this COVID 19 stuff dies down, we will be able to travel again.
The end was a bit... confusing to me. I felt like it happened really suddenly and we found out a lot about multiple people all at once. I wish the build up to the ending would have been a little longer. Things did wrap up pretty well in the end, which is definitely my favorite. I feel like each character resolved some issues in the end.
ginaparrish's review against another edition
3.0
This was a solid middle-of-the-road read for me. I wanted to like it more than I did, as it had some good things going for it.
Pros:
—Wonderful setting, a treat if you have been to Ireland and visited some of the places mentioned.
—Good clean writing. Nothing particularly amazing, but it’s solid.
—It was a mystery and I like mysteries, though police procedurals aren’t my first choice.
Cons:
—It’s too long and drags in the middle. The romantic plot felt like an unnecessary time-waster and I didn’t root for it.
—The mystery is not fair play. You’re not given many clues to be able to solve the mystery yourself, so you just have to wait for the detectives to figure it out. The ultimate reveal made me think, “Really? That’s weird. Why?” As opposed to “Ohhh I should have known all along!”
—I had trouble rooting for any of the characters, including the narrator and her cousin. None of them were very lovable or relatable.
Pros:
—Wonderful setting, a treat if you have been to Ireland and visited some of the places mentioned.
—Good clean writing. Nothing particularly amazing, but it’s solid.
—It was a mystery and I like mysteries, though police procedurals aren’t my first choice.
Cons:
—It’s too long and drags in the middle. The romantic plot felt like an unnecessary time-waster and I didn’t root for it.
—The mystery is not fair play. You’re not given many clues to be able to solve the mystery yourself, so you just have to wait for the detectives to figure it out. The ultimate reveal made me think, “Really? That’s weird. Why?” As opposed to “Ohhh I should have known all along!”
—I had trouble rooting for any of the characters, including the narrator and her cousin. None of them were very lovable or relatable.
lizzdarcy's review against another edition
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
jan256's review against another edition
4.0
I have not heard about this author, and I do not know why I reached for this book. Nice surprise. It is well written and interesting. I was a bit irritated that the narrative jumped between the present and the past. But it's rather my fault, with age I started to like simple narrative.
sariracha's review against another edition
Stopped at 16% because I borrowed the book from an inn and couldn’t take it home with me. May finish someday…
cadigits's review
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
Great mystery that ties in Ireland political history. The end felt very fast paced and unexpected in some ways.
mepresley's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
I enjoyed this read, which reminded me very much of Tana French, not just in terms of the Irish setting, but in terms of the fact that the mystery is embedded in an interior-focused psychological portrait of the detective figure, in this case Maggie D'arcy.
The novel presents us with parallel timelines of Maggie's two trips from the US to Ireland, where her cousin, Erin, disappeared. Maggie's first trip, two weeks after the last sighting of Erin, is in 1993; her second trip is in 2016, after the disappearance of another woman reignites the cold case of Erin's disappearance.
We see the detectives follow similar trajectories in both timelines, as the 2016 disappearance has them retracing their steps and interviewing the same witnesses/ suspects. I think that this technique got a little redundant after a while. Though new bits of information kept popping up, there was also a lot of hearing the same information from the same people.
There were some very solid red herrings, such as Erin's one-night stand with the investment banker's son and the groundskeeper at the golf course where one of the earlier victims worked . The doubt cast on Maggie's love interest, Conor, felt a little cheap.
I really liked the way that Maggie ended up solving the case. I found it hard to believe that everyone had missed a receipt from 1993 that indicated Erin had returned to Dublin two days after she disappeared. This turned out to be a clue that we were given the key to in the earliest pages of the novel; Maggie's daughter, Lilly, had been going through all the boxes in the basement and had mixed up Maggie's boxes, including her files on Erin, with her ex-husband, Brian's boxes. It was Brian who came to Dublin and changed money two days after Erin disappeared, and it was Brian who killed Erin to prevent her from coming forward about Erin's gang-rape in which his brother participated.
I don't think that we had enough pieces of the puzzle to figure out the identity of the serial killer, and it seems unlikely that the investigators would not have thought to look into cars being serviced by Niall's garage AND that the cabin in the woods wouldn't have been discovered years before, given the epicenter of the crimes.
The novel presents us with parallel timelines of Maggie's two trips from the US to Ireland, where her cousin, Erin, disappeared. Maggie's first trip, two weeks after the last sighting of Erin, is in 1993; her second trip is in 2016, after the disappearance of another woman reignites the cold case of Erin's disappearance.
We see the detectives follow similar trajectories in both timelines, as the 2016 disappearance has them retracing their steps and interviewing the same witnesses/ suspects. I think that this technique got a little redundant after a while. Though new bits of information kept popping up, there was also a lot of hearing the same information from the same people.
There were some very solid red herrings, such as
I really liked the way that Maggie ended up solving the case.
I don't think that we had enough pieces of the puzzle to figure out the identity of the serial killer, and it seems unlikely that