Title: ROCK PAPER SCISSORS
Author: Alice Feeney
Read: November 2021
Expected publication: out now
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟1/2
Book Description:
Things have been wrong with Mr and
Mrs Wright for a long time. When Adam and Amelia win a weekend away to
Scotland, it might be just what their marriage needs. Self-confessed workaholic
and screenwriter Adam Wright has lived with face blindness his whole life. He
can’t recognize friends or family, or even his own wife.
Every anniversary the couple exchange traditional gifts – paper, cotton,
pottery, tin – and each year Adam’s wife writes him a letter that she never
lets him read. Until now. They both know this weekend will make or break their
marriage, but they didn’t randomly win this trip. One of them is lying, and
someone doesn’t want them to live happily ever after.
My musings:
If you have read any books by Alice Feeney before,
you will know that she usually slots in a major twist or two, and this book was
no exception. The only problem with this concept is that when you expect a
twist, it is nowhere nearly as satisfying as being totally taken by surprise.
I’m no super sleuth, but being forewarned, and having read a lot of thrillers,
I was suspicious of EVERYTHING and ended up seeing through a lot of the
author’s carefully laid traps very early on. That said, it was still fun to see
all the threads slot into place, and thankfully there was one twist that I
hadn’t seen coming!
It’s difficult to review a mystery
that relies so heavily on the breadcrumb trail of clues left for us by the
author, so I am not going to say much about the story here. Basically, it’s the
sad tale of an unravelling marriage and a trip to a remote location in Scotland
as a last ditch effort to connect. Soon things are starting to go wrong ...
There are some aspects of the books
I really enjoyed, like the remote location and its spooky vibes – an old
derelict chapel during a blizzard in Scotland, it doesn’t get much better than
that! Whilst most of the book was pure entertainment, if you can suspend
disbelief long enough, I did find it a bit slow going in places, as the couple
lament their unhappy relationship, over and over and over again! The writing
style, which was initially quite endearing with its odd little one-liner words
of wisdom (one reviewer called them “fortune cookie wisdom”, which was an apt
term) but grated on me after a while. Nearly every paragraph had one of these,
and they made the writing feel choppy and cocky, as if it was trying too hard
to be clever. I also thought that the voice of one particular character could
have been eliminated to increase the tension, which was frankly lacking a bit,
despite the deliciously isolated setting.
All in all, this was a mixed bag for
me, saved by the excellent audio narration, which kept cajoling me along to the
end and provided some good entertainment on my daily commute to work. But
seeing that I had picked up the book knowing I was a bit tired of stories
relying on that “killer twist” to shock its audience, I hadn’t set my
expectations too high. This story will appeal to readers who love a few unexpected
twists and blind corners and don’t mind sacrificing a bit of credibility for
the sake of entertainment value. If you are a bit jaded with this genre, then
it may not be the right book for you.
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