Murder at the Book Club

It starts with a pretty terrible person complaining about how old people smell. Then she arrives at the book club where there’s a tone of other people and it’s too many all at once that I don’t know who’s who (and I don’t care). One of the women work at an old folks home and she hates old people and treats them poorly. One woman works at a bookmaker and dislikes gambling and gamblers. One woman really doesn’t want to get involved helping a teenager who has just lost his mother. And it goes on and on and everyone is just dreadful. We get to follow… um, maybe 5 people from the book club and 2 police officers, maybe. It’s a mess and I wouldn’t recommend this.

It's not often that I write especially negative reviews because I feel like I curate my TBR quite well for my tastes and moods, and I'm quick to DNF something that's not my cup of tea, but since this one was for a book club (fitting), I stuck with it, and to be quite honest, I would have DNFed this very quick otherwise.

I read the ebook while listening to the audiobook. Credit to the narrator, the audio definitely helped grease the wheels.

I'm going to stash a bunch of bullet points here to jog my memory for the book club, and maybe I'll expand it into a proper review later.

• I've never read a book that is so unkind and disdainful of its characters; even the ones you think you're supposed to like are described like something the author stood in and scraped off their shoe.

• The writing is really repetitive, and descriptions are reused frequently (eg. face of thunder)

• There is excessive “tell don't show”. Eg. We're frequently told that Barrett is an odd character, but we never actually get to see any of this oddness; we just have to take the author's word for it.

• So. Much. Filler. Huge swathes of the novel seem to be there just to pad out the word count. We spend pages and pages following one character just catching a bus to meet their friend, but none of it amounts to anything at all, and the character is promptly forgotten about shortly after.

• Similar to the fluff filler, there were far too many characters. Few of them are distinguishable from each other, and many neither serve any purpose nor progress the plot. Several of them could be combined into one character or entirely written out without affecting anything. They're so forgettable that even the author will introduce a character as if it were their first appearance, even though we just met them a few chapters earlier.

• The mystery is so wispy it could blow away on the wind. We see the police kind of sort of do police work which rarely turns up anything substantial, only for them to make a discovery “off-camera” and then reveal it like magic when it's convenient, and even if there were any threads to follow, the characters are either so aggressively beige or unlikeable that you don't really care anyway.

• The dialogue was often very clunky and unnatural,which was especially highlighted by the audiobook. Though the narrator put in a valiant effort, it still sounded super cringe.

• The wrap-up was very twee and unearned.

That's a lot of negatives, and I don't have much positive to say, and to be fair, whodunnits and murder mysteries are not my cup of tea generally. Perhaps the shortcomings of this book would pale or be more easily forgiven if this were a genre you enjoyed.

The writing is very simple, which makes it easy to read, even if it isn't very engaging. It's not aggressively bad, it's just kind of messy and forgettable, which to me, is almost worse.