Unraveling Oliver

The book starts off with Oliver confessing that he has hit his wife Alice so badly that she has gone into a coma and might never come out of it. After that, we get to know their story through multiple POVs and timelines – young and teenage Oliver, Alice's first boyfriend, their neighbor, Oliver's old friends, Alice's mentally challenged brother and the details of the summer of 1973.

I really had high expectations from this book and I was disappointed. We are told that Oliver is a psychopath in the beginning itself and the book is supposed to unravel the truth about him, but I did not get that. The story is well written, multiple timelines are managed quite smoothly, and overall it was a good read. It never got boring and I really enjoyed a couple of the side characters. I also especially liked the subplot in France. But the book promised so much more, so I am a little dissatisfied.

I read this right on the tails of finishing The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronsen. Though not planned, it felt like the perfect warmup read before encountering Oliver. I appreciated how the author focused this story on the slow makings of a psychopath, how nature and nurture contribute to corrode human empathy.

I listened to this in audiobook format which was a great choice, as all the readers are Irish, and I'm really fond of audiobooks read by people who have lovely accents. Each POV got its own narrator, which also distinguished when the POV changed each time.

The story is overall one of those that relied intensely on withholding major plot items deliberately to create suspense. The story begins at the end, and slowly over the course of the novel, the pieces fall into place and you learn what actually happened and why. I do wonder how interesting this story would have been had it been told in order – surely beginning with Alice's attack and unraveling why it happened was a better choice than ending a novel with it. So for the choices the author made, the out-of-order nature of the story was probably necessary for it to work overall.

This book also suffers a little bit from unlikeable characters – there are two that I was genuinely fond of, and neither of them had a particularly good story arc for themselves, but were rather side characters that were unfortunately caught in the web of Oliver's story.

Overall I think I enjoyed it as much for the narrators on the audiobook as I did for the story itself, which was perfectly fine as suspense thrillers go, but not overwhelmingly good or unpredictable. I did find that I figured out some of the “twists” before they came, but it was overall still enjoyable. I'm not sure I would recommend it to anyone, though.