レビュー要約

• 閉鎖的な建物に集まった人物たちの秘密が少しずつ露出する構成が高く評価されている。陰惨な題材を扱いながら、黒いユーモアと意外性で最後まで緊張を保つ点が読まれている。

レビュー

• Oh, So Creepy

  This book is not for the squeamish, or those who like a predictable plot. The book opens with police detectives interviewing a young girl, Cheryl, who appears to be one step above mentally challenged. She seems to be in shock as a detective shows her a photo of girl, stating that the photo is of a young woman, Lisa Dunne. Cheryl recognizes the picture but not the name. The detective states that police have been looking for this girl and asks Cheryl if she has seen her lately. Cheryl has not -- then the penny appears to drop as the girl in the picture she knows as Collette, who occupied a room previously occupied another girl, Nikki, whose dessicated body had turned up in the flop house where Cheryl lived. The detectives say that they found Lisa's frozen fingers in a freezer in the killer's apartment. The plot then reverses three years. Cher is living in a building with several other people, all of whom have fallen on hard times. Nikki has disappeared without a trace and another girl, Collette, pays cash to occupy her room. The landlord is obese and sadistic, never making repairs and constantly trying to trade sexual favors for rent and, failing that, blackmailing the young female tenants by raising the rent. Lisa aka Collette, has been on the run for several years. She witnessed a murder and ran for her life, taking a nightclub's bank deposit with her. She sees her pursuers in her dreams and on the streets. Cher is an orphan who formerly slept on park benches and made her living by rolling drunks with the promise of sexual favors. Having scraped together enough money to rent a squalid room in the landlord's building, she is constantly on the lookout for social services who might want to, once again, put her into foster care. Vesta, a woman approaching 70, has lived in the building all her life and has watched it sink to barely livable. She has seen people come and go and rarely interacts with them but a young Iranian, Hossein, helps her carry bundles and mail and is constantly upbeat even though he is biding his time waiting for a work permit. Two other single mean come and go and they remain largely unknown. One tenant does have company but only the reader knows this. Eventually, the residents are banded together by an event which cannot be revealed but which has the reader rooting for them to succeed. Velma lives on the ground level and her plumbing has been backing up for weeks. The landlord has zero interest in making even a pretense of maintaining the building and the occupants rather band together in misery. Again, descriptions in this book are graphic and ghastly. It's hard to know whom to loathe more - a serial killer or the landlord. Eventually, they devise a plot, not only to escape their squalid living quarters but to cast off their present lives. If you can get past the gore, it's a great book and, strange as it may sound, fun.

• Brilliant and tensely plotted, both warm-hearted and gruesome

  Having loved The Wicked Girls, I was looking forward to reading this and wasn't disappointed. This brilliant book is a challenge for faint hearts - the richness of detail about the squishier aspects of murder and death, to say nothing of drains and sewage, is unsparing and relentlessly vivid, showing solid research behind skilful and exciting, and at times funny, narrative. The plot (or perhaps more accurately suite of interwoven plots) is tense and intense, claustrophobically trapped inside a London house divided up into flats/rooms in a heat wave, each tenant haunted by dark, life-threatening secrets and fears, and so much seems to be revealed right from the start, that you can't believe there can be any twists to come, but there are, and they keep coming! Despite the gruesome descriptions this is a warm-hearted book, with characters you can believe in and warm to, in particular the 'three ages of women' trio of Colette, Cher and the effective 'house mother' Vesta and also asylum seeker Hossein. The sadness of murder victims' ends is not skimmed over or neglected either, balancing out the horror of killing and the physical challenge of dealing with human bodies. I read with real dread, worried about what was going to happen to these people I'd got to know, desperate to find out if those already dead would be avenged or at least acknowledged by the world, unable to stop reading until the satisfying end. Another must-read from Alex Marwood.

• Really great

  Thoroughly enjoyed it. Very funny, very realistic - having lived in awful bedsits in my younger life in London. Could hardly put it down. Have now read both of Alex Marwood's books and now am desperately waiting for third. Wonderfully entertaining.

• Finalmente un finale a sorpresa

  Finale sorprendente, cosa rara di questi tempi

• fun, a bit sick and quite dark ​It's not

  It's: clever, interesting, fun, a bit sick and quite dark ​It's not: suspenseful, fast-paced, electrifying, emotional ​Here's why I think it's on Mr King's list- the CHARACTERISATION. This is a character-driven story as opposed to a plot-driven one. The plot moves along nicely, I guess, but it's the characters that drive this story forward. And how Alex Marwood lets us into each characters head, switching from third person to inner monologue in a way that's so seamless it's a thing of beauty. It's not what I call beautiful writing (the kinds of words that move me, that make me have to put the book down and go WOAH), but it is a pretty spectacular study of how to write intricate characters, realistic, flawed, vulnerable. ​So one of them's a killer. This is my only issue with this novel- it's a shame you kind of know which one's the murderer. It's a shame there are no real surprises along the way throughout the whole novel, and you know who The Lover is almost immediately, that by the time he's revealed as the killer (about halfway through) you're kind of disappointed, hoping it was going to be someone less obvious. That's the only reason it doesn't get five stars from me. ​Other than that, this is a good story, dark and twisted, the kind of sick psychological mind I like to delve into. ​ ​I will definitely be reading more of Alex Marwood's books.

購入リンク