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The Cliff House: One hen weekend, seven secrets… but only one worth killing for

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When you first created your protagonist for this book, did you see an empty space in crime lit that you wanted to fill? What can you share about the inspiration for that character? Conversations on the Coast has a slightly different format to other literary festivals. with one author talk a week, spread out over a month rather than a cluster of events. And then there are people we might have some family connection with but who we don’t particularly get on with. I wanted to write about what friendship really means to people in different ways and how that works out over the course of years. But, crucially, I wanted to write about who we can trust. The person who might be closest on the surface is maybe the person who knows all our vulnerabilities. No,’ Zaki replied. ‘You should take the weekend to have some distance, have a good time. Maybe it will let you get some perspective.’ When this book started I found it to be intriguing, atmospheric and it had a lot a tension. I was enjoying it and found the characters to be well defined and was never confused as to who was who (as I find that can happen when there are a lot of characters in a story)

Parts are quite chilling especially about who is controlling the narrative although I do guess correctly I also enjoy how all the secrets come leaking out as water through a sieve deepening the plot and the mystery of who the ultimate target is.I do read a lot of crime fiction,” he says, “a lot of it written by my friends because you do end up becoming friends with writers.

As well as Jen, there's the pop diva and the estranged ex-bandmate, the tennis pro and the fashion guru, the embittered ex-sister-in-law and the mouthy future sister-in-law. Dark, heartfelt, stylish and thrilling, the kind of wonderfully original tale I just adore. Chris Brookmyre is a storytelling mastermind'He had been right. It was her problem. She had never fully trusted him, and at the root of it was this inescapable fear that he was too good to be true. There are some good red herrings as the pace builds, some intriguing cons and counter cons as it builds to an ending it does require some disbelief suspenders though I do still enjoy the entertaining denouement! I have enjoyed a number of Chris Brookmyre's books so enthusiastically, applied for a review copy of The Cliff House (2022).

He was also delighted to have the opportunity to explore a part of Scotland that he doesn’t know well, even if the weather wasn’t terribly welcoming:The great Scottish outdoors is where Chris does a lot of his plotting for his novels. “I like being outdoors I like walking,” he says. I feel like the twist in the book was good and there were believable red herrings leading up to that point. I could have done without so much of the inner monologues and the dynamics between characters, as they took me out of the action sometimes. I found Jen to be a mostly likable character, and felt like I understood the intentions of all of the characters, which seemed realistic even if not likable. The end of the book tied up everything a bit too neatly in my opinion but I didn’t hate it. This is a special novel. A brilliant, original, up-to-the-minute tale with all of the dark, edgy, humorous brilliance we’ve come to expect from one of the finest crime fiction writers in the world’ Not everybody’s playing an angle, Zaki had told her. But that was what a man who was playing an angle would say, and she had been fooled by such a man once before. There will be others that’ll lap this one up but I was frankly glad to survive it and battle my way through to the end. There are some clever twists and interesting moments but overall I’m afraid it didn’t really work for me: just too complicated, too contrived and way too unlikely.

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