Random Things Tours: Diving for Pearls by Jamie O´Connell

 

While ´an international star´ was about ´to conquer the world´s tallest building´ a young rich girl from a Muslim family in Dubai was living her last moments of her life. Hiyam corpse will be soon discovered floating at Dubai Marina and a search for the perpetrator will soon start. A search that will change the life of at least six persons for ever. 

Diving for Pearls, the promising debut novel by Jamie O´Connell is a highly entertaining and besides the whole glamour that is associated with Dubai and is well present into the book, it has a very thoughtful - not always obvious in the story - line. It is a deeply philosophical thought about the sadness of the dreams sunken when meeting the brutal reality. Almost all of the six of the persons in the book affected by th crime are here looking for a dream - a better future back home, sending money to their poor families, hiding their troubled past, hiding their own self. 

The book is rich in various stories intertwined with a focus on the human nature and their liabilities, the weaknesses that we rarely see through the everyday mask we wear, including in relation with other family members. The story may looks sometimes like a ping-pong game from a character to another with the clear connections between the characters reveals only later but at the end of it I had the good feeling of exhaustion because it is not such an easy reading. 

Diving for Pearls is more than a story about finding the culprit of a crime but about life stories and human expectations and betrayal. I´ve found the reading intense and kept me interested until the very end, although I wished the stories within the stories a bit more sharp and focused. 

But the writing is very promising and I could only expect more good books by Jamie O´Connell as I see an impressive potential for creativity and who doesn´t need nowadays good written complex stories?

Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered part of the blog tour but the opinions are, as usual, my own.