´(...) there are always two yeas to interpret everything in life. All ylou need is to pick the version that suits you better´.
Linda sounds like a very normal housewife, without any sense of adventure or courage. Just a plain 40 something, working in a charity shop, married, with an equally ´normal human´. Until the suburbs where she is living is recording a high number of women killed. Should she be afraid about ?
A Tidy Ending, Joanna Cannon´s third, is a complicated, character-driven thriller. It starts and continues for a long time into the book on a very quiet, slow-paced note, until it hurries up stumbling from a surprising twist to another, at the very end of it.
From the very beginning though, there is a discrepancy between the familiar, quiet, uneventful ambiance of the suburb and what you feel it´s boiling underneath the story. Similarly, the good Linda is far from being the boring kind of person one may misjudge at the first sight. She has desires and wishes to live in a more glamorous world, thus her quest to find Rebecca, the previous owner of her house, a subscriber of glossy magazines delivered to Linda´s address instead. Linda is kind of moderately obsessed with Rebecca and I muss confess that for a couple of pages was about to bet that she is into something more serious than her curious intentions.
The book have a relatively rich cast of characters, but Linda is by far the most memorable one. So memorable that you can easily create a very relatable mental representation of her, that may stay with the reader long after finishing the book.
Cannon is a skillful writer, with an unique art of creating suspense, literally out of the most anodine situation. The game of suggestions and allusions is comes to hand when you are almost about to lose any chance of expecting a real change or eventful occurence.
A Tidy Ending is a fine piece of thriller work with characters with a complex yet purely human psychology. I enjoyed the suspense and how the story evolved, as well as the human questions outlined.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered as part of the book tour, but the opinions are, as usual, my own
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