It’s a mystery novel with the word fish in the title that has Spoiler red herrings in it and you have no idea how happy that makes me as someone who likes puns. So I’m going to giggle off here in the corner for a few minutes before moving on with my review.
Okay. Giggling done.
So we have a pretty standard British murder mystery book, a re-release from the 1998. A doctor finds out he’s being tried for the murder of his wife, his children are missing, he claims he is innocent, and then the scrappy female police officer has to save the day! The book then veers off into a whole side investigation before a Spoiler twist ending. I’m not generally a fan of twist endings (too much building up an emotional rapport between readers and characters before the story is like Aha! I’m smarter than you!), but this one wasn’t so bad. Maybe it was because it wasn’t all about being cleverer than the reader, although I doubt one could have figured it out on one’s own. I’m rarely surprised by plots anymore, so maybe I’m softening towards twist endings. Who knows? The investigation was compelling too — not that it had much to do in style, tone, or content, but it reminded me of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, wherein you don’t really realize how far you’ve floated away from the story catalyst for quite some time (I guess until the twist). Bobbing along on a floaty in the ocean, only to look up and realize that the shore is no longer in sight (need some water analogies because of the fish title).
So decent potboiler mystery novel to read during a lazy summer.
Back to giggling about fish and red herrings (you don’t even want to know how much I laughed about the fish statue from the In Auction in The Ersatz Elevator).
Dead Fish by Ruth Carrington went on sale March 29, 2018.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.