Published By: Wildfire
Pages: 368
Released On: 11/04/2024
They say you can’t always get what you want. But you can take it.
Anna wants a fresh start. She doesn’t believe she deserves it, but after three years behind bars she has finally paid her dues. Most of them, anyway.
Lucy craves the attention of the only man she can’t have, her alluring Oxford professor. He’s married – not for the first time. Maybe she should be next in line?
Marie the recluse has been locked up for too long. She’s not ready to be free, but some rules are meant to be broken.
Everyone wants a perfect life. But not everyone is prepared to take it.
Unless someone decides to teach them a lesson.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Wildfire for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
**Contains Potential Spoilers*
This is my first Harriet Tyce book. I did have a copy of Blood Orange once but didn’t get round to reading it, and then it mysteriously disappeared, so who knows.
We follow three different women: Anna, Lucy, and Marie.
We meet Anna in Part 1 when she is released frrom jail. She is quite strong but I wondered if that was all a front. My immediate feeling was she had this hard outer shell developed whilst inside, but she had a soft interior that just needed love to help break through to it.
We then meet Lucy in Part 2. In love with her University Professor. I actually felt quite sorry for her. You wonder if she’s dangerous, waiting to make her move, but I think she’s just caught up in the idea of a romance, and I felt she was quite harmless, but naïve.
And then we meet Marie in Part 3. She was very much an enigma. I didn’t know what to make of her to begin with, and for quite a while to be honest, but she settled into the story for me by the end.
There are lots of other characters, including Tom, Anna’s lawyer, who was really caring and trustworthy and I really liked him. I am impressed by Harriet’s ability to create three very separate main characters, and then somehow make them work together. It’s fantastic to see how her mind works, fitting all these threads together and surprising the reader.
I was worried I’d get a bit confused by the various women, names flying about, how they all related, but it was instantly recognisable and I had no issue with it. I like that the women are front and centre. There are a handful of male characters, some nicer than others, and some more involved than others, but they fade to the background really with how powerful the female characters are written – even if they’re not the nicest people.
There are also two mysterious narratives among the main storyline. There’s one about two unidentified women, their fights over alcohol dependency, and the other showing the inner thoughts of an obsessed woman. They help tease of what’s still to come from the book.
The amount of work and time it must have taken Harriet to get all the threads written down and tied up, first singularly and then together. It is very impressive!
I mean, traditionally, or stereotypically, however you want to view it, criminals tend to be men, especially serious criminals. But in fiction, it tends to be the other way round. And Harriet’s done a marvellous job of creating three very different and yet very together female characters, all with a certain amount of criminality in them – either literally or figuratively.
It is such an addictive book. I read half of it before I went to bed one night and finished the second half as soon as I woke up. It’s so good. I’ve read so many thrillers recently and whilst most of them have been really good, you think it can’t be possible to keep having good ones, for them to be fresh and original and surprising. Surely all the twists are done. But this was as original and thrilling as any I’ve read.
Whilst it is an entertaining thriller, there are some important topics in it, none more so than the idea of whether prison works, or if it works as it is now. Are we really rehabilitating criminals? Are we making them ‘better’ people? How do we punish criminals? Should it be up to us who gets punished? Who gets to play God and decide what happens to everyone? It’s a difficult tightrope to balance on.
It is a very busy book. There is a lot going on. Not only in the three main stories, but many other things as well. Is there potentially too much going on? Perhaps. It works, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but part of me wishes it was a bit more streamlined perhaps. But it’s fantastic as it is. So I’m going to say if I had to give it a star rating, which I don’t usually, this would get a 4.5 out of 5. It is complex and exhilarating and a thrilling ride.
Harriet will definitely be on my list of thriller authors to look out for. I’ll have to get my hands on a copy of Blood Orange again, and this time, keep hold of it and read it!
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