The Evidence Against You

Could have been 5* with changes but closer to 3.5*

Just finished it - at last.
On reflection, there was a good story in there, swamped by unnecessary padding and repetition. I was bored by it most of the time. The book, for me, should have been much shorter. For example, did we need to know the age and physical description of a man who helped her grandmother move house twelve years earlier? He was never mentioned again. At times I wondered why the author’s apparent obsession with ballet shoes kept making an appearance. Did I really read that a character found and put on her ballet shoes so that she could stand en pointe to reach something? Surely I’m wrong.
The author is undoubtedly a very talented writer but I bought this as a ‘psychological thriller’. The excellent, fancy prose got in the way of that. It regularly dragged the story out and prevented any build up of tension. For example, during one conversation when I thought we were at last about to discover an important clue about what had happened, I found myself in a random paragraph all about sunburn.
Unfortunately all the main characters ‘spoke’ with the same highly intelligent and flowery speech. Even when reflecting on events nearly twenty years earlier the recollections were extremely detailed, which just didn’t ring true.
It was a bit of a mishmash of writing techniques, as seems to be the fashion these days. First person and third person sections, past tense and (yuk) present tense and ‘now’ and ‘then’ sections were all there. It’s getting tedious. This author doesn’t need to do this. Her writing is high quality and gimmicks aren’t necessary.
Nearly excellent yet disappointing.