What we have here are two reviews of a super new crime novel, The Truth Lies Buried, by Lesley Welsh.
You can read my own take on the book at http://bit.ly/29BEPxJ Add these commentaries all up and you know there’ll be a big hole in your life if you don’t rush to it immediately.
REVIEW THE FIRST:
Reading this ten days ago I thought it was wonderful. Now that my better half has read it and we’ve done all the post-mortems and compared our clinical notes, we rank it as outstanding.
The style is nuanced, sly, wry, and fiercely intelligent, without a superfluous word. Cultural allusions and quotable quotes abound, with two already established in our domestic lexicon.
You know from the get-go that a beautiful terror is born, and the joyride just keeps getting better. It’s all down to feisty, complex Monica, whose heart must have been forged from some mercury-tungsten amalgam. Her love and lust lead to chaos, lunacy, muddle and mayhem, carving up turf, inheritances and physiognomies, with unassailable logic and inevitability.
To sum up: a riveting crime novel that twists, turns, wrings and wrenches its way through a mesmerising cast of sentient psychopaths, a hitlist of great characters – most gone far too soon – but, I guess, c’est la morte. But then again who ever said that death was fair? And why can’t I find an English word for noir?’