Weycombe by G.M. Malliet | The importance of cohesive fact introduction

I’m not an author and I’m not trying to be one, so it’s very difficult for me to criticise books on the styles they were written in. But, ultimately, I am the audience. I read the blurb, I liked it, I was intrigued by it and decided to dedicate my time to reading a particular novel. And there are often times when the writing style or certain writing quirks don’t work for me as well as they do for others, and I find it my duty to share these moments with you!

«Weycombe» is similar one of those cozy, detective movies set in a small town in a middle of nowhere. The community is so tiny, everyone knows each other and such strong events as murder usually reveals a whole lot more gossip than we expected!

Weycombe is the chocolate-box village of everyone’s dreams. For American Jillian White, a gated life of pleasure and comfort with her titled English husband was a fantasy come true.

But the murder of a local estate agent mars the village’s so-pretty surface. Are people actually dying to live in Weycombe? Jill investigates, piecing together clues along the snaking paths and winding lanes of her adopted village. She knows truth has many versions, depending on who is doing the telling. And that few can be trusted in Weycombe, where nothing is as perfect as it seems.

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Sounds so interesting, right?! I love thrillers, I love crime-solving stories and I absolutely adore mysteries. «Weycombe» was all of that plus a huge family drama that started to unravel throughout the book. It had all the elements to be an amazing story and maybe some of you found it rather great.

I had only ONE BIG ISSUE – the timing of when certain facts were told to us.

We read the story as it is told to us by Jillian White, a woman from the neighbourhood. An American woman married to a upper-class British men, Will. They live in a perfect neighbourhood, in a perfect house, but as we know there are always troubles in paradise.

What I found odd was a mix of present and past events. At one point Jillian would be talking about Ann’s murder and her thoughts about it, or maybe trying to get more information from her neighbours to solve the case, and then suddenly she would be remembering certain facts from the past that would take up pages and pages of text in between the events that are happening right now.

I can’t say that it wasn’t interesting, it just wasn’t structured well enough and maybe a few cuts here and there would have made the book more perceptible to absorb all the information that was thrown at us.

Besides this big issue that I encountered, the book was interesting enough but not thrilling. There was not a single moment in the book when I wondered the well-known question – Who is the murderer? Because in the beginning I didn’t really care enough to ask and was trying hard to dive into the story and by the end it was a little bit too obvious to wonder who did it.

My rating:

★★★☆☆

It took me a week to decide what rating should I give it, and after careful thoughts 3 stars seemed just about right. Yes, I had some issues with it. Yes, there were moments when I wasn’t enjoying what I was reading, but overall it wasn’t all too bad.

Thank you NetGalley and Midnight Ink for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinion!

What was the last thriller/ crime book you read?

With love, Alex

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