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Crime and thrillers of the month – review
The scorned woman thriller deftly reimagined, preposterously gripping murders at an ice skating training camp - and a frantic search for a missing daughterThe protagonist of Chris Bridges’s Sick to Death (Avon) is not your run-of-the-mill thriller heroine. Emma is sick with a neurological condition that leaves her crushed by fatigue, prone to blackouts, unable to work. Hers is a disease “without concrete evidence, without affirmative scans or validated cause”, and she is constantly having to justify herself to her family – her mother, cruel stepfather Peter, stepsister and daughter – with whom she shares a tiny council house. “Everyone has their limits of what they can tolerate. It turns out that they couldn’t take me being ill. I can’t stand their lack of care. Why wouldn’t I become angry?” says Emma. When she falls for her handsome neighbour Adam, a doctor, her vague plans to get rid of Peter start to take shape – particularly when she learns more about Adam’s wife, Celeste, and the trouble Adam is in. “My illness doesn’t mean that I have to be relegated to a supporting role, the background character who dies at the end or fades away. I can even be the villain if I want to.” Bridges, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2020, writes in an author note that he had had enough of the “tired tropes” around sickness in fiction, from the “sickly sweet ill woman”, to the unwell person who is shown to be a fraud. Sick to Death turns these tropes on their head: Emma is a force to be reckoned with, and although the plot does become increasingly tangled, this is deliciously dark and twisted, and a lot of fun.Fun is also at the heart of CL Pattison’s First to Fall (Headline) – if you’re prepared to suspend your disbelief and just enjoy this tale of murderous figure skaters. We open with a newspaper report about deaths “at the home of legendary German figure skater, Lukas Wolff” during an extreme blizzard. Wolff, we’re told, is famous “for a spectacular sequence of skating moves called ‘the Grim Reaper’”. Our heroine is Libby, a promising but poor young skater who jumps at the chance to go to Wolff’s training camp in the Bavarian forest. Wolff puts Libby and her fellow trainees through their paces, a harsh but brilliant taskmaster, until the blizzard descends, the mobile reception goes, and Libby’s fellow skaters start dying. Pattison is a great writer, Libby a brave and brilliant character, and it turns out that reading about tricky skating moves is more fun than I’d anticipated. Throw in a corker of an escape down an icy river and you’ve got yourself a winner. Continue reading...
The scorned woman thriller deftly reimagined, preposterously gripping murders at an ice skating training camp - and a frantic search for a missing daughter
The protagonist of Chris Bridges’s Sick to Death (Avon) is not your run-of-the-mill thriller heroine. Emma is sick with a neurological condition that leaves her crushed by fatigue, prone to blackouts, unable to work. Hers is a disease “without concrete evidence, without affirmative scans or validated cause”, and she is constantly having to justify herself to her family – her mother, cruel stepfather Peter, stepsister and daughter – with whom she shares a tiny council house. “Everyone has their limits of what they can tolerate. It turns out that they couldn’t take me being ill. I can’t stand their lack of care. Why wouldn’t I become angry?” says Emma. When she falls for her handsome neighbour Adam, a doctor, her vague plans to get rid of Peter start to take shape – particularly when she learns more about Adam’s wife, Celeste, and the trouble Adam is in. “My illness doesn’t mean that I have to be relegated to a supporting role, the background character who dies at the end or fades away. I can even be the villain if I want to.” Bridges, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2020, writes in an author note that he had had enough of the “tired tropes” around sickness in fiction, from the “sickly sweet ill woman”, to the unwell person who is shown to be a fraud. Sick to Death turns these tropes on their head: Emma is a force to be reckoned with, and although the plot does become increasingly tangled, this is deliciously dark and twisted, and a lot of fun.
Fun is also at the heart of CL Pattison’s First to Fall (Headline) – if you’re prepared to suspend your disbelief and just enjoy this tale of murderous figure skaters. We open with a newspaper report about deaths “at the home of legendary German figure skater, Lukas Wolff” during an extreme blizzard. Wolff, we’re told, is famous “for a spectacular sequence of skating moves called ‘the Grim Reaper’”. Our heroine is Libby, a promising but poor young skater who jumps at the chance to go to Wolff’s training camp in the Bavarian forest. Wolff puts Libby and her fellow trainees through their paces, a harsh but brilliant taskmaster, until the blizzard descends, the mobile reception goes, and Libby’s fellow skaters start dying. Pattison is a great writer, Libby a brave and brilliant character, and it turns out that reading about tricky skating moves is more fun than I’d anticipated. Throw in a corker of an escape down an icy river and you’ve got yourself a winner. Continue reading...
