I’ve read Horowitz before so when this book appeared on my library app, I decided to pick it up. When I started listening to it, the book sounded familiar and I panicked thinking I’d read it before and was re-reading it. I was wrong. I read The Word is Murder—which, like this book, features the author as the protagonist—but a lot’s happened since I read that book and I completely forgot everything about it. My thoughts on it are here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2261741232

I found this book interesting and arresting. It was well written and pacey, and given the stakes involved quite riveting. What I didn’t like was that this book tried to educate through exposition instead of finding a diegetic way to explain the history of reservations and residential schools and the long term impact of colonialism on the Native American and Indigenous communities in North America. I appreciate a British author taking the time to fill in this gap in knowledge to a British audience, but it almost seemed underhanded to include it as a barrage of text that wasn’t entirely relevant to the storyline.

The biggest issue was how the victim was written. It’s very obvious the theatre critic in question is based on someone real—who knows which critic savagely reviewed one of Horowitz’s plays—and she’s written in the most utterly ham-fisted, cartoony villain way. This woman could do no right. I’d think a writer of this calibre would be above such put downs.

I did enjoy this book, and Rory Kinnear is a good narrator, but this one was trying too hard to go bold with some of its characters and it didn’t work. But, all in all, a fun read.