A girl has died - Estela, maid to a wealthy family in Santiago and speaking from a locked room, recounts the long lead-up to the event…

This was good, but didn’t knock my socks off. Fundamentally, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting - from the blurb, I thought that a political dimension would be a prominent part of the story. For some reason I was expecting political commentary around Chile’s recent attempted constitutional reforms. Instead, this is a domestic thriller, and any commentary largely revolves around class and the treatment of domestic workers, with a sprinkling about living conditions in the south of the country and the city-rural divide. It’s more social commentary, really.

I did not love the writing style. I initially struggled to get on with the casual conversational tone - I do not particularly enjoy chatty verbal tics beyond a few lines of dialogue, and the constant addressing of the reader felt a bit overdone. But I did eventually settle into it (or perhaps I simply desensitised).

My misplaced expectations have resulted in a bit of a lukewarm review for a book which I actually rated four stars, because it was good for what it was. Although it did lose a bit of steam as the story progressed, I remained curious to find out what happened - we know from the start that a girl has died, but not how, whether it was an accident or deliberate - and there were elements of the story that I really didn’t see coming.

A chatty domestic thriller, with a side of Chilean social commentary.