My Five Word TL:DR Review: Very Good, Atmospheric and Twisty

The Storm is a really good story. It has a way of hooking you in, leading you down a country path and then chucking you in the ditch with its revelations. You gotta love a story that keeps you guessing, and in my case, clueless.

The story basically involves three characters who have been friends since childhood. They’re pretty tight but at the same time that doesn’t mean that sometimes they’re not fond of each other. They all come from St. Medard’s Bay, Alabama and they have some serious history. The place is famous for the terrible hurricanes that lay waste to everything in their path, the famous hotel that remains standing in the face of such adversity, and the did she/didn’t she murder mystery about a young woman accused of murdering her slightly older, well to do boyfriend.

The three friends are older now, in fact the story is told partly through the daughter of one of the original friendship. Lo, Ellen and Frieda are the original girl gang. Back in the day, Lo, who was an absolute beauty, became involved with a young man, handsome and with a powerful family, he was destined for good things and his father had ambitions that certainly didn’t involve Lo. Ellen and Frieda were usually dragged along in Lo’s wake, sometimes getting involved in hijinx that had the potential to go very wrong.

There are so many things I enjoyed about this.

The writing is really good. I could picture everything so easy. It’s like I had the full story created in technicolour inside my head, the characters, the hotel, everything. And I really liked the setting and the way it was so easily brought to life. Also we have a split timeline and the use of an epistolary format, which are aspects of any story that I usually really enjoy, and I certainly did here.

Then we have the stormy weather, and these are some next level storms and they’re a part and parcel of the story. Everything hinges around one of the earlier storms and gradually we uncover that much more than was originally understood actually took place under the cover of bad weather.

I liked the characters. There is a lot of history going on here and slowly and surely things are revealed. Some things are handed to you on a plate, and immediately make you suspicious of certain characters, others are more tricky and need teasing out of the woodwork. I mentioned that one of the characters was the daughter of the original gang. Geneva came back to run the family hotel when her family could no longer manage and her struggles to keep the place going also feed into the story.

In conclusion, this had a very satisfying ending. I don’t want to give anything away so I won’t say more. I will say that I listened to the audio version and it was so good.

I bought a copy from Audible.

My rating 4 of 5 stars