My Five Word TL:DR Review: Bit Unrealistic but Ultimately Entertaining

I enjoyed How to Get Away with Murder – with a few provisos. This is an entertaining book that kept me turning the pages wanting to find the answers.

The story revolves around Detective Inspector Samantha Hansen who has been on long term sick leave for the past six months. Her godfather and therapist are trying to encourage her into a gentle return to work without much success but when the body of a local young girl is discovered in the park Sam decides she has a compelling need to return and find the killer and also uncover the person behind a book called “How to Get Away with Murder” that was placed at the scene of the crime.

What I liked about this.

The story is told both by Sam as she undertakes her investigations and Denver Brady (pen name?) of the author. I really liked the whole book within a book idea. Both storylines have a worrying thread of unreliability to them which adds an extra layer of entertainment to the story. As mentioned above Sam has been absent from work, this was following a sexual assault incident that was hastily and unsatisfactorily dealt with and resulted in a breakdown. On top of this she is displaying the symptoms of PTSD (possibly because of the aforementioned or also as a result of too many brutal cases). So, does she overestimate her own ability to jump into a high profile murder hunt – of course she does. But, although this involves a little bit of ego, being one of the Yard’s most successful homicide detectives, you can forgive her for rushing in because she genuinely cares. Denver Brady on the other hand is the author of How to Get Away with Murder, the reading of this part of the story is definitely disturbing as the author seems to take great pleasure in talking about his kills and clearly has a huge ego, the bragging becoming worse as the story unfolds – but, can we believe everything that Brady says or does he have an underlying motive.

This is without doubt entertaining. It relies on certain tropes that can be irritating – for example, the ‘I need to tell you something very important but keep getting interrupted’ scenario. Was this a little bit frustrating? Yes. Did it spoil the read? No. What I would say is that if you come to this story expecting a hard nosed police procedure being followed to the letter then you might be a little bit disappointed. If you leave your suspension at the door when you enter then you’ll have an entertaining read, quite often injected with a dose of dry humour and various twists along the way that you may or may not guess – for the record – I didn’t.

Without a doubt I liked Sam and worried for her almost in equal measure (which, let’s be honest, I wouldn’t worry if I didn’t care for the character). She’s not always had a pleasant past herself. Her mother and father have both died, her godfather has undoubtedly let her down and her best, only, friend is a stray dog that has attached itself to her. She’s clever too, I won’t say that I always followed her train of thought but I still like where she took us. In fact the relationships and dialogue in the book was well done.

Brady, is a real piece of work. I don’t want to give too much away, but he’s a boastful egomaniac, sly, self indulgent – I’m sure you get the picture, insert whichever unpleasant descriptors that you can think of and you’ll probably hit the nail on the head.

Anyway, I’m not going to overdo this review because I’m aware of spoilers and don’t want to be the one to give them away. At the end of the day I enjoyed this and it definitely kept me guessing. I think you definitely need to come to this expecting a story that takes liberties, both in terms of procedures and believability, it definitely strays into irritating territory with certain aspects – like the lack of communication mentioned above, but, at the same time, I understand this ploy as it makes you doubt people and think they have underlying motives. I would definitely read more from this author and would love to see more of Sam although this reads as a standalone. There is a serial killer within these pages – you simply need to discover who it is.

I received a copy through Netgalley, courtesy of the publisher, for which my thanks. The above is my own opinion.

My rating a strong 3.5 of 5 (rounded to 4)