Review: Lost You

Lost You by Haylen Beck
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Now. A woman stands on a ledge. She is holding a child. A man attempts to talk her down.
Then. Libby, a single mother, is on vacation with her infant son, Ethan. It is Libby’s first vacation since her divorce, one she was reluctant to take. But she is enjoying herself, as is her son. And then Ethan is gone.
Let’s not beat around the bush. ‘Lost You’ by Haylen Beck, Stuart Neville’s alter-ego, is one of the best novels of the year. Neville has always been an excellent storyteller, from his debut, ‘The Twelve’ (aka Ghosts of Belfast), to last year’s ‘Here and Gone’, his first as Haylen Beck. ‘Lost You’ surpasses them all. Ostensibly a story of child abduction, the book is so much more. Just when you think you know where he is headed, Neville takes a left-turn and the story goes to places you did not expect it to.
Neville creates sympathetic fully drawn characters, makes you care about them, only to reveal something to make you question your initial feelings. It would be unfair to discuss the plot in any detail but everything arises from decisions the characters make, decisions the reader can understand and empathise with, if not agree with. The characters drive the story forward to an ending that is as heart-rending as it is inevitable. The story will stay with you long after you have set the book down.
‘Lost You’ is stunning novel that deserves to be huge.


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Review: Daisy Jones & The Six

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Daisy Jones & the Six is the story of a fictional rock band from the 1970s. It is written as an oral history, very much in the style of Barney Hoskyns’ ‘Hotel California’ or ‘Trampled Underfoot’, about the Laurel Canyon scene and Led Zeppelin respectively, and shares much with both. Indeed, it is so convincing that I finished it aching to listen to ‘Aurora’, the group’s most successful, and final, album.
The story of the rise of The Six, centred around their lead singer, and natural rock star, Billy Dunne, and the parallel path of Daisy Jones, wild child, hedonistic drug user and crazily talented, is told in a cut-and-shuffle manner where individual interviews are edited together to produce a single narrative from multiple viewpoints. The spectacular, seemingly destined, collaboration between Daisy and The Six, and the volatile, complicated relationship between Billy and Daisy, is both the spark that brings the group unimagined success and the seed that eventually tears the the band apart.
Very obviously inspired by the complex relationships between the members of Fleetwood Mac, Taylor Jenkins Reid makes you care about these characters, all of them flawed, so that the inevitable implosion is as stunning as it is total. My only gripe is that the meaningful lyrics that many of her ‘interviewees’ pore over in such detail, and which are printed in full at the end of the book, come across as a little trite and generic, particularly without any musical context - but then that is also true of many of the great ‘70s bands, and I still love them.

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Review: Hydra

Hydra by Matt Wesolowski
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Welcome to Six Stories. I’m Scott King.”

The second in the ‘Six Stories’ series, ‘Hydra’ is just as good and as satisfying as its predecessor. As in Matt Wesolowski’s previous novel, the story is told as six episodes of a podcast which looks at a crime “from six different perspectives, seeing the events that unfolded through six pairs of eyes” and, as before, in printed form, the novel reads as transcripts of these podcasts but really comes to life in audiobook format.

Hydra is not so much a whodunnit but a whydunnit. We know from the outset that ‘the Macleod Massacre’ was carried out by Arla Mcleod, who bludgeoned her family to death with a hammer. The question, and the heart of Scott King’s podcast investigation, is what drove Arla to murder her parents and sister, what in her history brought her to that point. The episodes are again linked by an additional narrative, in this case a recording of Arla herself which has been uploaded to a torrent site and which eventually collides with the podcast narrative to reveal the truth behind the story.

The conceit of presenting the story as a ‘true crime’ podcast is immensely entertaining with the added bonus that, as the story is fictional, the twists can be tightly woven into the story rather than, as in some real podcasts, it feeling like information is being withheld in order to make the story more dramatic. It is a balancing act, but one which Wesolowski performs admirably. It will be interesting to see where he goes if and when ‘Six Stories’ comes to an end but, at the moment, I am hugely enjoying the series and have the third high on my ‘to be listened to’ list.

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