Wednesday 9 March 2022

#BlogTour - The Curfew by T.M. Logan


I should have known something was wrong.
 I should have sensed it. Felt it in the air, like the build-up of pressure before a thunderstorm, that heavy, loaded calm.


The curfew
Andy and Laura are good parents. They tell their son Connor that he can go out with friends to celebrate completing his exams, but he must be home by midnight.

The lie
When Connor misses his curfew, it sets off a series of events that will change the lives of five families forever.

The truth?
Because five teenagers went into the woods that night, but only four came out. And telling the truth might mean losing everything...

What would you do?


I thoroughly enjoyed T.M. Logan’s previous novel TRUST ME which was the first I had read of his work. THE CURFEW is to my mind even better. When Connor fails to meet his curfew, his parents are initially unaware that he didn’t return home at midnight. To be honest, given the lengths they go to later in the novel, it is a little surprising that it takes them so long to realise their son is missing but it is excusable. When he appears, and is implicated in the disappearance of a 16-year old girl in his class, Andy and Laura refuse to believe he could be involved. 


Logan tells the story largely in the first person from Andy’s POV and Andy comes across as a loving and dedicated father. He is painted very realistically, feeling a distance growing between him and Connor as the latter reaches ‘the difficult teenage years’, struggling to recapture the closeness they shared when his son was younger. Shaken by the police’s apparent focus on his son, Andy tries to investigate independently, looking into the missing girl, the other teenagers who were there when she disappeared, and their families. It is frustrating, and entirely believable, that Andy stumbles from one encounter to another, proving that he is not a trained investigator, and potentially making things worse. The reader simultaneously winces, as Andy gets deeper into trouble, and understands that, in similar circumstances, we would act similarly.


The characters, with one exception, are ordinary people, flawed, three-dimensional people who are utterly believable. The exception is Harriet, “Harry”, the couple’s younger daughter, who is no less believable but is a precocious, 12-year old who could teach Sherlock Holmes a few tricks. Harry is a wonderful creation who epitomises the drive to help Connor as well as the confusion and hurt over the situation in which he finds himself.


THE CURFEW is a tense, claustrophobic domestic thriller. It is well-written and maintains the anxiety, the feeling of helplessness, of events piling up which point in a direction completely at odds with Andy’s and Laura’s belief in their son, a paradigm shift - could Connor by guilty of something horrible? How well do they really know their son? It is a breathless finish to a quick paced, intense novel. 


Thanks to T. M. Logan, Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers and Zaffre Books for the invitation to take part in the Blogtour.






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