Thursday 8 November 2007



TITLE: DARKHOUSE

AUTHOR: Alex Barclay

DATE PUBLISHED: 2005

DATE READ: November 2007

NOTES: The reviews on the book said “Excellent” “A terrific debut by an exciting new writer” “A knockout”. It was none of these. A garbled plot, badly drawn characters and completely unbelievable. A sort of crime thriller written to order following a prescribed template.

And why do modern crime novels have to be so vile to women? Who gets off on this? Hero’s wife is attacked in a horrible manner – but wait, she had been unfaithful to him decades previously so perhaps she deserved it. And another victim is overweight so probably she deserved to die as well.

All very depressing.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

One wonders if you've got something against Alex Barclay and women in general. (Full disclosure: she is friend of long standing). Barclay, a former journalist for whom Barclay is a pseudonym, is a beautiful, intelligent highly literate female. I would say further the high quality of her writing is affirmed by the tens of thousands who bought DARKHOUSE round the world.
She deserves much better than you gave.