Cara Burrows—is she safe?Keep Her Safe is another book I read on the recommendation of a friend, and I'm beginning to think that these reads don't make for the fairest reviews – this domestic noir/missing girl genre isn't my favourite, so there's little chance I'm going to be blown away by yet another book along these lines. Yet, if other readers can lose themselves in the mystery, this might make for an enjoyable reading experience. As always, this is simply my very personalised take: and this book was just okay.
The basic setup is on the book's cover: Cara Burrows is a British woman on vacation in Arizona, and when she overhears another guest at the luxury spa insisting that she saw “Melody Chapa” alive and well at the resort, Cara realises from the guest's description that she saw that teenaged girl, too: the only problem is that Melody had been murdered when she was a child, and after a sensationalised “trial of the century”, Melody's own parents had been sentenced to life in prison, despite her body having never been found. What's not clear from the cover – and what I thought made for the most interesting part of the book – is that “famous murder trial in the USA” doesn't necessarily mean “world famous”, and while all of the Americans at the resort are intrigued by a Melody spotting, Cara has never heard of her. This leads to a device that I'm kind of ambivalent about: Cara wants to learn more about the Melody Chapa case, so she starts watching YouTube videos of newscasts and cable talk shows, reading blogs, and looking up archived newspaper coverage. On the one hand, this made for a very natural infodump – there's not much I dislike more than one character in a book monologuing all the background information to another – but because we're reading transcripts, it can get pretty dull and annoying; and especially since all the talk show videos feature people talking over one another and cutting each other off. And this impolite discourse is important to the book: Because Cara is English, she makes mental note of everything she finds annoying about America – from the over-friendly resort staff, to the disclaimers on televised pharmaceutical ads, to children playing Marco Polo (a game she's never heard of) in a hotel pool – but especially, there's a huge and negative subtext about the American justice system: the tainting of jury pools by sensationalised newscasts, lazy cops focussing on the first suspect they find, dirty cops planting evidence, and bombastic cable talk show hosts getting rich by trying suspects in the court of public opinion. More than a mystery/thriller, this book reads like author Sophie Hannah's takedown of America.
Just goes to show, huh? Lie with supreme confidence and idiots will believe you, even when the evidence of their own eyes contradicts what you're telling them.So, to the mystery (and I don't consider anything here a spolier): Really, what Cara is trying to solve is, “If Melody Chapa is alive, how and why were her own parents framed for her murder?” And the book twists and turns, characters lie and aren't who they seem to be, and there's no way for a reader to know what happened until the very end. I guess the mystery element was well handled, but too often Cara would think to herself, “That person said X, so Y must be true”, and I'd be thinking to myself, “That person didn't actually say 'X', you're just interpreting it that way”, and in every case, the misinterpretation of “X” is revealed to have been a red herring: and what reader wouldn't have seen that? I read this book quickly: not because I was on the edge of my seat and needed to know, but more of a in for a penny, in for a pound type deal – the longer I read, the more I just wanted it to be over with; a grim let's do this thing. And there was just so much extraneous to the mystery that I didn't care about or didn't believe: I didn't believe Cara's reason for coming to Arizona; didn't care about the strained relationship between the local detectives; I didn't believe that "civilians" would be enlisted in police investigations; didn't care about a dog named Stoppit; I didn't believe the ultimate solution; didn't care about the final twist. I get that for the sake of culture shock all of the American characters needed to be loud, sassy, or smarmy, but with her lame background and motivations, Cara was a twit as well; there were no characters in this book to root for or identify with.
And as for the writing: I love pulling longish quotes that I find interesting, especially well-written, or that give a sense of a book's vibe, but nothing really stood out for me here; I only marked the two quotes I used so that I'd have something for my review. I did like that Hannah was specific with name brands – people watch Netflix, use Instagram, have iPod Minis – because that's reality and I don't see it enough.
So, Keep Her Safe was fine; not really my cuppa, but I knew that going in.
Carrie at work - a lovely woman that I get along with well - has asked me twice now if I'd like to join her book club. We often ask each other about the books we're reading, and while she always seems to be deep into some domestic drama tale, and I think of myself as someone with more highbrow tastes, we do enjoy talking books together. Carrie told me last week that Keep Her Safe was her book club's choice for this month, and once again, suggested that I read it and come along to the meeting at the end of November. I protested that it didn't sound like the kind of book I like reading, and Carrie replied that contrary opinions always make for the best book club discussions.
And that makes for a dilemma.
As I expected, I didn't really like this read, but if I show up to Carrie's book club full of condescension (even unexpressed), that's not very friendly. On the other hand, it would be nice to sit around with a group of women discussing books; that does sound friendly; something I could use in my life. And if I had a third hand to consider, it would be this: wouldn't the perfect solution be to find a book club that reads the kind of books I actually like?
At this point, Carrie doesn't know that I read this, so I guess I've got time to figure out what I want to do. But, do I really want to read a book per month, chosen by other people, that I don't expect to like? The only upside would be that I'd expect to become more familiar with pop fiction and be able to say honestly to customers at the book store, "Oh, my book club loved that." That's no small thing either.
