When 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small town of Strathdee, the community is stunned and a media storm descends.
When 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small town of Strathdee, the community is stunned and a media storm descends.
Unwillingly thrust into the eye of that storm is Bella’s beloved older sister, Chris, a barmaid at the local pub, whose apparent easygoing nature conceals hard-won wisdom and the kind of street-smarts only experience can bring.
As Chris is plunged into despair and searches for answers, reasons, explanation – anything – that could make even the smallest sense of Bella’s death, her ex-husband, friends and neighbours do their best to support her. But as the days tick by with no arrest, Chris’s suspicion of those around her grows.
An Isolated Incident is a different kind of crime novel which focuses not on the whodunit or the investigation but on the aftermath of such an event. In this case the Sister of the victim and the young reporter sent in to cover the case are under the spotlight and it is a hugely immersive character study, a truly human story that creeps up under your skin.
It is beautifully told, a realistic, literary prose that takes us through the month following a horrific murder, as family, friend’s and community struggle to come to terms with loss of many kinds.
Chris is a hugely sympathetic character- far from perfect but slowly spiralling down as days go by, you feel every inch of her emotional trauma. May, whose career may well end up being made on the back of another’s suffering struggles with it all and with herself most of all.
An Isolated Incident is a beautiful, brutal, utterly riveting psychological drama, one that takes an edgy and insightful look at crime from the underneath of it all, it is darkly complex and completely compelling throughout.
Recommended.
You can purchase An Isolated Incident (Lightning books) Here.
Happy Reading!
