Our House by Louise Candlish

I had bought this book, before seeing Louise Candlish, speak a few weeks ago.

1 afternoon, 7 authors (Off Shelf book festival crime afternoon)

She talked about how this book and her most recent Those People are both centred around London houses. She said how you can own millions of pounds of property in London and therefore this amount of value could be a motive for murder.

The book is a his and her story with her narrative supposedly a podcast and his a ‘word file’. The podcast, narrative did not really work for me. It did not read as though she was speaking it, especially with punctuation like brackets. Also I could not quite understand her motive for doing a podcast; until beat the end of the book when that was explained. All her narrative was told looking back, yet was told in chronological order without revealing the end point. I guess sometimes you do watch documentary which, are scripted to keep you in suspense but I’m not sure that is how she would have spoke. You do know right from the start the situation is that she had come home to find new owners moving in. I would have accepted more having the discovery chapter then rewind to start the story chronologically again.

His story was in the sense of it’s perspective more believable.

Overall this book did not leave up to expectations.

Discussion with SPOILERS

Through the book it did not make much sense, why he was so afraid of jail; that definitely needed explaining or it would have been another flaw of the book. It was explained on last bit one page. Not that it felt like a big reveal. Also there had been clues he was planning suicide. You kind of wanted him to pull a fast one and get the money; but him committing suicide makes it anti climatic.

Her killing the Toby / Mike seemed out of character. But then as part of the narrative was hers and she had to make herself sound like a victim rather than a criminal then that makes some sense. However with that in mind perhaps she would have talked less of Toby in podcast? Perhaps not having meet between Bram and Toby? The meet between Bram and Toby could have just been in his narrative; that could have created more of a twisty story rather it all being laid out so much. Did she even need to say she had been on a weekend away with Toby as going through that and saying good time surely creates suspicion of way he disappeared after House incident.