Rating: 4 Stars Themes: Thriller Thoughts: This book has quite an interesting story, the wintery small village makes an eerie setting for a murder as it feels more idyllic and romantic than violent and scary. Seeing the murder of Bakary through the murderers’ wife instead of the victim or the murderer themself gives the book a different feel and also leads to us as outsiders considering what we may have done in those circumstances. The crime itself is unsettling as there’s layers of race, and prejudice as well as crime and finances. It’s also interesting that the further into the facts of the case we go the more the murderer also becomes a victim of another crime. Reading the authors note, I didn’t know anything about the case before and I’m not sure how much of the book is supposed to be true to the real crime and how many are fictionalised to make the story up. Favourite Quote: “I don't know if we're all capable of killing with as much as savagery as you had. I still don'...
Rating: 1 Star Themes: True Crime Thoughts: With such a plain cover I seem to have been tricked into reading an AI book. Davidson has written 523 books according to Goodreads and some have much more obviously AI covers. The format did seem a little repetitive despite being so short (but I’ve seen that in human writers covering crime cases too). It irritated me how often the book mentioned finding the boy's name and giving his name back but it never actually mentioned his name (Cairo Jordan) and even worse when looking into the case facts, it gets the cause of death wrong. The book keeps mentioning asphyxiation but all the news coverage on the case states an electrolyte imbalance being the likely cause of death.