Hi Evening,

Hope you’re all having a good week. For those of us in the UK, it’s basically Thursday today. I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to this four day weekend ahead of us. I’m hoping for all of the chills, all of the relaxation and not a lot else on top! I hope you have some exciting plans for the Easter break.

Book 📖

Thank you to @tandemcollectiveuk for having me on yet another fantastic readalong of The Favour by Nicci French. Thank you also to @simonschusteruk and @likely_suspects for the hardback copy of this book. The Favour was published on the 18th October 2022 and you can get a copy here.

Description 🔖

Jude hasn’t seen Liam in years, but when he shows up at her work asking for a favor, she finds she can’t refuse. All Jude has to do is pick Liam up at a country train station—without telling anyone. So what if she has to lie to her fiancé? Jude is still committed to him and their imminent wedding, even if she and Liam were in love once.

She owes him.

After the car crash that changed everything years ago, bright, ambitious Jude went to medical school, back on the path she had planned before meeting moody, artistic Liam. Meanwhile, he never fully recovered from the dark stain the accident left on his record.

Now he’s gone.

When the police show up at the station instead of Liam, Jude realizes that she knows nothing about the man he’s become. Now she’s tangled up in his life, the last person to have seen him, and maybe the only one who can uncover the truth about what went wrong—even if she destroys her own life in the process.

General Thoughts 🤔

This book started off strong for me. I was hooked right from the get go and I was invested in Jude’s story. That’s not to say I wasn’t frustrated by her story, but we’ll come onto that in the character section.

After the initial hook, the plot did simmer a little and I lost a tiny bit of interest. I changed from loving it to liking it. I wasn’t super excited to pick it up and get my chapters for the day read, but once I started, it was a pleasant enough experience. Then when it got to the ending, it was a little bit of an anti-climax. Both myself and some of the people on the readalong had guessed what was coming quite a while beforehand. I wouldn’t say that I was disappointed in the ending, I just would have liked something a bit more shocking.

Characters 👫👭👬

Back to Jude. My goodness this woman was one on her own. Firstly, who agrees to do such a huge favour for someone they’ve not seen or spoken to in so many years. I thought a lot about this and wondered what I would have done in the same situation, but I just can’t replicate it because my first love wasn’t Liam. Liam wasn’t the most reliable of people back when they were together, so what made her think he would be now? Following on from that, Jude continued to go to that awful house full of awful people.

This is where there was a bit of a gap in the characters in my opinion. There were some really weird and wonderful people living in Liam’s house and I think the story could have been developed much more if these characters had been explored deeper. I felt like I brushed the surface with this group of people and I wanted more.

Writing Style ✍️

This is the first book that I’ve read by this author and it wasn’t until I had started reading that I realised that Nicci French is actually a pseudonym for the married couple Nicci and Sean French. I am always so intrigued my books that have been written my multiple people and wonder how the process works. I would never have known it from just reading the book.

I liked the way these authors hooked me in at the very beginning of the book, they definitely started on a high. I think that there was potential with this plot to have maintained that throughout and thrown in some really great twists, but unfortunately, it seems to just so slightly miss the mark for me.

Conclusion & Scoring 🎖

I was smitten with this book to start off with and really intrigued about where the story was going to go. I love when characters have me screaming at them via the pages of a book and the main character Jude definitely had me doing that. I found her to be so frustrating but grew a love to hate relationship with her by the end. This was an enjoyable thriller that had the potential to be super twisty and dark, but ended up being a bit more tame and easy going. I wanted a little bit more from it than I got, but I enjoyed it all the same.

😍😍😍😐😐