Title: The Girl in Kellers Way
My
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Book Description (Goodreads):
When a body is found buried near the desolate forest road of
Kellers Way, Detective Melanie Carter must identify the victim if she is to
have any chance of finding the killer. That's no easy task with fragmentary
evidence from a crime committed years earlier and a conspiracy of silence from
anyone who might have information.
The one person who may be able to help is Julie West. In a troubled marriage, Julie often jogs along Kellers Way to clear her mind and escape the confines of her suffocating suburban life. Until one day, something happens there that shakes Julie to the core, making her question everything she ever believed about her life, her marriage and even her sanity . . .
The one person who may be able to help is Julie West. In a troubled marriage, Julie often jogs along Kellers Way to clear her mind and escape the confines of her suffocating suburban life. Until one day, something happens there that shakes Julie to the core, making her question everything she ever believed about her life, her marriage and even her sanity . . .
My musings:
Whaaaat??!!?? No way! *frantically flicking pages* That
can’t be right!
Don’t you love it when a book totally blindsides you? I had
so many theories reading this one that I was convinced that one of them had to
be right, and yet the author still managed to surprise me. As an added plus, it contains one of my
favourite ingredients of any psychological thriller – an untrustworthy and
unreliable narrator. It soon becomes obvious that Julie, one of the main voices
narrating parts of the book, is a troubled soul. But how troubled exactly? Is
her husband a controlling, cheating despot who drugs her with psychotropic
medications every night, or a caring partner concerned about her mental health?
Did she see a body in a wrecked car whilst out running in Kellers Lane, or was
it just a hallucination? Coming from the wrong side of the tracks, she has
never quite managed to live up to the standards of her husband’s first wife,
who was tragically killed three years earlier. The harder she tries, the more
convinced she becomes of her failings, and her mental health seems to get
shakier by the minute. Goldin does a great job in portraying the unstable
woman’s inner thoughts in a way that played out like a jumble of nightmarish
images, just as they must have appeared in Julie’s medicated brain.
Our other POV is that of Mel Carter, a detective and young
widowed mother of two adolescent boys, who is trying to solve the murder case
of a body found in Kellers Way – the very street where Julie goes running every
morning. But how are the two connected? I loved Mel’s character, who tries so
hard to balance family life with her career. This was one of those rare books
where that particular struggle is not overdone, and whilst Mel’s boys do
feature in the novel, they never get threatened, abducted or embroiled in the
investigation in a way that distracts from the main story-line. Mel’s voice is
a no-nonsense one, who logically lays out the facts for the reader, and
provides a refreshing contrast to the paranoid Julie. I would love to see her
character come back in future novels!
Goldin writes very well, using the two unique voices to
highlight the differences between the two women and creating an ever-present
shadow of doubt in the readers’ mind. I quickly got sucked into the story and
was loathe to put the book down. Seeing how this is Goldin’s debut novel, I
will be looking out for other great things to come from this talented writer!
Books with an unexpected twist are the best kind! This sounds like a great book!
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