Book 57 - Pine by Francine Toon

Reading date - January 2021

What was promised here was a taut thriller full of suspense.  What I received was...is detailed below.

The basic premise of this book is that it is set somewhere remote in Scotland, where there are loads of pine and it's all country-sidey, e.g. you can't just walk to the local Tesco and when it gets dark, it gets eerie.  The kind of place where you don't look out the window when it's dark incase something stares back at you.

The author is good at making things seem scary and taut and you feel that you're in the same place as the characters so brava on that aspect of things.  She is good at setting the scene and I could feel how cold and unwelcoming the place was as I read.  However, once you get taut and know that something fishy is going on, you waste so much time just wishy-washying around waiting for something to happen.  The blurb states that someone goes missing, this doesn't happen until a good 200 pages in.  Until then, you're just constantly told how one man likes to drink, doesn't like a lady in town, how a girl is bullied at school but has a friend in the year above her who has gone to private school elsewhere and how she plays with her best mate (a boy) in the woods.

I would say it should be aimed more at the YA market but I'd be insulted if I was a YA and was told that this is the kind of book that is for my level of intelligence.

The story could work with a few minor tweaks, just slam the reader with all the info and let them figure it out, don't draw it out so much that by the time the action kicks off, the reader has figured out exactly what happens.