by Araminta Hall
SYNOPSIS
If most men say they’re one of the good guys, then why are so many women afraid to walk alone at night?
Cole is the perfect husband: a romantic, supportive of his wife, Mel’s career, keen to be a hands-on dad, not a big drinker. A good guy.
So when Mel leaves him, he's floored. She was lucky to be with a man like him.
Craving solitude, he accepts a job on the coast and quickly settles into his new life where he meets reclusive artist Lennie.
Lennie has made the same move for similar reasons. She is living in a crumbling cottage on the edge of a nearby cliff. It’s an undeniably scary location, but sometimes you have to face your fears to get past them.
As their relationship develops, two young women go missing while on a walk protesting gendered violence, right by where Cole and Lennie live. Finding themselves at the heart of a police investigation and media frenzy, it soon becomes clear that they don’t know each other very well at all.
This is what happens when women have had enough . . .
REVIEW
One Of The Good Guys was my first read of 2024 and it has set the bar incredibly high for the rest of the year. This is a story about consent, coercive control, gaslighting, rape, power, manipulation, violence and revenge. It's a book which makes you take sides but also forces you to look at the same situation from lots of different angles, and it's these different perspectives that make the story so unique.
Using transcripts of podcasts, news reports, newspaper articles, online forums and WhatsApp message groups interspersed throughout the main storyline, One Of The Good Guys starts blurring the lines into something that feels like it could be a true crime account because these forms of communication are so familiar to all of us. The way people started to take sides and turn on each other for stating their opinions seemed so real it could have been lifted directly from social media.
Even after all of the topics raised and presented throughout the story, the thing that stands out to me is the feeling that you can’t win, and by YOU I mean nobody. It’s a very effective way of reflecting the situation that we all find ourselves in currently where everyone takes a side, it seems like there’s no need for discussion because everything is black or white with nobody willing to concede, and even if it does look like people are beginning to see the point of one argument, all it does is bring up a whole set of other issues which nobody can decide on.
This is an incredibly clever story and the way it was structured bringing all of the pieces of information in at exactly the right time to make points snd shift perceptions was just brilliant. It’s a story that looks at some very relevant issues and feels like a book that everyone should read. An easy five stars from me!
Thanks to Random Things Tours - @RandomTTours, Araminta Hall @AramintaHall and Pan Macmillan - @panmacmillan for the opportunity to read and review.
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Genre: Psychological Thriller / Thriller
ISBN: 978-1035018109
Pages: 336pp
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