Cara’s first Standalone

Since Close to Home, Cara Hunter has had an affinity with using social media posts in her writing and from what I can remember she was one of the first to do this regularly, so moving on to a True Crime based fiction for her first standalone seemed perfectly logical, with Twitter posts and discussion threads making up a key part of the end of each episode. But describing a TV programme in the written form was at times, a little quirky for me. Although it was helped out in the audiobook sense by having the right number of narrators to deal with the voices so that the confusion of the TV description wasn’t compounded by this.



It took me a while to get used to this approach, but once I got into the flow of it, it really worked well. This book was heavily dialogue based, which meant that you had to listen closely, because there was little need for lots of scene description like in a traditional book. This meant that in order to fill the book out there needed to be more evidence within the dialogue and as a consequence, more twists. In my view possibly too many on this occasion, but it really worked well when it came to the end of the book, as it was able to speed through the twists in an exciting and dynamic way as if you really were watching a TV reconstruction. This may explain the need for the number of twists in the book and its episodic nature meant that the clues could easily be hidden, but for anyone who is really observant, the clues were there. This is the sign of good writing.



Make sure you pay close attention to anything that is said and you’ll enjoy this book as much as I did.












https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Murder-in-the-Family-Audiobook/B0C3WG6YMN?qid=1694677166&sr=1-2&ref_pageloadid=Hb4RPZRkRLigkv9s&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_2&pf_rd_p=c6e316b8-14da-418d-8f91-b3cad83c5183&pf_rd_r=FMAB333H0AWSYBW4X7WQ&pageLoadId=KC3tGaqH6oxQ8N04&creativeId=41e85e98-10b8-40e2-907d-6b663f04a42d