stefanie aus frei
Running from the past, running to have a past - and future “Surgeons don’t care about people, not in a touchy-feely way. They’re like mechanics: they just want to cut them up, see how they work, dismantle them. Your average surgeon’s like a little boy who takes apart his dad’s watch to see how it works and then can’t get it back together. The more skilled you get, the better you get at re-assembling the parts. But we always leave a scar.” P 275 There is certainly someone in this story who does not care about people either, because that someone does not care if people get scared or worse. And there was somebody who did not care about Nora ten years back either, when she was sixteen and was texted from her first love to tell her good-bye. She had opted to say good-bye likewise, to her old life, her then-friends, even her then nickname “Lee” – only to return now, ten years later, to meet up for the hen-night for her then best friend Claire. But Nora was left with a scar, emotionally. “In a dark, dark wood there was a dark, dark house; An in the dark, dark house there was a dark, dark room; And in the dark, dark room there was a dark, dark cupboard; And in the dark, dark cupboard there was … a skeleton.” Those traditional words are printed right ahead of the first chapter of this debut novel, followed but a somewhat dream-/nightmare- like short scene with someone running – for escape, for fun, to get help? Leonora “Nora” Shaw is in a hospital. “What has happened? What have I done?” (p 3) I did enjoy the style of writing in this debut novel and could often solidarise with Nora, although I found some of her decisions rather hard to understand, especially her dwelling on the past. I would rather not rate it a “creepy thriller” – “tense, claustrophobic”, yes, I will take that. I did feel entertained, I liked some of the other characters such a laconic Nina. Although I consider some turns a bit foreseeable, found too many citations right from the genre, at least all of the trails were resolved. A solid ‘whodunnit’ where for a long time it’s not even clear what has really happened, but without many new ideas.
