My reading has been very patchy over the last year or so – not good when you’re supposed to be writing as well. However, I have started to pick the pace up in recent months. A lot of the books I’m buying at the moment are based on the recommendations of book bloggers I follow – which means I do download quite a lot of books and they are beginning to stack up on my Kindle (thank God I don’t pick up many physical books!).
I don’t tend to write many reviews – which is partly reflective of the limited number of books I have been reading. It is also reflective of the fact that many of the books I read are entertaining, but don’t necessarily offer anything different enough to warrant comment. The Jack Reacher books, for example, are all great, but they’re pretty much what you expect – besides, I don’t think Lee Child is going to get overly excited about missing out on my review.
Which brings me to The Mistake by KL Slater. I remember seeing this book reviewed on a book blogger’s site and thinking it sounded interesting. Once I’d looked it up on Amazon, I realised it was set in my home county and I had at one point lived quite close to the setting. As a result, I felt on familiar ground almost as soon as I started reading.
Nottinghamshire is often overlooked as a setting for books, but this is a prime example of why it should take centre stage more often. The depiction of the one-time mining village presents an ideal backdrop for an excellent psychological thriller.
Sadly, some of the other content was also familiar to me – at least it has started to become familiar in the last couple of years. This thriller is psychological in the truest sense as psychological abuse forms a core part of the story. Together with the social position that a male should be more dominant than a female, this is reflective of experiences I have been privy to and which have, frankly, shocked me in their prevalence in this day and age.
The fact that it reminded me of those real situations is credit to the author’s ability to take a piece of fiction and make its premise so credible. At the same time, even though you think you know where this story is taking you, there is a twist that I hadn’t even contemplated (I hate covers that tell you there’s a brilliant twist, but this did catch me out). To say I thoroughly enjoyed this book would be incorrect. Some of the scenes were uncomfortable to read, but necessarily so, and made the rest of the book that much more worthwhile. I will definitely be reading more from KL Slater.
To purchase a copy, click here for Amazon UK, or here for Amazon.com.