On reading the synopsis for Dear Amy my interest was piqued and I didn’t hesitate to request it. What I found upon reading was a reasonable debut from a very promising author, but I’m not quite sure she’s ready to be heralded in the crime/psychological thriller genre just yet.
When Margot Lewis, teacher by day, starts receiving letters for her part-time advice column, Dear Amy, she becomes intrigued. They are purportedly from Bethan Avery, a girl who went missing and has been presumed dead for twenty plus years, and so starts Margot’s investigation. A month previous to the arrival of these missives a girl from Margot’s school goes missing, and after several weeks searching she is presumed by the police to be a runaway. Margot believes otherwise. Could these two cases, two decades apart, be related?
Sadly after flying through this gripping first third, and being enthralled by Margot’s discoveries, I hit the wall of the long winded mid-section.
Cue Martin, I’m still unsure on his specific job role but he gets the ball rolling on identifying the authenticity of Margot’s letters. What he is actually there for is to be a love interest, and not a very appealing one at that, to entice female readers into this genre.
Roll in Eddy, Margot’s philandering husband, who bears no significance to the story at all except to fill too many pages with drivel about divorce, money and company takeovers that are all completely unnecessary to the plot.
After that nonsensical, and somewhat unbelievable, detour we are swiftly on to the latter part of the book. Here we uncover the “twist” in the story, one that I had seen coming for a while, some poor choices by our main characters and an absurdly swift conclusion set out in a series of such short paragraphs they may as well have been bullet points.
For me, an avid reader of this genre, it could have been a lot more nefarious. Unfortunately Chris did not have me looking over my shoulder with a racing pulse. I would have liked the characters to have been further developed, if this had been the case I would have felt a greater empathy towards them. Not even Katie, who is being held captive in horrific conditions, could garner my sympathy.
After saying this, I did enjoy Callaghan’s writing style. The undemanding yet eloquent prose was effortless to read and I will keep an eye out for her next offering if someone could find a hole her talented peg would better fit.
* Thank you to Penguin UK - Michael Joseph, via NetGalley, for this ARC *