An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire
Summary
When 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small town of Strathdee, the community is stunned and a media storm descends.
Unwillingly thrust into the eye of that storm is Bella’s beloved older sister, Chris, a barmaid at the local pub, whose apparent easygoing nature conceals hard-won wisdom and the kind of street-smarts only experience can bring.
As Chris is plunged into despair and searches for answers, reasons, explanation – anything – that could make even the smallest sense of Bella’s death, her ex-husband, friends and neighbours do their best to support her. But as the days tick by with no arrest, Chris’s suspicion of those around her grows.
Comments
This book was not quite the psychological thriller we thought it was. It was more about the friends and family left behind after a loved one is murdered, violently. The love/hate relationship they have with the media. While we understand what the book was trying to get across, we felt it didn’t quite hit the mark. For the most part, the book was well written, and engaging despite the grim subject. The main characters we are little hard to connect with. We sympathised with Chris, and felt her pain, but some of her actions were questionable. We found ourselves reading to the end, wanting to know who did it, why they did it, and how many managed to get the victim in their own car in such a public space without being noticed.
Rating 7.5/10
The Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades. Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.
