Review: UNDER THE ICE by Rachel Blok

Under the Ice by Rachael Blok
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is the week before Christmas and the cathedral city of St Albans is blanketed by snow. But beneath the festive lights, darkness is stirring. The frozen body of a young girl is discovered by the ice-covered lake.

The police scramble for clues. A local woman, Jenny, has had visions of what happened the night of the murder. But Jenny is an exhausted new mother, whose midnight wanderings pull her ever closer to the lake. Can Jenny be trusted? What does she really know?

Then another girl goes missing, and the community unravels. Neighbour turns against neighbour, and Jenny has no idea who to believe. As Christmas Eve approaches, Jenny discovers a secret about her past – and why she could be key to everything...

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Under the Ice is Rachel Blok’s debut, a crime novel with a strong psychological thriller vibe set in the week before Christmas. As it happened, I read this book in the lead-up to Christmas which added a nice feel to it.

This book opens with the discovery of a young girl’s body in a frozen lake, and swiftly moves on to introduce us to Jenny, one of the protagonists. She’s a first-time mother who’s struggling with motherhood—and she sees ghosts.

Okay, her ghostly “visions” and experiences somewhat annoyed me. I found those sections slow and not that engaging. While the way they were written symbolised Jenny’s confused mindset at the time, where she was only half awake, I found these passages a challenge to read. I had to really concentrate as I read to work out what was going on, and it felt like hard work. I don’t mind reading engaging books where you have to really think to know what’s happening, but I don’t think the writing style quite worked here as it threw me out of the story and reminded me that it was writing that I was reading, which in turn slowed down the pace a lot for me during these sections. But the ghostly visions also certainly added a mysterious element to Jenny’s character, and played nicely into her unintentional unreliable qualities as a narrator.

One thing I really loved about this book was how it alternated between psychological thriller (with the narrator being Jenny) and police procedural (with the narrator being detective Maarten). I love police procedural and it was so interesting seeing the hunt for the murderer from two different perspectives—and more than once it made me convinced that Jenny was going to be revealed as the killer.

Adding in a second crime to this murder mystery—the disappearance of a second girl who has no connections to the first—was nice as it upped the stakes and really increased the tension. With the second girl also being the best friend of Maarten’s daughter, it added a nice personal element to Maarten’s motivation to find the killer. We saw the pressure on him both from a family perspective and a professional one. It really developed his character nicely.

The actual identity of the killer was not something I saw coming. I was shocked, both in a good and bad way—partly because the real killer had never been on my suspect list at all (or the police’s or Jenny’s suspect list). It did seem to come out of the blue, but it it didn’t seem totally unbelievable.

Overall, this is a solid crime thriller.

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Review: TORN by Cat Clarke

Torn by Cat Clarke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

They didn't mean to kill her...now the guilt will tear them apart

Alice King isn't expecting the holiday of her dreams when she sets off on a trip to the wilderness with her mates. But when her best friend Cass decides to teach mean girl Tara a lesson, Alice finds herself in a nightmare she can't escape.

Now Alice is the guardian of a secret too horrific to tell; and a secret too terrible to keep. A secret that will change all of their lives for ever...

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Torn is the second book by Cat Clarke that I’ve read, and this is a good read. I absolutely loved her other book, Girlhood, and I think that’s the problem—if I hadn’t read that book and been blown away by it, I probably would’ve enjoyed Torn a lot more than I did. But for me, Girlhood was excellent, and though Torn is a great story, it felt a little flat compared to it.

Don’t get me wrong. This IS a good book. I just went into it with really high expectations.

Torn tells the story of Alice, a sixteen-year-old who’s caught up in the murder of classmate and former best friend, Tara. The plot is high tension and the ending particularly was well done.

I especially enjoyed how Clarke explores Alice’s unravelling mental state and the ghostly apparitions of Tara.

The characterisation, on the whole, was well done in my opinion and all main characters felt real and believable. They felt like the typical girls you’d meet in a secondary school, and reading the chapters sent during school really felt like we were stepping into a high school.

Tara was probably my favourite character. I really liked how we saw her evolution and how Clarke allowed to see who and what had shaped Tara into what she’d become—and how those same factors played into her death.

The romance between Alice and Jack, Tara’s brother, felt a little forced, particularly at the beginning. By the end, I was fully onboard with it—though there seemed to be a few pacing issues where we’re told rather than shown how time is passing and how the relationship progresses.

The ending of this book felt raw but satisfying.

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