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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