I received this novel as an advance copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I looooove books that deal with doubts about a crime previously committed. I don’t know why but it is just my favourite thing to read! I was super excited to request this book and get it approved, so here is my review:
Summary (Goodreads): Will Hurley was an attractive, charming, and impressive student at Dublin’s elite St. John’s College-and Ireland’s most prolific serial killer. Having stalked his four young victims, he drowned them in the muddy waters of the Grand Canal. Sentenced to life imprisonment when he was just nineteen, Will is locked away in the city’s Central Psychiatric Hospital.
Freshman Alison Smith moved to the Big Smoke to enrol in St. John’s and soon fell hard for Will Hurley. Her world bloomed … and then imploded when Liz, her best friend, became the latest victim of the Canal Killer-and the Canal Killer turned out to be the boy who’d been sleeping in her bed. Alison fled to the Netherlands and, in ten years, has never once looked back.
When a young woman’s body is found in the Grand Canal, Garda detectives visit Will to see if he can assist them in solving what looks like a copycat killing. Instead, Will tells them he has something new to confess-but there’s only one person he’s prepared to confess it to. The last thing Alison wants is to be pulled back into the past she’s worked so hard to leave behind. Reluctantly, she returns to the city she hasn’t set foot in for more than a decade to face the man who murdered the woman she was supposed to become.
Only to discover that, until now, Will has left out the worst part of all …
My Rating: 
Review: I really wanted to love this book. But I didn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a bad novel. But it wasn’t as exciting as I wanted it to be.
I really liked that the story flitted back and forth in time to pull the story together. I thought both time points were super interesting, which is something that happens quite rarely for me.
However, I thought the pacing for this book was slower than what I would have liked and some of the character interactions were a little too forced to be realistic and believable. I also didn’t think there were really enough twists to keep me interested. I also didn’t think that the resolution to the story and the ending worked well for the story; it just didn’t live up to my expectations.
This is a slow-burner of a thriller, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it wasn’t what I was hoping to see. I thought it was an interesting case but it didn’t have enough twists to keep my interest. For those reasons, I’m giving it 2/5 stars.
Special thanks to Chloe @BookDragons for making me these amazing stars! If you haven’t checked out her awesome blog, you should visit her here!
Happy reading ~
Omg I follow this author on WordPress and social media. I’ve been wanting to read her books for forever; I had no idea she was on NetGalley! Did you see that she also has another book, Distress Signals? It’s about a murder on a cruise ship and apparently she got the idea from working on a Disney cruise ship when she was college-age or thereabouts. I haven’t read it yet but it sounds fantastic. Thanks for this review; it’s nice to be able to into this book expecting a slow burn! I really want to like her stuff lol and now I can go into it knowing even better what to expect.
I actually did read Distress Signals by her! I think my post should be on this blog somewhere so you can read what I thought about it. I think that her publishers always put her books up on Netgalley and I think it is Blackstone Publishing (but I may be wrong about that) so you should definitely search her up and see what you find! I hope you like her work!
I’ll def go find your review of her other book!
Ah darn! The synopsis sounds so good! Bummer that it was a miss!
Erica | Erica Robyn Reads
Yes, the synopsis is really what caught my attention but it ended up being a bit of a dud 🙁 Oh well, better luck next time, right?