The ending redeemed a lot of the book.
It wasn't enough for me to give it a higher rating than two stars though.
I really liked the concept. There's a town in the middle of nowhere in the USA where criminals and people have testified against criminals live. Shielded away from the rest of the country. There's one thing that sets this location apart from all other. It's a social experiment. All people have had their memories removed.
Most of them have had the specific memories of the crimes removed, others (that have been in the village the longest) have had large parts of their memory removed.
Sheriff Calvin Cooper has been a law man for the full eight years in the town. He has seen everyone coming and going (people are actually free to leave), and he has been there when new joiners had to pick their new names and identities. Then one day a murder happens. Then the next. This is unheard of in the town isolated from the rest of the world. Cooper starts the investigation.
The book takes place in the span of a week. The thing that annoyed me the most was that everything seemed to be going fine for eight years, and then suddenly everything starts to unspool. The murders aren't the only things going on in the town.
There are people with assignments, special agents suddenly coming in, and people are getting their memories back. It all felt a bit random all at once.
This does get explained in the end, but for me it wasn't an enticing enough read. I didn't care for the characters enough; not even the ones we should care about the most.
The pacing felt off as well for me. The build up is slow and then it all escalates, but it goes out of control a few times as well. It was a bit too overdone and chaotic for my taste.
The premise will stick with me, but the execution of it is not something that will linger in my mind (no pun intended).
2 stars
Statistics:
Date read: May 28, 2020
Date published: August 1, 2017
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Format: Paperback
Pages: 382
Genre: Mystery/Thriller/Horror
My Number of Books Read by this Author: 1
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