Book Review: The It Girl by Ruth Ware

The It Girl is another whodunnit by Ruth Ware. Six Oxford University students became fast friends during their first term, and one of them is dead by the second term. Murdered. The story is told from two timelines, alternating between "before" and "after" the murder.

Unlike many of Ruth Ware's books which grips you from page one, The It Girl was a bit slow to build up. But once the pace picked up, it was hard to put down. I finished the book in two days.

Hannah, the protagonist, was hounded by the media over the murder of her best friend (it was her testament that put a suspect behind bars) but instead of taking a stand and telling them to buzz off, she went into hiding. 

A decade later, a reporter found her at her work place and convinced her to start recalling her memories of what she saw on the night of the murder.

As she dug deeper and deeper into the past, it began to look like one of her friends was the murderer. Or was it someone else? Ruth Ware is really good at the game of casting doubts on every character. :-)

Book Review: 1222 by Anne Holt

I've never read Anne Holt's work before even though she's a best-selling novelist. That's because she's a Norwegian author, and her novels are all written in Norwegian. So English readers like me are lucky when her eighth installment of The Hanne Wilhelmsen series was translated into English.

After having read Snow by Orhan Pamuk, which was also another translated work, Anne Holt's 1222 is a refreshing change. It draws you in. 

Although it's a crime thriller, it is not one of those action-packed novels that I like. Rather, it is reminiscent of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes. It focuses more on solving the puzzle of the crime instead of the crime itself. That said, I do like Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, too, so if there is going to be anymore English-translated work of Holt's, I'd be sure to read them.

1222 is the name of a hotel atop a mountain near a train station. The story begins with a snow blizzard that caused the train to derail. The survivors were rescued and taken to Finse 1222. Snowed in and unable to go home, people started to die. 

Amongst the survivors was a former police detective Hanne Wilhelmsen. Paralyzed from waist down due to a bullet that hit her 12th and 13th vertebrae, she tried to work out who the murderer was from a long list of suspects.

Even though I am more a fan of fast action novels, somehow the narration of 1222 managed to draw me into the story and it was one of those hard-to-put-down books. Imagine this....my nose was buried in my Kindle as hubby and I walked along Jalan Telawi in Bangsar.....