Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney
| Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney | |
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| Category: Thrillers | |
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Reviewer: Sue Magee
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| Summary: A brilliant plot with so many twists you feel dizzy! Exceptionally well done and highly recommended. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 320 | Date: August 2021 |
| Publisher: HQ | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-0008370985 | |
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Amelia Wright is forty-two and it was the staff raffle at Battersea Dogs Home that gave her a weekend away in a converted chapel in Scotland. Her husband, Adam, isn't so keen on the idea. Like Amelia, he knows that their marriage has been under strain: he's a screenwriter and he's never shy of making it clear to Amelia that he'd prefer to spend time with the novels he's hoping to adapt than with her. Amelia's annoyed that he never enquires about how her day has been - and working with the dogs, many of whom have been abused, is never easy. Still - she's won the weekend away, even if it does mean driving for eight hours in her 1978 Morris Minor Traveller with Adam beside her in the passenger seat - and then doing the same thing to come back a couple of days later.
Adam's different. He suffers from prosopagnosia - the inability to recognise faces. He can - and has - walked past his wife in the street. He's more likely to recognise her by her shape or her perfume. He can't even recognise his own face in the mirror. It's one of the reasons why he hides behind his work: it's safe. Recently he's been trying to look after himself rather more - taking up running half marathons. Amelia thinks of it as him being good at running away, especially from reality. She got her own back though - she destroyed his running shoes. Adam doesn't seem to be the man that she married but his career-high happened when he sold his first screenplay at the age of twenty-one. Since then, he's been adapting other people's words for the screen.
So, the signs for the weekend away are not good but it wasn't always like this. We find out a great deal from the letters written to Adam, by his wife, every year on their anniversary - but they were never sent. What is obvious though is that husband and wife have secrets that they're reluctant to share.
It's a couple of years since I read Alice Feeney's I Know Who You Are but I remembered the story full of twists and turns where no one was who they seemed to be. Could Feeney do it again? Yes, she can - and I think this book is even better. There's a real talent for evoking location - I shivered when I read about the eerie Scottish chapel in the snow. When it became obvious that Adam and Amelia were there for a reason, I couldn't put the book down. Twist followed turn and you could never be certain what was going to happen next. It's another cracker and I'd like to thank the publishers for letting Bookbag have a review copy.
For more of Scotland in the snow, we can recommend The Red, Red Snow by Caro Ramsay.
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