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A Tidy Ending: The latest dark comedy from the Sunday Times bestselling author

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The ending was a clever switch if you suspend – and I mean really suspend – disbelief. It was too much of a stretch for my suspenders, I’m afraid, and I didn’t buy it, not with these characters. With some modification to the characters, it could be a great idea. Ridiculously good—gripping and creepy and clever and insightful. An absolute masterclass in characterization—Linda is going to stay with me for a very long time. Just as she did with The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, Cannon perfectly captures the claustrophobia of suburban life while reminding us how little we really know the people who live behind those lace curtains and neat hedges.” — Marianne Cronin, author of The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot This deliciously dark-ish, quirky story brilliantly comes together in a way that I never saw coming. Linda has lived around here ever since she fled the dark events of her childhood in Wales. Now she sits in her kitchen, wondering if this is all there is – pushing the Hoover round and cooking fish fingers for tea is a far cry from the glamorous lifestyle she sees in the glossy catalogues coming through the door for the house’s previous occupant. The bestselling author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep delivers a “compellingly creepy” ( The Guardian, UK) novel filled with unexpected twists about mysterious murders in a quiet neighborhood.

I'd never really needed a hiding place before, because my life has never had anything in it worth hiding.

MY THOUGHTS: Very clever, Joanna Cannon. I had absolutely no idea where you were taking me, not the slightest suspicion. My jaw hit the floor at the end and I laughed, probably a tad hysterically. It was just so beautifully unexpected. Lately, there have been too many books on dysfunctional characters with mental health issues, so a book needs to have something special to make it stand out. This one didn’t do anything for me. I feel that I might have liked this book slightly more if I had read it, but I doubt it would have been a 5 star read for me even then. It was more tedious than tidy for me. After The Hammets move houses, Linda becomes fixated on the previous tennant, Rebecca Finch, after receiving her mail. Rebecca’s fashion magazines lead Linda to believe that she lives a more glamorous life than she does. Intent on befriending Rebecca, Linda cyber stalks and ingratiates herself into her life. DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Harper Collins UK, Harper Fiction, The Borough Press via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions. A Tidy Ending’s lead character Linda’s first-person narrative, initially exudes a vibe similar to Nita Prose’ The Maid and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, in that her world-view is small and heavily shaped by past traumatic events.

Newspapers will always sniff around, asking their questions, wanting answers and photographs and rummaging in everyone else’s business. It’s started, even now. All those people who walked at the edges of my life over the years have begun to reappear. All those passersby and all those silent voices have suddenly found something they want to say. Everyone is trying very hard to work out who they think I am, which is odd because they were never very interested in who I was before any of this happened. I suppose they want to make sense of it all, and they’ll struggle because no one has all the pieces of the story, except for me. It won’t stop them, though. Poor Linda, they’ll say. She always was soft in the head or Poor Linda, I often thought she was a little bit strange, because we like to cast the heroes and the villains quite early on in a story, and then everyone knows where they are. Hers is a strictly limited life: she hardly uses the internet, never travels further than the city centre and envies the beautiful, moneyed people in glossy catalogues. She goes on about the number of reports she’s made, and we get a good picture of her as the neighbourhood busybody. Her mother is another real piece of work, a controlling woman who moved Linda to Wales after some family event in their past, something to do with her father, which is revealed only slowly. She must find common ground with people, and this is through things like the television show Coronation Street and will use these talking points as the basis for her answers to police, as to what she was doing and when. She has no breadth of experience, and almost everything she utters is cringeworthy.A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. Jacqueline Sutherland’s debut has a very different lonely woman at its heart. Kat’s husband has recently died in a car crash. She is miserably isolated in the countryside until her one friend, Ginny, urges her to join a club for the recently widowed, where she meets a man bringing up his daughter alone. Kat has always wanted children and jumps at the chance of an instant family, but is Nico really who he seems? And is Kat? This is a twisty, chilling look at the lengths one woman will go to get what she wants. First Born Heightened thriller plots frequently rub shoulders with compassionate portraits of ordinary lives in the work of Joanna Cannon. But while her bestselling debut, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, successfully used a resident’s disappearance to tease out a community’s secrets, the crime thriller element in her latest novel skews much darker, upsetting the balance.

Linda lives a nice, normal life, on a nice, normal street with Terry, her perfectly ordinary husband. Cannon’s novel is most engaging when it focuses on the details of Linda’s everyday struggles, elevating the kind of person whom we might otherwise judge, ridicule or overlook altogether. I get it; her father was the only one who understood her, unlike her mother who scoffs and scolds her nearly all the time. What impressed me early on was the voice, which was extraordinary, in the literary and the literal sense. The audiobook was narrated by Lissa Berry whose brilliant reading adds a lot of value to this novel.I have read and loved everything Joanna Cannon has written, and she has surprised me again with this entertaining, character driven mystery that has dark undertones. A story filled with wonderfully unconventional characters who seem to fit a bit outside of the box, but live a quiet and relatively conventional life in a relatively small and quiet suburban community - until news breaks about what they will soon come to believe is a serial killer. Who are the people who are seeing the world how it really is and who are the people that are mistaken? How do you know which way around it is?’” I really enjoyed this book, the writing is superb (see notes for some examples), and the author’s way with words captured me (Joanna Cannon - get OUT of my head!).

A compellingly crafted, darkly funny and compulsive read, full of twists’ – Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry About the Author, Joanna Cannon

The story gets even more interesting when a body of a young woman is found nearby and it doesn’t end there. Locals have the jitters and the whole awful affair feels too close for comfort. Linda’s not like everyone else, she keeps herself to herself. But she’s good at solving puzzles and there are times she sees things other people might have overlooked. Mother says I take far too much notice of the world, that I hold on to things when everyone else has let them go, but it’s just the way God made me and you never know when that kind of information will come in useful.

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