Book Review: "Someone in the Attic" by Andrea Mara

I first came across Andrea Mara because of her book 'No One Saw a Thing' and admittedly I thought it was fantastic. Her writing style of going back and forth between characters and places, from timeline to timeline, was pretty awesome and the story was really engrossing because in the middle of it were two very young children and everyone always wants kids to be alright in the end. However, I did not find the same deal in this book entitled 'Someone in the Attic'. Mainly because there was no hook character for me - there was no character in the whole book that I could say was actually a legitimately nice human being.

The story begins with Anya who has been found dead in her bathtub and her 'friend' Julia seems to know it was no drowning accident but instead it was a murder. Julia plus a couple of other 'friends' of hers try to uncover the truth about what happened to Anya and with that, they go digging up some other awful stuff that happened in the past such as the time when another 'friend' from their friendship group died - Donna.

As the book goes on, we don't really get too much back and forth into timelines except to see the friendship before Anya and Donna died. We then get a whole host of characters into the present-day mix that it is more than often hard to keep up with who is who. I'm not going to lie to you but I felt this book was way too overloaded with fluff characters who had no real big impact on the story.

By the end of the story, we know who did it of course. However, the route it took to get there meant that the way Julia found out didn't make a lot of sense and ended up being a bit strange: someone who has murdered someone else would not leave Riddler-esque clues around in order to have themselves found out. The result seemed a bit too out there and most likely, this is not how it would have happened in real life at all. It made me kind of upset because the whole solution that is found out in about 5 pages near the end of the book means that about 50% of the rest of the book was a complete waste of time.

The first thing I didn't like about this text was that there were so many characters and again, so many unlikeable characters. I understand that it is made to look like anyone could be the killer, but even Julia our main character, is completely unlikeable. She talks about Anya as if she's a horrid person and even though she was, you can at least have a bit of respect for someone who has been murdered. Another thing is that Anya was genuinely a horrid person and so it is a bit difficult to get on the empathy train when it comes to the funeral scene.

The next thing I didn't like was the ending. I felt the ending was literally laughable because it includes an anagram. I'm not going to lie to you but murderers very rarely leave anagrams so people can discover who they are. This is not the 'Chamber of Secrets' and you are not Tom Riddle. I felt that part really took me out of the whole crime scene investigation atmosphere that I usually like getting from thriller novels. Think about it, someone who does not want to be found out for murder not only leaves an anagram, but also says that they were sure that Julia would have worked out the anagram. This sounds above and beyond stupid. I'm sorry, I could not take that ending seriously by any means.

From a badly written ending to fluff characters who made no impact on the text, this book's use of TikTok seemed to be a way of padding the book some more and including other character such as Julia's children. There were a whole host of ways to make this book even shorter and I don't think that this is anywhere near as good as her previous novel. Though, I am looking forward to what she does next - I hope it is better than this.