Her Perfect Family

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As she enters the cathedral hall where all the parents and visitors are gathered, a shot suddenly rings out wounding Gemma. It was great to be back with familiar characters, particularly PI Matthew Hill, who is one of my favourite crime series protagonists.

However, it also turns out that Gemma's family is far from perfect, with a web of hidden deceits under the surface. The fig tree is there, too, when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, when the teenagers vanish. Her Perfect Family is a thrilling ride, a finely-crafted mystery that begins with a terrible act of violence, a mother’s worst nightmare. As each person agonizes over their secrets and the problems they may be causing the family unit is further broken down.I also thought some of the transitions from flashback to present, or viceversa felt abrupt and choppy. The people of Japan believe that everyone has an ikigai - a reason for being; the thing that gets you out of bed each morning. I’m not sure that our author has ever spoken to teenagers or people who smoke weed, but this line made me laugh out loud.

It was supposed to make things seem tenser, more frightening, but anyone who refers to stoners who smoke dabs as “hard-core smokers” will find anything scary. The Perfect Family doesn’t exist, it is a social construct which forever lies in the eyes of the beholder , and is held up as a pedestal worth climbing on top of. But when a fling with the feisty beauty leads to an unexpected pregnancy, Aine runs from her sexy, stubborn boss. OK, it was horribly underfunded and it didn’t have coordinated decor with fancy accents, but his experience across the few dramas of his lifetime – appendicitis and a broken leg – had been good.After all, Emma’s a kindred spirit—someone Sophie was sure she could bare her soul to, despite the village rumours. and then there are so many extra (and in some cases extraneous) characters—the ex boyfriend, the tutor, all the school administrators, ex-wives, the family of the private eye. You also get some chapters narrated by the private investigator, Matthew, who I actually liked more than all of the other characters in the book. It’s their daughter’s graduation and Rachel and Ed Hartley are expecting it to be one of their family’s happiest days. And yeah – I get that an affair with a married man is, in theory, dirty and seedy and underhand but I’ve always told myself it’s not like that with us because his marriage is over anyway.