If words could kill…

Eli Hagin can’t finish anything.

He hates his job, but can’t seem to quit. He doesn’t want to be with his girlfriend, but doesn’t know how end things with her, either. Eli wants to write a novel, but he’s never taken a story beyond the first chapter.

Eli also has trouble separating reality from fiction. When his best friend kills himself, Eli is motivated, for the first time in his life, to finally end something himself, just as Mike did…

Except sessions with his therapist suggest that Eli’s most recent ‘first chapters’ are not as fictitious as he had intended … and a series of text messages that Mike received before his death point to something much, much darker…

Will Carver is the international bestselling author of the January David series and the critically acclaimed, mind-blowingly original Detective Pace series that includes Good Samaritans (2018), Nothing Important Happened Today (2019) and Hinton Hollow Death Trip (2020), all of which were ebook bestsellers and selected as books of the year in the mainstream international press. Nothing Important Happened Today was longlisted for the Goldsboro Glass Bell Award 2020 and Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. Hinton Hollow Death Trip was longlisted for Guardian Not the Booker Prize, and was followed by three standalone literary thrillers, The Beresford, Psychopaths Anonymous (both optioned for TV) and The Daves Next Door. He lives in Reading with his family.

My thoughts: another strange adventure inside the psyches of some more Carver characters. This time Eli, who can only write first chapters, Jackie, his girlfriend, and Mike, his best friend.

Leading up to and away from Mike’s terrible, tragic death, Eli struggles with what kind of person he is, hates his awful, soul destroying job (reminiscent of Office Space) and keeps planning on dumping Jackie. Who’s cheating on him, and visiting a confessional every week to appease her guilt.

Mike’s death makes them both feel guilty, and wonder whether they could have stopped it. But someone has been nudging him along, will his phone reveal their identity? And what’s with the two Teds in the coffee shoppe next door?

With little references to other Carver books for the careful reader, and clever little moments where you wonder just what’s real and what’s maybe in Eli’s head, like his invisible therapist, this is another clever, twisty turny book from one of my favourite authors.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own