Title: Keep Your Friends Close
Author: Joanne Ryan
Publisher: Boldwood Books
Pages: 234
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Rich and privileged
Mia Enderby allows best friend Carrie to live rent-free in her own apartment. Eight
months ago, Mia killed her abusive boyfriend Marco in self-defence after a
horrible altercation. Luckily for her, Carrie called some people from the Dark
Web and made the body, and the problem, disappear. Mia has no idea how the body
was disposed of. And all she needed to do was fork out 25,000 pounds.
Now Mia is exploring a
relationship with Sebastian, her boss at the art gallery where she works to
keep herself busy. When she begins to spot Marco almost everywhere she goes, and
begins to experience strange delusions and hallucinations, she begins to
question her sanity.
The book, written in
the first person past tense PoV of Mia Enderby, is a quick read. But the
writing wasn’t very exciting. The book needed better and more professional
proofreading.
One quote that stood
out for me”
Opposites may
initially attract but they don’t work.
A lot of the action
comes to us through Mia’s thoughts. Very little appears to be live action. This
affects the pace and leads to a flagging of our interest. The internal monologue
is definitely overdone.
All the usual tropes
are here: a protagonist who drinks too much and loses time, large blocks of it,
and thinks she is losing her mind.
None of the characters
were even remotely likeable, except for Sebastian, but Mia doesn’t really care
for him, and that affects us in turn. Mia herself is very entitled, taking pride
in her wealth and beauty. She keeps stressing that she has so much money, she
doesn’t need to work.
The friendship between
Mia and Carrie is a strange one. One wonders what to make of it. Between them,
the characters appear to be like warnings to us, actors in a morality play,
warning us about the consequences of wrong behaviour.
With a title like Keep
Your Friends Close, you think you know what to expect. And, of course, the
main premise is predictable. But the twist that follows goes a long way towards
causing you to pause and think.
(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)
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