‘The Fall’ by Rachael Blok

My Review (3 stars out of 5)

A man is found dead having apparently fallen from the tower above St Albans Cathedral. DCI Maarten Jansen is faced with the task of working out if the man jumped or was pushed. However, a witness – Willow – sets the investigation going in a different direction, linking a psychiatric hospital, a pregnant woman, and decades of silence.

As with most books I buy, I’d already read the first couple of pages of The Fall via Amazon’s look-inside feature, and it was this that inspired my purchase. However, after finding the dead body and the detective’s initial thoughts, the story slows down somewhat. The amount of information we’re given about Willow and her family feels a bit over the top and I got bored very quickly. While the book does get interesting later on, it takes way too long for this to happen, and I found myself skimming over some passages to find something that moved the story along. There’s also the issue of exclamation marks, which some authors believe are essential to meaning. In the first two chapters the word ‘exhausted’ gets an exclamation mark twice! Wow, these people must be REALLY exhausted! IMHO these vile devices (unless being used ironically), should be expunged from the text, as all they do is drag the narrative down.

An okay read that should have been so much better.

Back to the Blog