The Quiet People by Paul Cleave

Today is my stop on the blog tour for The Quiet People by Paul Cleave. This is my first book by this author and I think I held my breath through most of it because it's super tense! Huge thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for inviting me and to the publisher for my review copy.

The Blurb

Cameron and Lisa Murdoch are successful New Zealand crime writers, happily married and topping bestseller lists worldwide. They have been on the promotional circuit for years, joking that no one knows how to get away with crime like they do. After all, they write about it for a living. So when their challenging seven-year-old son Zach disappears, the police and the public naturally wonder if they have finally decided to prove what they have been saying all this time… Are they trying to show how they can commit the perfect crime? Multi-award winning bestseller Paul Cleave returns with an electrifying and chilling thriller about family, public outrage and what a person might be capable of under pressure, that will keep you guessing until the final page…

The Quiet People is published by Orenda Books and will be out next week, on 25th November.

 

My Review

Zach Murdoch is generally a happy kid but sometimes he can be a bit difficult, has meltdowns and can be tough for his parents to handle. When he goes missing, attention focuses on Cameron and Lisa with the press honing in on their various speeches at festivals where they said, jokingly, that they could get away with the perfect crime. Suspicions are high and life for the Murdochs will never be the same again. 

This book opens with a bang. The prologue is exciting, tense, heart racing then heart stopping. And those moments just kept coming right until the end of the book. I finished the book in a couple of days and felt like I hadn't taken a breath the entire time. There is a sense of dread and foreboding which builds and doesn't go away. There is a moment early in the book when Cameron thinks 'The Bad that populated my books just whispered my name and stroked a finger down my neck.' Which, firstly, I thought was just a great sentence and,  secondly, kind of describes how I felt reading this book. Honestly, I couldn't put it down. 

Told mostly, but not exclusively, from Cameron's point of view, and in him Cleave has given us a character that we can't help empathising with. At least until doubt is placed in our mind. I spent a lot of the story not knowing quite who or what to believe and I think I went through every emotion possible! But these are all characters we care about in one way or another.

The Quiet People is a story of doubt, desperation, disbelief and determination. A mission to find out the truth, one way or another. It has things to say about the press, and about society's tendency to judge people without knowing the facts, without knowing if we're right or wrong  It was a book that kept me on edge - I'm a parent and whilst my kids are grown up now, when they were younger one of them disappearing was my worst nightmare. My emotions were tossed and thrown all over the place as the story raced from one nail biting incident to the next. I thought one thing one minute, then another the next. Believed one person, then another. It's jam packed full of action, very tense and will absolutely keep you glued to the page. Loved it. 

The Author

Paul is an award-winning author who divides his time between his home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, where most of his novels are set, and Europe. He has won the New Zealand Ngaio Marsh Award three times, the Saint-Maur book festival’s crime novel of the year award in France, and has been shortlisted for the Edgar and the Barry in the US and the Ned Kelly in Australia. His books have been translated into over twenty languages. He’s thrown his frisbee in over forty countries, plays tennis badly, golf even worse, and has two cats – which is often two too many. Follow Paul on Twitter @PaulCleave, and his website: paulcleave.com.