Last month the book club made a welcome change towards contemporary thrillers with journalist Holly Seddon’s debut Try Not to Breathe. Although there has been a plethora of female driven psychological thriller’s in recent years this is my first foray into the genre. Despite my slow start this was definitely a good introduction.
In 1995 15 year old Amy was found having been raped and left for dead by an unknown attacker. However she didn’t die. Instead she fell into a vegetative a state: a form of a coma where there are no obvious signs of life except for neural changes. When freelance journalist Alex visits the hospital to write about advances in neuro medicine she becomes intrigued with Amy. They come from similar backgrounds and are the same age, except as Alex has aged and lived through the past 15 years Amy has remained as if in stasis. Soon Alex finds herself investigating Amy’s case and is determined to hunt down the killer. In doing so will she find herself in the process?
Alex, who holds the primary narrative voice, is an intriguing character. A young, successful woman who ought to have the world at her feet is falling apart at the seams. Her marriage and work have been crushed and she is ‘dealing’ with this by attempting to drink herself to death whilst denying her alcoholism. Her interest in Amy offers a glimmer of redemption and brings her into contact Amy’s mystery visitor.
The main characters are well fleshed out and their less than ideal aspects help to make them recognisable. For example Amy’s confusion and naiveté, Alex’s drinking and others hiding behind silence, rounds them out to become characters that could walk off the page and sit next to you. Sometimes characters are at their most realistic when they are at their most undesirable. However it is important to note that Alex is a pleasant travelling companion for the novel and it feels as though you could bump into someone like her in the street. What is intriguing is what people do not say. How Alex has to chase down answers and knock on locked doors in order to try to recapture Amy’s final days. Journalists make good protagonists as they take the reader on the same journey they are on.
It is also interesting to look at a case such as this without the filter of social media and mobile technology, where someone can have secrets, can disappear. Sneddon’s past as a journalist can be seen throughout as the writing is well crafted and skips along navigating the line between storytelling and description well. The medical information comes across as accurate and useful. It is lightly dropped into the novel – as it would be in a good piece of journalism – so as to provide the needed information in a manageable manner.
The murder mystery aspect has readers scouring the text searching for clues and turning points. Can you work out what happened before Amy does? Most of the book club kept pace with Amy’s investigation and found the writing and characters kept them reading even more so than the thriller aspect. The end is wrapped up rather quickly and little time is given over to get to know the perpetrator. It might have been nice to have had a chapter or two near the end narrated by the murderer. Seddon does not do this, perhaps in part because she avoids making the murder sensational or gratuitous, instead keeping human, frail and real Amy – the victim – at its centre.
Full of suspense Try Not To Breathe hooks the reader in from the start. The quality writing keeps one reading as much as the level of intrigue. It is one of those books that once you have started will not be able to put down until you reach the end. Set aside a day or two to get lost in Sneddon’s writing to really enjoy the novel
Ballantine Books. London. 2016. Hardback. ISBN: 9781782399452.
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