Book info

• Title Until It's Over
• Author Nicci French
• Year 2007
• Genre Thriller

Cycle courier Astrid Bell is bad luck - for other people. First Astrid's neighbour Peggy accidentally knocks her off her bike - and not long after is found bludgeoned to death in an alley. Then a few days later, Astrid is asked to pick up a package - only to find the client slashed to pieces in the hall of her own home. For the police it's more than coincidence. For Astrid and her six housemates it's just the beginning of a nightmare - the growing suspicion that the worst is yet to come. Because if it's true that bad luck comes in threes - who will be next to die?

Thoughts

Really enjoyed this book, a different sort of story to those that Nicci French usually produces. The murders at first almost seem incidental, you know that they are connected but it doesn’t seem clear how. Gradually, you can start guessing at who might have committed it, but it’s hard to pin the blame in the right direction.

A story of two halves, the first is from the point of view of Astrid, as she gets caught up in the middle of some really horrible stuff, and then the second is from the point of view of the criminal, explaining what and why, although you still never really get a good feel of why. It’s nice that in this story the police seemed okay at their jobs, and actually sympathetic to the cause, rather than bumbling or obnoxious which is the case in other French books.

A proper page turner, you spend much of the first half wondering what on earth is going to happen, and then the second half wondering why on earth it all happened how it did. And it’s great to read about someone that isn’t a master serial killer but instead of a series of events that just got out of control.

Rating: 5 / 5