Somebody's Daughter by David Bell

 

This is one of those modern thrillers that confuses interminable twists and a surfeit of variously unreliable narrators for cleverness. Somewhere in the back half I was finally able to turn off the part/s of my brain that were trying to figure out what was going on and just read; the book didn't necessarily get better, but it got less unpleasant. It's a little harder to pull off unreliable narrator/s when you stick to third, but the tight third here enables the decision--there's one narrator who's a little more reliable, and they're also the character acting less stupidly than just about all the others. So many people with so little in the way of redeeming characteristics, it's vaguely amazing I finished the novel. I picked this up at the library because I remembered reading another book by the author, I remember being ambivalent about it, but liking it more than this. Oh well.