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BOOK REVIEW: All These Perfect Strangers by Aoife Clifford
This is about three deaths. Actually more, if you go back far enough. I say deaths, but perhaps all of them were murders. It’s a grey area. Murder, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So let’s just call them deaths and say I was involved. This story could be told a hundred different ways.
Within six months of Pen Sheppard starting university, three of her new friends are dead. Only Pen knows the reason why.
Things don’t go wrong in an instant. There isn’t one single moment when the world suddenly splits in two. Rather, it begins with a minute crack, and then another and another, until they join together, getting bigger and wider and all the time you keep fooling yourself that this can still be fixed. That you can fill them in and everything will return to normal.
The Academic Night was the beginning. A hairline fracture, a fissure too small for Frank to notice. But I can hardly blame him; at the time I didn’t see it either.
College life had seemed like a wonderland of sex, drugs and maybe even love.
Looking up into his eyes, I wanted to shrink the world so it was only as large as the two of us, ask him if this could be love, but he was already moving his head, turning his eyes south to calculate the bare minimum of clothes that needed to be shed. We ended up having sex on that roof, minimal moving, fumbling, functional, rubber-infused sex.
Full of perfect strangers, it felt like the ideal place for Pen to shed the confines of her small home town and reinvent herself. But the darkness of her past clings tight, and when the killings begin and friendships are betrayed, Pen’s secrets are revealed. The consequences are deadly.
‘Sometimes, other people pay the price for you trying to do the right thing.’
The rest of this review can be found HERE!
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