The plot of A Lesson in Cruelty is a little hard to summarise without spoilers but I shall do my best. This is really a book of three separate plots which then come together. The first part is about Anna, a woman who is being let out of prison only to find her cellmate dead on the day of her supposed release. The second is about Marie, a woman imprisoned on a remote Scottish island (that's about it really). Finally we have Lucy, a law student who desperately wants to sleep with her professor and gets the chance to when they go away to a conference together.
If these plots sound a bit disjointed then good, I have accurately represented the listening experience. Never has a book had so much going on and yet so little of it which actually matters in the end. The swaps in character did not feel particularly natural and I actually found it intrusive to the flow of the story. The three characters are distinct but when the plot starts coming together and the different threads start to collide, you start to realise how much faff there was. It is at this point that some events are chalked up to 'random coincidence', something I'd be more forgiving of if this wasn't already a bit of a mess in terms of how its crafted.
I also just need to talk about Edgar for a minute because he is in some ways the most outlandish character. He is a law professor and honestly cartoonish in the way he neglects his family and how he conducts 'research'. I'd like to point out here that I am actually a lecturer and even allowing for the liberties fiction can take, what he gets away with is absurd. It pokes a huge hole in an already-punctured plot.
The 'twist' at the end is painfully obvious as several reviewers have pointed out, but it's made even more obvious by the way the audiobook is narrated. The narrator does an ASMR voice for some passages where we're not supposed to know who exactly is narrating them, but then the same voice (admittedly dialled back) is used for that character so it becomes clear who it's going to turn out to be. Additionally, some lines near the end are a different volume to the surrounding ones. This was very distracting and just made the production seem a bit cheap, like they'd been dubbed in afterwards.
Overall, I sadly wasn't very impressed by this thriller. The plot is oversaturated and requires suspension of disbelief to buy that certain aspects would be allowed to happen. The characters are decent but there are so many of them and too many coincidences play out in terms of their relationships. Perhaps if the audiobook had been better then I would have enjoyed this more, but it wasn't my cup of tea
Overall Rating:
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