Fell flat
The Lying Room is a great concept for me - a woman finds her lover murdered in his flat and helps to cover it up to hide the evidence of her affair. In all ways it should have really gripped me and I should have really struggled to put it down however I did feel that it fell down in some key aspects.
Firstly, the read felt a bit like a slog at times - there was so many bits of unnecessary detail packed in about meal times and nights out and the school run that I honestly didn't care about and did nothing to further the plot. It even got to the point where I thought the hamster and its cage might have had something to do with the murder as it was described so many times throughout the story. The character of Mabel (Neve's teenage daughter) also really annoyed me and I don't understand why she was given the free rein that she was to be such a horrible individual! To be honest I had zero compassion for all the characters really - I didn't even really like Neve. I also found the story to be a little unrealistic in certain places - surely CCTV or witnesses would have placed Neve near the flat at the time of the murder or even just all of the other times that she visited the flat to have an affair? Also covering up all trace evidence of you at a murder scene when it's somewhere you have spent a lot of time is surely a lot more difficult than just a bit of bleach and a wash cycle! The end reveal also felt very unrealistic and I didn't understand the motivation that the perpetrator had to commit the murder in the first place.
Overall The Lying Room was a great concept but on the whole fell very flat for me. Thank you to NetGalley & Simon & Schuster UK for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
