56 Days is my fourth read by Catherine Ryan Howard, the Irish author who has a super-lyrical and readable writing style and knows how to craft a brilliant psychological thriller. When I say I couldn’t put this down, I mean it! I’ve been in a little reading slump recently and 56 Days pulled me right back out of it.
Opening sentence: It’s like one of those viral videos taken inside some swanky apartment complex, where all the slim and fit thirty-something residents are doing star jumps behind the glass railings of their balconies while the world burns.
Let’s go back to lockdown…
Set in Dublin in 2020, 56 Days looks at the day of, and weeks leading up to, the discovery of a body in an apartment block.
Our lead characters are Detective Inspector Leah Riordon – known as Lee – called to the scene once the other residents make the police aware of a terrible smell coming from apartment one…
The other characters with chapters are Ciara and Oliver. Author Catherine Ryan Howard is brilliant at giving us different character POVs of the same scenario, so you see what happened in two different ways. This is the charm of Ciara and Oliver’s chapters, especially as there is far more to both of them than first meets the eye.
He knew coming back to Ireland would be a risk, but he had presumed that enough time had passed for him to be yesterday’s news.
It’s all about the small, in the moment decisions
From the beginning, 56 Days was packed with intrigue and tension and it just kept ramping it up. This isn’t the first book I’ve read that uses the first lockdown as part of its plot, but it definitely uses it to the most dramatic and evocative effect.
While reading, I was transported right back to all those strange feelings of lockdown one in 2020. Those collective feelings of loss and isolation, of disruption to the norm. This is maybe why this book was so addictive to me, all of this was so relatable.
At its core, 56 Days looks at the huge consequences that can occur from the smallest decisions – it’s so cleverly done, there are a few moments where you think you know where the plot is going and then it swerves direction. There is a literal gasp moment too – just when you think you’ve worked everything out, you very much have not.
Quick, clever, so descriptive and well-written, 56 Days is a brilliant psychological thriller – loved it!
The other Catherine Ryan Howard books I’ve read and really enjoyed are The Nothing Man (the plot of which actually gets a mention in this read, love a good cross-book reference), The Trap and The Liar’s Girl.
- Get your copy of 56 Days here;
- Published by Corvus 202;
- 426 pages;
- My rating:
Books on the 7:47 