Great thriller with a tense and oppressive atmosphere
⭐️⭐️⭐️
The blurb
Blackwood Bay. An ordinary place, home to ordinary people.
It used to be a buzzing seaside destination. But now, ravaged by the effects of dwindling tourism and economic downturn, it’s a ghost town – and the perfect place for film-maker Alex to shoot her new documentary.
But the community is deeply suspicious of her intentions. After all, nothing exciting ever happens in Blackwood Bay – or does it?
Blackwood Bay. An ordinary place, home to an extraordinary secret
The Review
I love a psychological thriller that involves a protagonist with a memory disorder. S.J Watson did this so incredibly well in Before I Go to sleep, (a book that sets the gold standard for psychological memory thrillers) and we revisit this theme in Final Cut. Alex can't remember much about her past, only snippets, but she knows that something bad happened to her, something that links her to Blackwood Bay.
This is the kind of book where it feels like everyone is keeping secrets. It keeps you on your toes as nobody is quite as they seem, and you'll end up questioning everyone's motivations and intentions. The landscape of this part of the country is so well described, you can picture it vividly - how barren it is and how isolated Alex feels.
The timeline of the story flows effortlessly between flashbacks of Alex's past, and her present, gathering films for a documentary. This means you are drip fed information that helps you make sense of the story unfolding in the present.
For me the book loses a slight bit of momentum in the middle, but once we get into the last third it picks up again for an excellent and thrilling reveal. The atmosphere of the book throughout is tense and oppressive as Alex becomes more and more entwined in trying to find out what happened to the girls that went missing.
The best feature of this book for me, was the premise of the local community being able to submit video footage anonymously. It really allowed for some super creepy moments and had quite a voyeuristic feel to it. It was a very good narrative technique, artfully employed.
Final Cut by SJ Watson is published in hardback by Doubleday on 6 August 2020
Big thanks to @annecater at Random things tours, for organising and inviting me to take part in the blog tour. This is my honest and unbiased opinion.
From the Author
In writing Final Cut I wanted to move away slightly from the entirely domestic, urban and claustrophobic feel of Before I Go To Sleep and open the story world a little. I’m returning to my preoccupations of memory, narrative and identity, though bringing a fresh spin and new maturity to them.
The story follows a young ambitious documentary film maker whose first film was lauded and her second less so, and who is struggling with her third film. She hits on the idea of making a film about life in a small, northern village and is persuaded, against her better judgement and for reasons unknown, to film in Blackwood Bay. Once there she discovers a town shrouded in mystery and full of secrets, that threaten to engulf and ultimately destroy her. She has to dig deep to save herself, as well as the lives of others.
In researching the book, I was drawn to the idea of the way we document our lives now, on Instagram and Twitter etc., and the downsides of that, as well as the darkness that can hide in plain sight and the abuses that people can visit on their fellow humans. The sad fact is I had to tone down some of the horrific atrocities I read about, or else the book would’ve been too dark, even for me