Book of the Day

From the review

Short chapters, most of them three or four pages, handed between characters like a baton. Steve Wheeler is in an English village doing the pub quiz and keeping to a routine he has no intention of breaking. Amy Wheeler is on a private island guarding a bestselling novelist who is having a wonderful time. Then a body turns up, and a bag of money, and two pleasant lives running in parallel stop being parallel. Osman builds momentum before the plot has explained what it wants, which is a neat trick to pull on readers who think they know this author's gears. The killings come with a pattern. Influencers dead in three countries, each one near a bag of cash, each one a client Amy was paid to keep breathing. That arrangement does something interesting to a reader's suspicion. There is no drawing room and no fixed cast to squint at, so attention drifts to the paperwork instead. Who arranged the transfers. Who knew the itinerary. Who profits from a bodyguard unable to account for her own movements. Reading alibis gives way to reading logistics, and the tension holds because Osman keeps the money legible even while the geography scatters.