Severed by Simon Kernick || Book Review

After devouring We Can See You by Simon Kernick, I made a note to look for more of his books and I was happy to find that the library had a couple to checkout.

I chose two books to start off with, hoping to continue discovering more wonderful books by the author.

You can actually pick up on how different writing standards are with earlier books to the modern books. I didn’t find this book lived up to the same standard of ‘good‘ that I experienced with the previous book.

DISCLAIMER: This review could contain possible spoilers based on my opinions. All opinions and views are my own.

Book review: Severed by Simon Kernick #bookreview #simonkernick #mysterybooks #crimebooks #booktwt #bookaddict #booktwitter
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Originally published: 2007

Pages: 320
Format: Paperback

Plot from GoodReads:

Ex-soldier Sean Tyler wakes up in an unfamiliar room next to the headless corpse of a girl he’s met recently. With his memory of the previous 24 hours wiped clean, he’s hardly out of bed before the he notices a note next to the TV telling him to press play on the room’s DVD machine. The film shows him stabbing someone to death.

Tyler is confident that the footage is fake, but will a jury see things the same way? The man on the end of the phone tells him that if he wants the evidence to disappear, he must go to an address in east London, and await further instructions.

Tyler knows he must do as he is told. He also knows that the phone caller has no intention of keeping him alive.

To survive he must recover the missing 24 hours of his life and find out who’s setting him up before his time runs out for good. The clock is ticking…

Thoughts:

The first chapter pretty much starts off on an insane note and the main character, Sean, is sent on an insane trail to do something insane or ‘else‘…

Sean is made out to be quite resourceful to get out of very sticky situations but that’s pretty much all that made him stand out from any of the other characters in the book.

The book has a medium to fast pace with new information being thrown in with each chapter, and little information given about characters popping in and disappearing again. I still don’t understand the importance of some of them, even with the big ripples that some made.

The blurb made the book sound really interesting but the book didn’t really live up to the suspense it promised. The ending was rushed but had one small interesting twist that was kind of an “I didn’t see this coming” moment but otherwise there wasn’t anything else to make this book stand out.