Mark Billingham

Perfect strangers. A perfect holiday. The perfect murder... Three couples meet around the pool on their Florida holiday and become fast friends. But on their last night, their perfect holiday takes a tragic twist: the teenage daughter of another holidaymaker goes missing, and her body is later found floating in the mangroves. When the shocked couples return home, they remain in contact, and over the course of three increasingly fraught dinner parties they come to know one another better. But they don't always like what they find: buried beneath these apparently normal exteriors are some dark secrets, hidden kinks, ugly vices... Then, a second girl goes missing. Could it be that one of these six has a secret far darker than anybody can imagine? A brilliantly plotted, utterly gripping thriller about the danger of making friends on holiday, Rush of Blood is Mark Billingham's most ambitious and accomplished work to date.

Rush of Blood

Originally published: Great Britain: Little, Brown, 2012.

Sam Kiszonka

Okay, I am going to start with the positives on this one.
I absolutely loved the story, it was dark, intriguing and completely twisted. But sadly these things do happen.
The story focuses on three English couples vacationing in Florida, when a 14 year old girl goes missing. They all promise to keep in touch when they return home, and they do. However the missing girl incident follows them home and things quickly escalate.
All I can really say is that I did not expect that ending AT ALL!! Absolute madness!! 
The characters are all believable, they all have flaws and they are all quite likeable in their own ways. Billingham has done a fantastic job of bringing all these characters to life and giving each of them their own time to shine as a possible suspect. Seriously every one in this book is super suss!

However the let down was the writing. Whilst I know that a lot of people would really enjoy Billingham's style of writing, I found that I couldn't enjoy quite immerse myself in the story. 
The story jumps between the 6 vacationers and 2 detectives POV's. Sometimes I would have to go back an re-read sections as the POV would just randomly shift from one character to another with no notice.
After figuring out the 8 different POV's. We were also given narration from the killer. If that wasn't enough occasionally there would be an overview sort of section told from a third person view which would give you a run down of what was going on with all the couples.
Overall this was a brilliant story that I really just could not get into. I think that a lot of people would love this book, but Billingham's writing style is just not for me. 

I would like to thank the publishers and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book.

Rush of Blood

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