Title: The Cousins

Author: Karen M. McManus

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 337

Rating: 3.5/5

I have a bit of a weird relationship with Karen M. McManus, because I first discovered her work when I was staying at a hospital overnight with a borderline case of sepsis. I enjoyed One of Us is Lying and One of Us is Next, but I can’t help associating them with the smell of a hospital ward.

This book is a standalone, but it’s still very McManus in that it uses the same tricks, including being told primarily in the present tense and through the different points of view of the characters she’s using. Fortunately, there are only three main characters for us to follow in this one and so it doesn’t get too confusing.

The idea here is that there’s a family called the Story family (nice surname), and the grandmother cut off all ties with her children with a note saying “you know what you did”. Each of the kids claims that they don’t have a clue what she’s talking about, but life goes on.

At the start of this story, those children have had children of their own, and the grandmother sends out a message inviting her three grandkids to come and stay with her. They’re not particularly keen on the idea, but they go along anyway.

Thus begins a tale full of twists and turns that sets out to keep surprising the reader from start to finish, with varying results. Most of them came out of the blue for me, but then I’ve never been the kind of reader who tries to predict what’s going to happen.

If you’ve read thrillers before, you pretty much know what you’re in for. I’d say that this is a little tamer than most thrillers, probably because McManus is aiming for a younger demographic, but it was still a decent read even as a 35-year-old man, so there’s that. I’d read more of her stuff.

Learn more about The Cousins.