Sweet Little Lies
Sweet Little Lies by Caz Frear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Sweet Little Lies hooked me immediately and kept me engaged through the entire novel.
Caz Frear has given us a terrific police procedural. Policewoman Cat Kinsella is a flawed and believable officer. Summary can be read elsewhere, what I want to emphasize is the writing.
Police procedurals are a dime a dozen in the mystery fiction genre. In some ways, Sweet Little Lies is formulaic. We’ve got the flawed narrator, a police officer with a father figure colleague, a strong female role model as a boss, and family secrets bubbling their way up to the surface of her current murder case.
But what sets this apart is the attention to detail, well drawn characters, and the excellent pacing by Frear. Little by little, as the murder case progresses, we get more info about the victim’s past. Along side this narrative, Cat and her father’s past is slowly revealed. Do the two intersect, and if so–how much? Frear seamlessly interweaves the stories, writing in-depth characters and wonderful descriptions.
Two of my favorite things about Frear’s writing: I love how she talks about the rural roads in Ireland with names like “pot-holey road” the “road where so-and-so kept sheep.” And, she writes one of the best humorous banter I’ve come across. Banter is difficult to write, coming across as stilted in less deft hands. Frear totally nails it in the scene where Cat and Aiden meet for a drink. With a less skilled writer, humor often reads like a formulaic, “insert jokes and laughter here.” But Can and Aiden’s conversation creates even more depth of character and is eminantley believable.
If you like well a written police procedural, with strong female characters, strong sense of place, and complex layers of family relationships, give this a try.