Brandy Scott

3 friends set off paper lanterns to celebrate the New Year and let go of things. When they hear that a small plane crashed that same night, and the 2 in the plane, Pete and his son Lincoln, are in the hospital, one of the friends, Aimee, is convinced the lanterns were the cause of the crash.
Melinda and Lou try to convince Aimee not to come forward. However, the guilt eats at her.
As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the women all have some resentment towards each other, either due to the paths not taken vs. the ones taken, or over men, or children, or wealth. The relationship that lasted 30 years is now beginning to fray. The women are forced to look carefully at their lives.
I began to get bored with the novel, and I wanted to get to the point. There was a bit of extraneous info and back stories that seemed a bit much.… (mehr)

New Years Eve often involves some reflection, some celebration, and some odd goings on. For Aimee, Melinda and Lou, starting out their celebration with an illegal Chinese lantern ceremony. Filling each lantern with their own resolution, the women light them and they lift off, after which they soon notice a flare of fire in the distance. Was it lucky, or something very bad (and for this reader why the hell didn't they ring the fire brigade, or the police or do SOMETHING it's JANUARY IN AUSTRALIA for god's sake!)

The next day, and the discovery that the flare was a small plane crashing, and the women start to wonder. Aimee takes the blame, Melinda dismisses it as nothing to do with the lanterns, and Lou's got other things on her mind. Leading to a blow up between the three, their relationship overrun by guilt and obsession.

A slow burning psychological thriller, NOT BAD PEOPLE seems to fit in the chick-lit / thriller style of novel that's been around quite a bit lately. In this outing we have three women fitting into the categories of brave, over-privileged and whinging nicely, with their downfall the sort of poor decision that anyone could make at any moment in time (although to be fair it came as a timely reminder also of the differences between city and country living - December / January and a hint of smoke or flames in these parts leads instantly to a lot of Meerkat like behaviour and a leap for the phone).

NOT BAD PEOPLE is one of those psychological thriller / mistakes in the moment type novels that you can really see making book club lists around the place. There is much scope here for discussions about the differences between good and bad, the way that mistakes happen and the way that people recover or atone for those mistakes.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/not-bad-people-brandy-scott… (mehr)