Catherine Ryan Howard - 56 Days

No one knew they'd moved in together. Now one of them is dead. Could this be the perfect murder?
56 DAYS AGO
Ciara and Oliver meet in a supermarket queue in Dublin the same week Covid-19 reaches Irish shores.
35 DAYS AGO
When lockdown threatens to keep them apart, Oliver suggests that Ciara move in with him. She sees a unique opportunity for a new relationship to flourish without the pressure of scrutiny of family and friends. He sees it as an opportunity to hide who - and what - he really is.
TODAY
Detectives arrive at Oliver's apartment to discover a decomposing body inside.
Will they be able to determine what really happened, or has lockdown provided someone with the opportunity to commit the perfect crime?

Comment: I became interested in this book after seeing it being recommended by someone whose opinion I trust. Before that, the author had not even gotten on my radar, but this story proved to be quite interesting.

In this story, Ciara and Olivier meet in a supermarket and exchange some small conversation. A subject in common makes the conversation last longer and they decide on a following date. Days later, a global pandemic affects the whole world and the government imposes a lock-down, whose circumstances now allow them to need to be together for a specific period of time. Later, a neighbor alerts the authorities that a strange smell is coming out of the apartment and the police discovers a decomposing body inside and what seems to be a clean apartment. What happened and why?

The author mentioned in a note (at the end of the novel) that she was inspired by the words of other authors, who claimed they would never write stories where the covid-19 pandemic would be part of it. For Catherine Ryan Howard, the inspiration was exactly the opposite and she wrote this story after the first lock-down was mandatory in Ireland. I've found this to be quite the incentive to think of this novel in a specific way and with this in mind, the book does take on an even more special meaning.

The story is told in alternated voices, Ciara's, Oliver's and Lee's, the police officer who is now dealing with the discovery. I would not say there are chapters because as things move along we have POVs going back and forth between the titled 56 days ago, when Ciara and Oliver meet, and today, when the body is discovered, and even one or two other dates, related to the explanation of some things. This method is clever, of course, because it doesn't show us right away what the secret is, or what is behind the whole thing, but there were times this didn't work so well.

My biggest complaint is that this going back and forth was a bit distracting and sometimes too repetitive... we have, a few times, the POV of both Ciara and Oliver of things that happened in the past. For instance, the first time I've noticed this we had had their first meeting told from Ciara's POV, then we had the POV of the police officer and after that, I thought we would go on to a different scene but no, we went back to see the same thing seen from Oliver's POV. The idea is, obviously, to allow us to see the little things and to start having doubts about what is going on, but this happened enough times to become a bit tiresome.

The plot develops slowly and with having several times in which important things happen, things start to seem one thing at some point and then, by the end, it's something different. There were a couple of revelations which I guessed. Not the how, but the fact itself, just from some hints which the author had to include anyway. Basically, we are told and shown that some situations were random, simple, not much of a big deal, and it turned out that for every seemingly little detail there was something bigger behind. I did like the process of peeling the layers but some of them, for the overall story to make sense, could not be kept a secret completely.

This was how it seemed to me, at least. Of course, the biggest revelation was quite surprising, so obvious in its simplicity. For this, the atmosphere and the vibe created by the author were the key elements, because we keep convincing ourselves of certain things, of the information told by the characters - even when we doubt things are that easy or that all they say is true - and when something else proves that what had been told wasn't that objective after all... the author certainly planned things quite well, but the writing wasn't always as engaging as it should.

Another issue I should point is that, for me, there are situations that aren't easy to imagine, namely how Ciara and Oliver planned for some things while they were having dates before the lock-down and how things progressed in that period of time. I understand some choices had to be less reliable for the plot to reach the goal, but this made me think there was also a certain idea of dissonance, and a few steps they both took felt unlikely to be done that way, even with their personal reasoning behind.

The covid-19 references were, as we can now muse about, quite on point. Who would not relate to that? We all lived it somehow! Of course, this means that the dead person in this novel died and no one found out or thought to pay attention to anything due to confinement. 

What I think was well done is that the way the characters think about the pandemic along with what we slowly discover about them makes them very mundane and relatable for most of the novel. They could be anyone dealing with that situation.

Of course, when the big revelations happen, especially the one I consider to be THE one, we learn that feeling empathy towards a character - or a real person in fact - is always debatable and subjective.

In the end, this was a fascinating novel, although not always fully engaging. I'm still curious about reading something else by the author and will do so in the future.

Grade: 7/10