No One Saw A Thing by Andrea Mara (Paperback)

I was having lunch with friends, and we thought that instead of randomly recommending a book we’d enjoyed, it might be fun to read the same book and discuss it as a group in a book club. What could be nicer than a get together over some wine discussing books?! We took the plunge in February and for our first ever book club, we read Andrea Mara’s No 1 Bestseller, No One Saw A Thing. 

We all had such high hopes for this book; the blurb sounded really exciting, and it was a Richard & Judy Book club pick, so we thought we would all love it.

 

“Two children get on the train. Only one gets off...

No one saw it happen.

Your two little girls jump on the train ahead of you. As you try to join them, the doors slide shut and the train moves away, leaving you behind.

Everyone is lying.

It's only when you reach the next stop that you truly begin to panic. Because there aren't two children waiting for you on the platform. There's only one.

Someone is to blame.

Has your other daughter got lost? Been taken by a passing stranger?
Or perhaps the culprit is closer to home than you think….”

 

A missing child must be high up on every parent’s worst nightmare list. For Sive and her husband Aaron, this nightmare is about to become reality. Aaron Sullivan, a high-flying criminal barrister, is visiting London for a reunion with his former flat mates. As he catches up with the friends he lived with twenty years ago, his wife has arranged to have breakfast with one of his female friends. In the middle of rush hour, Sive tries to negotiate an unfamiliar London Underground with two small children and a baby in a pram. Her day is about to be changed irrevocably when she decides to answer her mobile phone, whilst pushing the pram and trying to keep her eyes on six-year-old Faye and two-year-old Bea.

Sive encourages the two young children to jump on the tube train, but before Sive can reach them, the train doors close leaving her stranded on the platform, and the two youngsters embarking on a journey alone. With panic rising and not knowing what she should do for the best, a fellow passenger approaches her and says that a man on board noticed what happened and would get the children off at the next station, however, when Sive arrives, she finds only Bea on the platform, Faye is missing, and all two year old Bea can say is “chase on the train.” It quickly becomes apparent that in a city of millions, no one saw what happened to Faye.

To her credit, Mara has managed to capture the fear of being in a large, unfamiliar city, full of crowded, bustling streets and large parks where a child could be taken to. She has painted a place where kidnappers could lurk in the shadows, and people turn a blind eye for fear of becoming involved in something they don’t want to be a part of. But what starts as an interesting storyline, filled with fear and angst, quickly turns into a book littered with plot holes which make for an exasperating read.

The book starts with several if only’s.’ “If only Sive hadn’t told the girls to run ahead.” “If only her editor hadn’t picked that moment to phone.” “If only she’d used the baby carrier…” “If only they hadn’t picked that week to go to London.” There are far too many ‘if only’s’ and ‘stars aligning’ for the first page of a novel, and maybe that should have been a warning claxon that this wasn’t going to be the book for me.

Anyone, even if they haven’t visited London, will be familiar with the concept of rush hour on the underground. There are enough TV shows, films, or news reports, which show how busy it is. People pushing each other to grab that two inches of space before the train doors close and whisk people to their place of work, is not just part of London rush hour, but it’s a part of any big city. So why would a mother tell a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old to run ahead and board a train in such an unfamiliar and scary environment? Why would you try and answer your phone when you are on holiday and trying to negotiate an unfamiliar busy city with 3 small children on your own? Common sense dictates that you either grab the kids and walk to somewhere quieter, or you ignore the call until a more convenient time. On the London Underground, you would be telling your children to hold tightly onto the pram and KEEP TOGETHER.

“Chapter 5, three days earlier” …it’s one of those books that flips back and forth along a timeline. If executed well, see Lucy Foley’s “The Guest List,” then it can be a positive element of a book. Done badly and it becomes a lazy way of conveying an ‘interesting’ twist to a book. Just dot a few red herrings in the past and it’ll confuse the reader! Unfortunately, I found all the toing and froing got in the way of the story and became very irritating very quickly. The chapters were far too short to constantly yo-yo from one period to the next. Mara could have gotten away with this technique in the latter part of the book where it would have helped to ramp up the tension, but to have it all the way through the book was too much.

Whilst we’re on the subject of the short chapters, they didn’t contain anything of merit, nothing was fleshed out, and far too many ended with: "What happened next changed everything" or something akin to that. Spoiler alert…it didn’t. The number of times this trope was employed instilled a fear in me that this writer wasn’t confident about her writing, or her characters, and decided a clickbait ending to a chapter would ensure that you’d continue to read further.

As the story unfolded, the main plot line became increasingly ridiculous and had little to do with the title of the book. No One Saw A Thing gives the impression this is a book about a child’s disappearance and her fate. What happened to her, why did no one see anything etc. This story seemed to be focused on the friends and their lives, little time is given to Faye, the character who no one saw disappear. The book would have made a little more sense if it had been called ‘Everyone Lies’.

Amongst my many grievances, the characters felt too one dimensional and predictable. All the men were obnoxious, all the women were weak. There was one character, Nina, who went in search of tea to give to Sive and Aaron, as they were taking part in a press conference to plea for help with finding Faye. It took her an hour to buy tea…in London! London is filled with Starbucks, Costa, or lots of independent coffee shops (that also serve tea) however, the press conference was in a hotel. A hotel serves tea, was Nina that feeble she couldn’t ask a member of staff for tea? Her character suggested she was a confident, practical person, so this seemed such an unlikely scenario that she couldn’t manage to source three cups of tea. Such incidences are littered throughout the book.

I failed to understand why, after twenty years, Aaron was so desperate to meet up with his former flatmates. It was transparent that none of them liked each other, either now, or even when they lived together. Even more bizarre was why Sive and the children came with him to the reunion, especially as there were no other partners/children invited. Sive didn’t know anyone, and it wasn’t as though these people were close friends to Aaron. The language used around the children was clearly inappropriate and the places they were expected to dine at were not places you would consider taking such young children so late at night. There was mention that days before Faye disappeared, of her being left to wander around a restaurant. Who would let their six-year-old child do that, especially in such unfamiliar surroundings? For a 'top earning' Irish Barrister, Aaron could easily afford to pay for a nanny, his young children could have remained with the nanny, and it would have given Sive the opportunity to connect with his “friends.”

Neither the main plot nor the various sub-plots did anything to explain the relationships properly. It was just a convoluted way of showing a bunch of vacuous people, with questionable relationships to one another, telling lies throughout their whole lives, so they could become a potential suspect. This is a story about lots of people with revengeful motives, but instead of being a dark and clever thriller, it’s just a messy, pointless plot.

I didn’t think I could roll my eyes anymore, but by chapter 73 they nearly fell out of my skull. “Six months later…six months earlier…one day later…Monday…six months later…two hours earlier…after”, this timeline was all over the place. It was obvious that the writer didn’t have a clear plan in her head, and this was the result. I can only surmise that all the people who say they “loved” this book were the ones who were getting free copies for “an honest review.” (I suspect they were living in fear of never receiving a free book ever again.)

I’m sad to say that in my reading group, no one saw this would be such a tedious book to read. Everyone felt that the book dragged and that there was an unnecessarily complicated, and rushed ending, which only served the purpose of trying to tie the end of the book together. It was highly unlikely that any of us would pick up another book by this author again. (To be fair, we all agreed it was ok as a holiday read.) I think there were the bones of a really good story hiding between those pages, sadly it was poorly executed from the first page onwards.

Genre: Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Crime

Release Date: 11^th May 2023

Publisher: Penguin (Transworld)

Pages: 376

 

“Disclosure: If you buy books linked to this site, I may earn a small commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops, at no owing items extra cost to you.”