1 September 2022

Review: THE NOTHING MAN, Catherine Ryan Howard

  • This edition made available as an e-book on Libby through my local library
  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0855N98FH
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Corvus; Main edition (6 August 2020)
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 309 pages

Synopsis (Amazon)

I was the girl who survived the Nothing Man.
Now I am the woman who is going to catch him...

You've just read the opening pages of The Nothing Man, the true crime memoir Eve Black has written about her obsessive search for the man who killed her family nearly two decades ago.

Supermarket security guard Jim Doyle is reading it too, and with each turn of the page his rage grows. Because Jim was - is - the Nothing Man.

The more Jim reads, the more he realises how dangerously close Eve is getting to the truth. He knows she won't give up until she finds him. He has no choice but to stop her first...

My Take

This is the 3rd of this author's stand alone novels that I have read, each very different from the last. 

Jim Doyle used to be a policeman, but has left the force and works as a security guard in a shopping centre in Cork. At the book shop he notices a new book on display, just released,  THE NOTHING MAN, by Eve Black. So Eve has written the book - it is about him - and the murder of the rest of her family twenty years earlier.

It is a very adventurously constructed novel, with the principal narratives from Jim and Evie. We start with the essay that Evie wrote in her creative writing course, a thinly disguised statement about how The Nothing Man took her family away, and her childhood when she was 12 years old. Hers was the last family The Nothing Man attacked, his fifth strike in two years. The essay established Evie as The Girl Who.

Evie is convinced that if she can work out how her family was chosen, she will be able to identify The Nothing Man. She hopes that she will be able to lure him out from his cloak of secrecy.

The book makes compelling reading.

My rating: 4.7

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