The Short Version: A lightly tense thriller that will keep you along for the ride, but doesn’t take you anywhere new or exciting.
The Long Version: I got to listen to the audiobook ARC of this book thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape media.
The List follows a young English woman who’s living a simple life, working at a local theatre, living with her loving boyfriend, and taking her morning runs. One day on her run, she finds a list of five names, the third name is hers. After some research she finds the first two names on the list have died under suspicious circumstances. Now she has to unravel the mystery of The List before it’s too late.
The premise of this book made my ears perk up, it’s super catchy and who wouldn’t be freaked to find a list of dead people with their name on it, and for a good part of the book, there’s decent pace and tension that keep you going, the main problem with it is that it fails to get over that hump that separates decent thrillers and great ones.
At the beginning, it’s a little tough to get on board because the story is told through three POVs(two in third person, one in first person ). In the audiobook this is especially tough because the POVs aren’t separated into their own chapters, so you’ll be listening to the third person narrative then it switches over to first person abruptly. I’m sure in the print version there’s a page break to ease these transitions, but this would have been an easy issue to fix.
Once I got past that, I started to warm to the main character, whose world starts caving in on her after the discovery of the list. There’s a midpoint twist, but it was fairly obvious, and while I was interested to figure out the mystery of the list maker, I wasn’t desperate to keep listening, I wasn’t waiting anxiously for my next fix.
The main components of the novel are strong (prose, dialogue, plot) and it’s an enjoyable read/listen overall, with a. Strong performance from the narrator as well on the audiobook. The real shame comes in the ultimate reveal. The identity of the list maker made the whole premise feel convoluted and…well…stupid. There were so many better ways for the list maker to achieve their goal without the list.
Overall a solid 3 out of 5. It’s not spectacular, but you probably won’t be disappointed you read it either, except perhaps for the ending.
Component Ratings
Idea/concept: 4 out of 5
Protagonist: 3 out of 5
Antagonist: 2 out of 5
Supporting characters: 4 out of 5
Character Development: 2 out of 5
Plot: 3 out of 5
Pacing: 4.5 out of 5
Prose: 4 out of 5
Dialogue: 4 out of 5
Narrator performance: 4 out of 5
Ending: 1 out of 5