A Dark Thriller That Requires Little Emotional Investment | “The Running Girls” by Matt Brolly (2023) Book Review

Thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and the author for providing this Advanced Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review; all the views expressed in this review are my own.

I got into “The Running Girls” by Matt Brolly with high hopes, having loved his earlier book “The Pier.” Let’s see if my hopes were dashed or upheld.

The story begins with Frank Randall being let out of prison after 20 years for the murder of his wife, Annie. Since his return to his hometown, only Laurie, his son David’s wife and the town’s lead detective, has visited him and even she can’t talk to him about the past. When a girl named Grace goes missing and is found dead a couple of days later, everyone is suspicious of Frank, particularly when Grace’s injuries and method of death are revealed to be closely similar to Annie’s. In spite of all the overwhelming evidence against him, Laurie is not convinced that he is the killer.

Who is the murderer? Why did he do it? We get the answers to these questions in a thrilling story of human relations, failings and fears.

The best part about this story, for me, was the way Brolly explored the darker shades of his characters. The story has been told in Laurie’s point-of-view, with Frank’s and the killer’s viewpoints thrown in occasionally.

Brolly has tried to make the story thrilling by keeping the reader ignorant of the killer’s identity almost until the end; it makes sense because there are not many people who could be the killer, anyway. The book starts energetically and Brolly maintained that momentum until about 70 percent into the story.

However, the last portion of it is so lengthy that it stops the tale in its tracks. It got so boring and only got better towards the conclusion. That is one of the main reasons this book gets four stars instead of five.

If you are looking to pass time with a book that explores the various dark facets of human beings and requires very little emotional investment, then this is the book for you.

This book gets 4 out of 5 stars.