Book Notes: Let Me In by Claire McGowan

Published by

Clarissa

January 18, 2024

A wife crushed by childlessness and washed out by NHS’s mishandling of COVID.

A husband demolished by a vicious and unfair #MeToo attack.

They come to rural Cornwall, and a murder mystery ensues. It’s a good mystery but what I found much more impressive is that there’s a clear and unvarnished depiction of #MeToo as destructive and horrid. George, the #MeTooted husband, was a sincerely lefty journalist but that didn’t help when the time came for him to suffer a media mobbing over a misinterpreted joke.

Let Me In contrasts the general indifference towards an actual pedophile with the evisceration George experiences after making a clumsy joke about pedophiles around an easily scandalized teenager. Crimes of word and crimes of deed have swapped places.

It’s encouraging to see that popular literature is turning against #MeToo in a straightforward, unapologetic way. Let Me In also states it clearly that a man like George, who has no claims to being “diverse,” has no hope of clawing his way back into a career once he’s tarnished by the overheated word police.

To be clear, the novel is not about #MeToo. George’s loss of his job and reputation is provided as background to the murder mystery. But still, it’s good to hear this message no matter how tangential it is to the story.

A solid murder mystery about pedophiles but offers no graphic descriptions of anything unsavory.

Rate this:

3 responses to “Book Notes: Let Me In by Claire McGowan”

Post Alley Crackpot

January 20, 2024

“They come to rural Cornwall, and a murder mystery ensues.”

Upon the arrival of said plot also ensues my ritual calling of bullshit. :-)

Look, British writers of mystery novels, I get it: wouldn’t it be so lovely to get in a working holiday whilst soaking up picturesque landscape?

Yet if the Cotswolds, Cornwall, or even the Yorkshire Dales had as many murders as imagined by British mystery writers, the people living there would insist on a police force larger than that of London!

So do the readers a favour: set the story in Manchester or Swindon instead.

Go live in Manchester or Swindon so you can make the setting plausible with details instead of doing some kind of literary Thomas Kinkade place setting for two.

Someone getting stabbed to death in either is considerably more believable, and yet there’s still an interesting mystery to tell.

“George’s loss of his job and reputation is provided as background to the murder mystery. But still, it’s good to hear this message no matter how tangential it is to the story.”

But it’s just fluff to get you to ignore the low crime figures in Truro and Penzance and how your belief shouldn’t be suspended, not a bit.

Go on, British mystery writers, dare to tell a story in Highbridge and Burnham if you want that working holiday so badly! :-)

What did Swansea ever do to you? :-)

The police: “… right, so how did you know it was a stabbing?”

If I’m the author, then I arrive on the scene with unfair causational advantages.

Now pack off, don’t you have a tray at Gregg’s to arrest? :-)

LikeLiked by 1 person

Reply
1. Clarissa
  
  January 20, 2024
  
  This dates back all the way to Agatha Christie who killed off so many inhabitants of one tiny village it was a mystery that anybody still remained alive. Or even back to Arthur Conan Doyle who routinely sent Sherlock Holmes to investigate gruesome murders in the countryside.
  
  This is the foundation of the whodunit genre. Everybody knows it’s all made up but we love it anyway.
  
  LikeLiked by 1 person
  
  Reply
Post Alley Crackpot

January 20, 2024

Hjalp! Jag har varit moderad!!!

LikeLike

Reply

Clarissa's Blog