REVIEW: With Malice by Eileen Cook

With Malice by Eileen Cook
Published by Hot Key Books on 7th June 2016
Pages: 316
Source: *Received from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review*

Wish you weren't here…

When Jill wakes up in a hospital bed with her leg in a cast, the last six weeks of her life are a complete blank. All she has been told is that she was involved in a fatal accident while on a school trip in Italy and had to be jetted home to receive intensive care. Care that involves a lawyer. And a press team. Because maybe the accident…. wasn't just an accident.

With no memory of what happened or what she did, can Jill prove her innocence? And can she really be sure that she isn't the one to blame?
Intriguing, mysterious and cautious, With Malice is a brilliant psychological thriller that will have you itching to know the truth. This cover is brilliant, simple, and mysterious; and I love the colours used.

Jill wakes up in the hospital, unable to remember anything that happened over the past six weeks. Apparently, she went to Italy on the school trip that she has been waiting all year for. She was in an accident. But she has a lawyer. If she was in an accident, and she is innocent, why does she need a lawyer?

Jill isn’t the most likable character. She would sometimes say things that would make you agree and like her, yet in the next moment Jill would make you strongly dislike her. Jill is obsessed with describing her friendship with Simone and those at her school, how everyone views her and what she was like to others. It is almost like she was trying to encourage the reader to believe her. It was certainly a brilliant way to write it, but Jill was definitely not a character that one would like; I believe Cook must have done this purposefully in order to make the reader suspicious and question her.

"She always believed the ends justified the means, that a person did what a person had to do. But I didn’t believe that. Or at least I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to believe that the world was a better place than that. That there were people who did the right thing for no other reason than it was right."
With Malice by Eileen Cook, page 211 – 212 (ARC)

The plot was intriguing, it wasn’t overcomplicated or far-fetched; it was believable. And this is what made it that much more addictive and thrilling. It wasn’t a plot that you would throughout be thinking that this would never happen, it was believable and therefore had me on the edge of my seat and trying to devour this book as quick as I could. I loved how Cook set up the novel, you have one chapter of the current events with Jill, and then the next chapter would contain either police reports, interviews, psychologist’s reports, texts, blog posts and comments, emails, letters or postcards. It was a brilliant way to read the novel, and really painted the pictures of the information you are receiving as the reader. It helped to see the multiple sides of the story that the police and lawyers were seeing. The only issue I had with this was the ending. I did like the ending, don’t get me wrong, I was surprised and it left me wanting more, even though I knew we wouldn’t. But I felt like it was a little anticlimactic. But I guess it went with the nature of the plot, it was simple and straight to the point.

With Malice will certainly have you reading as quick as you can to finish and find out the truth, but some mysteries will always remain that, a mystery.


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