Nine Perfect Strangers (Liane Moriarty)

Nine Perfect Strangers
Liane Moriarty
Flatiron Books
Fiction, Suspense
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: A romance novelist whose career may be over, a divorce lawyer whose relationship may end over the matter of starting a family of his own, a single mother obsessed with weight, a past-prime footballer coming to grips with his mortality, a young couple whose lottery win has driven a wedge between them, and a family struggling to deal with a teen son's suicide. These nine strangers have all come to Tranquillum House, a health resort deep in the Australian countryside, for a ten-day program that promises complete transformation and renewal. The treatments are supposed to be revolutionary... and possibly on the fringe of legality and sanity, as the resort's owner teeters on the edge of a breakdown.

REVIEW: Yes, I do read books beyond my genre comfort zone. Usually, when I hit an iffy streak, it's a sign I need to branch out and shake up the reading (or listening, this being an audiobook) list. This promised to be a decent suspense novel from a popular author, with a great setup and lots of promise. Unfortunately, I think it was misbilled when it was pitched as "suspense". Or maybe my impression of the word has been skewed by my tendency to read more genre fiction than general novels. This was much more an exploration of characters than what I would consider a true suspense tale; for a very long time, there are only mild and vague hints of something being wrong (a key part of suspense, or so I figured, the idea that the normal has become abnormal, the expected about to be subverted in unsettling and potentially terrifying ways). Very little that I would consider truly thrilling or suspenseful happens until past the halfway point. Before then, things meander wordily though the various guests and staff members, setting up backstories and establishing (borderline overestablishing) their personalities and the problems that brought them to Tranquillum House, and what they hope to accomplish while there. The characters sometimes feel more like tropes, with toes poking over the cliche line, than rounded, grounded people, with some themes becoming repetitive across the ostensibly-different characters. The actual suspense portion of the story feels short-changed, and I found myself irked by what felt like bait-and-switch and deux ex machina resolutions at the climax, followed by a meandering tail end as the characters cope with the aftermath of what happened, and what they learned about themselves. The descriptions could be decent, some moments and scenes were very solid and effective, and the characters (tropes notwithstanding) had potential, as did the setup of an isolated health spa run by an unstable guru, but I mostly found myself frustrated that there wasn't more actual escalating suspense in what I'd been told was a suspense novel, seeing chance after chance to build up the tension or unsettle the characters pass by or be brushed off uneventfully. Maybe I would've been less disappointed had it just been billed as general fiction, but even then I think I'd have hoped for a little more tooth, because that's just the kind of reader I am.

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