No Further Questions by Gillian McAllister

Author : Gillian McAllister
Title : No Further Questions
Published : 2018
Publisher : Penguin
Pages : 432
Genre : Mystery Thirller

     The police say she's guilty. She insists she's innocent. She's your sister. You loved her. You trusted her. But they say she killed your child. Who do you believe?

     For me, this was a more unusual book to come to. While it does fall into the crime genre it is not really like many of the others. I was presented with a book that is much more about the morals of our lives and how much we trust those how are nearest and dearest. In reading this book it asked me a great deal of how I see my own family and my loyalties to them. If the police tell me that someone very close to me has murdered my child but they swear they haven't, who do I trust? It is a difficult thing for some people to turn against a sibling. Especially ones that have been as close as these two have been.  

     What I liked here is that the book is far more driven by the perspective of the two women involved. this is about the close bonds of sisters and what it can take to ripe them apart The author does a great job in putting me front and center into what exactly took place on this fate full night. It is a book that is impossible to pass through and show a great deal of indifference. This author is far to good at her job to let that happen. Because we get to flick back and forth in perspective between the two of them, it felt to me much like its courtroom setting. With points being made followed by their counterpoint. All in an attempt to lead us on to its heartbreak conclusion.

     This is not one of those books where we start ow out with our answers and have to follow back to see how things turned out the way they did. In No Further Questions, we are just as much in search of answers as these two sisters are. While certain facts seem like the bedrock of this book, everything is a bit more fluid and how we can interpret the situation is always moving. I feel that any story that deals with the death of a child is a hard one to stomach and in searching for answers it is far to easy to get lost in emotion. And while this does take place to some extent in McAllister's story. She does a great job of keeping not only the pacing up but also the general level of anxiety. It is a book where you find your self muttering under your breath. It is all for me at least in the hopes that the cases laid out before me can't be true. 

     The author for me has told this story in the best possible way. It gives us not only an emotional road to take but one that contains a good few twists along the way. She asks a lot from her reader but in return, we are delivered a story that feels very real and could easily have fallen from the headlines.  So for a crime book that's not quite that but something more and different, a book that is both subtle and completely brutal in its execution, No Further Questions might just be for you.