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Another book about a murder, but this takes a very different approach from my previous read.

Julie Myerson’s Something Might Happen plunges you directly into the story. A woman is horrendously murdered near her home in a small seaside town, and this is the starting point for a novel about grief, and the effect that such traumatic events can have on the people they touch. The main character in the novel is Tess, the murdered woman’s best friend, and we see the unfolding events through her eyes as the police arrive and carry out their investigation, and the questions they must ask start to expose complex feelings. Tess herself becomes drawn to one of the other characters, but then another tragedy strikes and makes her reassess her situation.

It’s quite difficult to describe this book without giving too much away, not that it’s a mystery in the conventional sense at all, but the developing emotional situation that Tess finds herself in is so well written and beautifully paced that it would be a shame to examine it too much and spoil the effect for other readers. All I can say is that I found it very moving; it’s really compelling, and for that reason is the first book for some time that I have effectively read in a sitting. Towards the end I found myself close to tears, though not quite as embarrassingly so as with another novel (about a time-traveller’s wife) that I had to stop reading on the bus in case I totally lost control.

This novel it makes very clear that real life is a mess and things are never tied up as neatly as we might like to think. Very, very sad but well-worth reading.