Book Review: Rachel Ryan's Someone You Trust is extremely well paced and plotted
Author Rachel Ryan.
- Someone You Trust
- Rachel Ryan
- Piatkus, £14.99
With a flash-forward prologue, and chapters which move backwards and forwards in time, tells the story of Amy, who has fled her life in working-class Dublin to take up a position as cleaner and nanny for the wealthy Carroll family in their ‘futuristic and sleek’ house in the village of Knockcrea in West Cork.
Miles, a solicitor, and his much younger wife, content creator June, have two children, Tom and Poppy. Also living in the house is Liam, Miles’s teenage son from an earlier encounter. Amy is surprised at this as the boy has not been previously mentioned.
Amy is hoping for some peace, a place where she can rest and recuperate.
The reasons she has had to leave Dublin in a hurry are gradually revealed. She had been with Mark Keating from her teenage years and had a son, Robert. Love’s young dream had turned out to be anything but, the relationship turning into something horrendously abusive. After Mark first hits her Amy ‘became an expert at walking on eggshells — she danced on eggshells, she pirouetted on them.’ Amy escapes but is drawn back in because Mark is granted visiting rights, a source of great pain to Robbie and the reason why he goes off the rails. His father has been beating him and locking him up in a cupboard.
Robbie becomes involved with drug dealer Craig Keane and his gang and repeatedly runs up debts with them. This leads to a terrible event which makes Amy’s existence in Dublin untenable.
It soon becomes apparent that Amy has not found the idyll she hoped for in Knockrea. There are strange goings-on in the village involving a mysterious graffiti artist, a hooded figure in the night, theft and a hanged cat. Many of the villagers, themselves a classically odd and divided bunch, believe that Liam is the culprit. There is a violent confrontation between Miles and some of the villagers because of these suspicions.
The Carroll family soon reveal themselves to be anything but the perfect family, rather a moil of dysfunction. What are the furious arguments Amy overhears about? Why did the two previous nannies leave in such a hurry? Amy quickly finds herself wondering what she has let herself in for and begins to think about finding another position and moving on again.
Everything comes to a head when Amy’s Dublin life catches up with her new rural one, with explosive results.
is extremely well paced and plotted. The characterisation is believable, the dialogue perhaps just a little less so at times.
It twists and turns in a satisfyingly unpredictable manner, though this reader did have a slight presentiment of what the final revelation was going to be.
It deals sensitively with issues of toxic masculinity, drugs, infidelity, and poverty versus wealth.
The book has a pleasing lyrical aspect, with many descriptions of sumptuous West Cork skies: ‘...the sun hit the horizon and lit the heavens with shades of apricot and flamingo pink and richest gold.’ This is Dubliner Ryan’s second novel. Her first, (also published as ) was a top ten bestseller, garnering excellent reviews in numerous publications.
I thought that I wasn’t at all in the zone for a blockbuster thriller, but a few chapters of disabused me of that notion. It does its job most effectively.
