The Gnome King reviewed Silent Fear by James Morcan
Review of 'Silent Fear' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
When this book arrived in the post I was quite shocked, it was one hell of a beast, 700 pages long and quite tall too. I thought this is gonna take me ages to read, but due to the pace of the story and how gripping it was, it turned out to be a pretty quick read.
It’s not often you come across a book featuring the deaf community and even rarer for the story to be based in a school for the deaf. For the last 16 years I’ve worked at a school for the deaf so I was very interested to see how the authors did portraying this unique community. They have done a very good job, there research has been thorough and the advice they got was spot on. I think the only difference between the fictional and real schools is where I work the focus is …
When this book arrived in the post I was quite shocked, it was one hell of a beast, 700 pages long and quite tall too. I thought this is gonna take me ages to read, but due to the pace of the story and how gripping it was, it turned out to be a pretty quick read.
It’s not often you come across a book featuring the deaf community and even rarer for the story to be based in a school for the deaf. For the last 16 years I’ve worked at a school for the deaf so I was very interested to see how the authors did portraying this unique community. They have done a very good job, there research has been thorough and the advice they got was spot on. I think the only difference between the fictional and real schools is where I work the focus is on speech and not BSL.
The plot is very complex, a virus is spreading across the world, and the only case in Britain is in a school so it gets quarantined…unfortunately there is a serial killer still inside the school. Luckily…or unluckily a detective is also trapped inside. You can see what has happened in the real world has influenced the writing of this book. Ebola outbreaks, Brexit (UK closes its borders to avoid contamination) and a heartless bitch of a PM willing to sacrifice those trapped aboard as well as those in the school. (you all know who that PM is.)
There are a few issues I had with the book which stop it getting 5 stars. For some reason a few bits, especially phrases, got repeated, I’m not sure if that was intentional or just a part of there being two writers but for me it broke the flow of the story. Another issue I had was the writers try too hard to make you think somebody was or wasn’t the killer and I felt a few times that mistakes were made. I had two suspects from very early on and it turned out one of them was the killer. One great thing they got correct was very little in the way of flashbacks, I hate it when you’re getting into a story and everything stops whilst you have to read some boring background….none of that here 😊
All in all this a very good book, one of my top reads for 2017, it is well worth the time to read.
Blog post is here> felcherman.wordpress.com/2017/10/29/silent-fear-by-lance-james-morcan/