DNF - I did not realize this was part of a series. I was unable to find the older books so will not be reading this one. I don't like when they give hints to background stuff and you don't know what it is. I get that it's so they do not reveal spoilers but hard to get into when you feel like an outsider

I was very intrigued by the description of this book. The book is slow to get to the suspenseful part about halfway through. The book was interesting and I really liked the premise of it. I really wish that I was able to get more into it.

The main character, Amy, has gone through a lot in her life. You read a lot about her issues and things she has dealt with. Her character was well written.

Amy hasn't always made the right decisions or been on the right side of the law. When she witnesses a murder she decides to use her skills and intelligence to track him down.

The lonely Witness is billed as an action thriller, but I thought it was more a mystery than a thriller, and the action was scarce. The book read uneven to me, the action sections seemed dropped into the story rather than moving the story along, The story itself was entertaining, I guess I was expecting more. The heroine is a complex character, and the balance of the book is weighted to her character profile, which slowed the read for me as well. If you go into it expecting a light mystery with some action, you will probably be satisfied.

I was about 29% in to this book and was really ready to put it down. Then, I read a review that said it was slow at the beginning, but got better. So, I decided to give it a try.

Well, it did have action over halfway through I think. That action, however, was interspersed with what seemed to me to be filler pages. The action did get my pulse racing a little, but that's only because I scanned the many filler pages and looked for it.

I had a lot of sympathy for Amy still trying to figure things out. However, I was sold on the understanding that this was a thriller.

In short you go through a LOT of filler pages about Amy's issues before I got to the action part. I was really expecting more action.

Thanks to Pegasus Books and Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest, unbiased revie

Amy is a victim of circumstances who takes advantage of her bad luck in life. The novel is well-written and has a satisfying ending.

I was very intrigued by the description of the book, so I had high hopes. Unfortunately, it didn't grab my attention the way I thought it would. The characters were hard to commit sttneriinnto. Amy was troubled and went back and forth between her new self and her old
Self. She witnessed many things in her life that troubled her. I felt like it was a day by day account of her life with no real deep plot twists. I really like William Boyle so I know I will read Joan other work. His writing style flows nicely and it is easy to read. I think it was just the storyline that wasn't appealing to me.

Amy Falconetti, a thirty-something New Yorker, has abandoned her life as a bartender and partier. She volunteers for a church, bringing communion to elderly shut-ins. One day she follows a man who has discomfited one of her elderly neighbours and witnesses his murder. Instead of calling the police, she picks up the murder weapon and leaves; in the following days, she starts to worry that the killer is following her. Her routine life suddenly becomes chaotic, complicated even further when two people from her past make unexpected returns.

This book just didn’t do anything for me. Amy’s behaviour from the beginning is just unbelievable. After her former lover abandoned her, she explains, “’I started going to church, and I just felt like I could hide out and maybe help people.’” She does not seem to be religious or spiritual and as a gay person would probably have some difficulties with the teachings of the Catholic faith, but she chooses to deliver communion? She witnesses a murder yet does nothing to help the victim? Instead she takes the murder weapon and hides it in her home? Especially after the childhood incident involving Bob Tully, an incident which she describes as having “shaped her life,” she chooses to behave as she does? When Amy says, “’I don’t know why I do what I do,’” the reader can only echo with “I don’t know why you do what you do!” And when she thinks, “this was definitely the wrong road to go down. Beyond the pale. Epic as fuck, in terms of how stupid she’s being,” the reader can only agree!

It seems that Amy is trying to find her true identity: “’I’ve been searching for an identity my whole life, trying all these different lives.’” For years she lived an entirely different life drinking and partying: “She thinks about what she would’ve done when she was twenty-five or twenty-eight. She would’ve gone out. She would’ve headed straight to the bar. Shots. Beer. Music. She wouldn’t have felt intimidated or regretful. High school had taught her that . . . no way was it wrong to chase a feeling, to be unhinged, to act out of fear and fascination. How did she lose that knowledge? Whatever she’d gained had led to so much lost.” Now she feels she has become “so boring.” She even toys with reclaiming her old life by dressing in her old clothes and revisiting old haunts and friends. She decides she does not want to grow old, living in “fear of a toxic future. Lives get smaller, ruled by paranoia and isolation, and there’s nothing left to do but stay in retreat, stay hidden. Collect things, shield yourself, keep out of the sun.”

When Amy makes some questionable choices, she justifies them to herself as a desire to escape her boring existence: “You do things because you have to be near the beating heart of terror.” Perhaps my inability to identify with Amy stems from the fact that I don’t want to live “near the beating heart of terror.” I don’t need to stalk potentially violent people or contemplate carrying out a criminal act in order “to fill the void.” Amy is in her mid-thirties and says she is “starting to feel old” but she behaves like someone half her age. As a teenager, she found “Catholic school was boring. The nuns were boring. Her grandparents were boring. Smoking was boring.” Twenty years later, she has the same complaint that she has become “so boring”?! Not living in an inner city, perhaps my life is too safe so I have difficulty understanding the lives of people who witness murders on a regular basis; three major characters witness four murders.

In the end, Amy comments, “Maybe she’ll feel new for a while, this most recent wreck a movie she never wants to watch again.” Her comments reflected my feelings as I finished the novel: I wanted to move on to something new because I felt like I had watched a bad movie (with an especially bad climactic scene with ever so not subtle symbolism) which I do not want to watch again.

Note: I received a digital ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

I received a free advance copy from NetGalley for review.

I may be from Kansas, but I think I may have developed a Brooklyn accent after reading this book.

Amy is a young lady living modestly in her Brooklyn neighborhood, but she used to be a hard partying Manhattan bartender. After her girlfriend dumped her Amy shed most of her once beloved vintage clothes and records and became a regular church goer who lives in a basement apartment. One of her volunteer jobs for the church is giving communion to elderly shut-ins, and one elderly woman that Amy visits complains that her usual caretaker hasn’t been around in days but instead sent her son, Vincent, instead. Vincent has been barging in with the key and going into the old woman’s bedroom even though she asked him not, too.

When Vincent shows up Amy confronts him, and Vincent angrily leaves. Amy is worried that he might come back and that he may have have done something to his mother so she follows him around the neighborhood . Haunted by a homicide she witnessed as a teen that she was threatened into keeping quiet about, Amy continues to shadow Vincent until she witnesses a murder which triggers an odd reaction to it that kicks off a chain of events that gets her more involved.

I’m surprised how much I liked this book considering that it’s loaded with one of my pet peeves, a plot that depends on the main character regularly acting like an idiot. However, that usually bugs me because too often it’s just a lazy way to make things happen in a thriller, but this is one of those books that is either a character drama with some crime in it or a crime novel driven by the character in it. (Six of one, half-a-dozen of another.)

So it works here mainly because Amy is such an interesting and complex character. She knows she’s behaving irrationally at times, but she’s driven by both compulsions related to the old crime she witnessed as well as reexamining her life as she wonders who she really is. Adding to her confusion is the reappearance of the father who abandoned her as a child.

The other strong point in this is the just how thoroughly William Boyle develops the Brooklyn that Amy lives in. There’s such a strong sense of place here that the neighborhood comes to feel like another vivid character, and yet it’s realistic and not sentimental. It’s so well done that you can do Google Street View along with Amy’s movement and see many of the locations mentioned in the book.

If you’re more interested in a complex character study that uses a crime as a launching point then this fits the bill. Also, I didn’t realize this while reading but have since learned that this functions as a follow-up to Boyle’s Gravesend so now I’m adding that one to the to-read pile.

William Boyle's new novel isn't exactly a sequel to his previous one, Gravesend, but we do follow Amy, a small side character from that first novel, a party girl who formed a relationship with Gravesend's heroine, Alessandra. In The Lonely Witness she has cut herself off from her past life after Alessandra abandons her, and sequesters herself socially in her Brooklyn neighborhood, where she volunteers for a local Catholic church, providing in-home communion for the elderly.

Once again, Boyle provides us with a deep study of an emotionally lost character as she drifts through a detailed Brooklyn steeped in sadness. The novel is all about identity as Amy struggles to figure out her place in the world. She constantly believes that the life she's set up for herself as a helper to the ignored is the right one, but she keeps finding herself pulled in other directions. Old friends from the past and the people who inhabit her life presently all know different Amy's, but the real question that she has to ask herself is which one is the real her. You get the sense that Amy has hidden behind all of these personality facades all her life and now she's on a journey to realize who she truly is. Amy, as well as most of the other characters in the book, set about to leave their dead end lives, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Like Gravesend, this book is a slow novel and a bit meandering, but the reason why it doesn't fully succeed for me the way Gravesend did is because where that first novel switched back and forth between equally fascinating POV's, keeping it fresh, this one just focuses on one character, one that happens to be a hard nut to crack, so the pace and other issues were more evident. But the novel's conclusion as well as Boyle's keen-eyed observance really clicked with me.

The Lonely Witness come out tomorrow, May 1, and this is my review of an advanced copy that I received in exchange for an honest review!

William Boyle’s The Lonely Witness drew me in with the title. It is a compelling idea. I can imagine all sorts of stories with a lonely witness, but none of my imaginings came close to the wild ride Boyle takes us on. We begin with Amy, a heartbroken young woman who has lost her mojo after her lover Alessandra left her to pursue success in Hollywood. She drops out of the world of bars and parties and began volunteering at the neighborhood church, bringing communion to seniors in the neighborhood. The mystery begins when a neighborhood tough guy frightens one of the women she visits. He says his mom is ill but they begin to wonder if he murdered her. Amy investigates and witnesses his murder.

This is not the first time she saw a murder. The last time she was a child and she never told anyone, even after she was threatened and menaced by the killer. She inexplicably does the same, not calling the police, not admitting she saw the crime, and then trying to find the murderer, though with no idea why.



I like this book a little more than I think it deserves. I liked Amy even though she is someone life happens to rather than someone who makes life happen. Usually, I hate that, but she has a tenacious quality, a sullen stubbornness, that I like even though she is not the brightest bulb in the store. Perhaps instead of being the Lonely Witness, she is more the Witless Loner.

This is not a big mystery. You know who the killer is as soon as Amy does when she sees him. He’s not the brightest bulb either. No one shines. In a way, the most sympathetic character is the recovering alcoholic who has decided to come back to Amy seeking forgiveness after abandoning her and her mother when Amy was a child. Amy is not interested, though she is polite. After all, she thought he was dead.

In a way, it seems like Amy is in a funk and perhaps she’s one of those people who need a good murder to get out of it.

I received an e-galley of The Lonely Witness from the publisher through NetGalley. It will be released May 1st.

The Lonely Witness at Pegasus Books
William Boyle author site

Great book! Looking forward to reading more by this author! Highly recommend!

The Lonely Witness is a wonderfully-crafted character study. Though the action is quite limited for much of the book, it doesn't matter. The journey into Amy's world is so complex that you want to read more. These days, Amy is a church volunteer who ministers communion to shut-in elderly and spends time with them. She dresses conservatively and lives in a tiny basement apartment with few possessions. She used to have another life where she tended bar in Manhattan, dressed like a rockabilly model, partied until dawn, had intense romantic relationships with other women. Now, Amy witnesses a murder and somehow gets caught up in it. And, the question is who is she really. Which character is Amy and which is just a disguise. Who are we really underneath our costumes and disguises? An intensely written drama that starts slowly and builds to quite a crescendo. A very well-imagined piece of writing.

It’s been a long time since Amy spent the night clubbing. These days she helps out as a caregiver to house bound residents in a Brooklyn neighborhood. On of the women Amy sees, tells her she hasn’t seen her regular caregiver, Diane in days. Diane’s son, Vincent, says that Diane was ill .Amy, however, has a very bad feeling about the man. She follows him and another man, where to her horror, she witnesses Vincent being murdered. For some inexplicable reason, Amy doesn’t call the police, she grabs the murder weapon and begins hunting the killer herself. Okay, from reading the synopsis of this book I was skeptical. Why would anyone chase a killer instead of calling the police? Boyle, has more than a few tricks up his sleeve however, and I found myself enjoying this book, and Amy, immensely