Though this sounded intriguing, the story never really captured my attention. I like the premise, but it moved so slowly that I didn't get wrapped up in the plot. The writing is good, but perhaps not quite suited to what is ultimately a mystery. Overall, just not or me.

I wanted to love this, but this one fell flat for me!

It felt TOO LONG the entire time I read it. It was paced slowly, the writing was long winded and the story was just neverending. It didn't have enough spice in the sense of action or suspense to justify the length it felt.

I just never got into it, everything felt dark. Literally. Like a dark room. I just needed something more exciting to happen.

4 stars / This review will be posted on goodreads.com today.


Linda Hammett is the type of woman that people don’t befriend. Perhaps it goes back to her childhood with a domineering mother and an indulgent father. Perhaps she was just born that way. Whatever the reason, people tend to not want to spend a lot of time around Linda, no matter how hard she tried.

When serial killings start happening in their estate in England, it brings back memories of Linda’s childhood in Wales. The times when her mother cleaned the house from top to bottom, gave away all their belongings, and moved them to England. For a fresh start her mother always said. Now young women are being found strangled. It’s a dark time.

Then a catalog appears in Linda’s post. A catalog with a name on it that belongs to someone other than herself or her husband Terry. The former tenant, maybe. A very glossy, fancy catalog unlike anything Linda would ever purchase. Linda is very interested by the taste of this former tenant and decides to figure out who this Rebecca might be. Finding out about Rebecca will change Linda in ways no one could have imagined.

The novel starts out present day, with narrative from Linda about what appears to be an institution. It then jumps to the past, when the serial killings begin. It’s an interesting format of interspersing these current observations with Linda’s retelling of what led up to now. A few twists and turns along the way bring quite the element of surprise into the book.

At times the book read very slowly, but it’s a good story and makes you wonder how much you really know about your neighbors.

Clever and gripping enjoyable read! The main character, Linda, shares a life full of quirky thoughts and details that allude to a traumatic and unresolved past. There are hints to Linda being on the spectrum (as in The Maid by Nita Prose), and hints of her being obsessive (as in the movie Single White Female). Yet, the book's ending is a delightful surprise, casting a sinister angle to her tale of interesting and perplexing characters. This is a book for those who love a slow-building mystery with a boomerang ending that makes you want to re-read the book. Tight, inventive writing. A favorite for 2022! Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

After reading an English village mystery in the cozy style, I was ready for a change of pace to something darker. It turns out that this is so twisted that sometimes I just had to laugh.

You start to have your suspicions about what’s going on, but it keeps getting deeper, darker and more twisted than you’d imagined. Or maybe you are more clever than I was, and you will see what’s really going on in the Now and Then chapters.

Make sure you have time to read this all in one go, because I definitely found it impossible to put down. My e-reader ran out of juice, I switched to my iPad, and it was down to 3% when I finished. Whew!

I understand WHAT this book is trying to do and WHERE the story was trying to go, but that doesn't mean that I enjoyed it.

Dark humor, twisted stories and unreliable narrators are quite heavy in books that I read. This...Linda... I just...I feell

This was very obvious for me from the jump. The 'dark childhood', the 'missing girls', the 'obsession', the 'husband's odd behavior'. It did nothing for me. There was nothing...deep or special there. The characters in this were not written with depth or with any sort of strength or layers. People contain multitudes, even sociopaths.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC: The theme, for me, was about perception. Nothing is as it seems. The author is a psychiatrist and she created characters who are fully realized. Linda appears to be a repressed, rigid, unperceptive woman, but things are not what they seem. The story started a bit slow, but once it got going, all my assumptions were challenged. There is a twist that makes one re-evaluate the book. Well written, thoughtful and thought-provoking. A literary psychological thriller.

A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon was a clever and interesting book with writing I enjoyed! This is a somewhat dark story, the main character of Linda is relatable in that she’s wondering about life, is there more?

It’s a slower-paced story but I did like it and will read more from this author.

PLOT:

Linda has lived in a quiet neighborhood since fleeing the dark events of her childhood in Wales. Now she sits in her kitchen, wondering if this is all there is: pushing the vacuum around and cooking fish sticks for dinner, a far cry from the glamorous lifestyle she sees in the glossy magazines coming through the mail slot addressed to the previous occupant, Rebecca.

Linda’s husband Terry isn’t perfect—he picks his teeth, tracks dirt through the house, and spends most of his time in front of the TV. But that seems fairly standard—until he starts keeping odd hours at work, at around the same time young women in the town start to go missing.

If only Linda could track down and befriend Rebecca, maybe some of that enviable lifestyle would rub off on her and she wouldn’t have to worry about what Terry is up to. But the grass isn’t always greener and you can’t change who you really are. And some secrets can’t stay buried forever…

August 2.

If only there were something tidy about this book. Ending, beginning, middle. Anything. As it is, the novel sprawls, distracts, dangles loose threads, introduces unreliable elements. Is this clever and popular? For me, it was just maddening. How did Linda pay for all the shopping? How did the household exist when Terry lost his job? Neighbor Ingrid makes a distracting appearance, then doesn’t show up again. As for the murders and the victims, and Rebecca and Jolyon and their schemes, let’s not even go there.
Dreary stuff, and very long. Perhaps this is a genre offering that will attract many readers. But not my cup of tea.

This was a quirky, sometimes cringe worthy read. Funny in all the right places, goofy for a little comedic relief. A fun little story

Linda starts to question who her husband really is, as young women go missing and he has blocks of time unaccounted for -all while she is struggling with what her life has become as opposed to what she thought it would be.

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC of this book!
I really enjoyed this book and found it incredibly intriguing and captivating. The characters were interesting and I had no idea what would happen next - definitely recommend!

Loved this! Joanna Cannon never spells out the obvious, and I spent pretty much the whole book resisting being pulled into the obvious conclusions. The final unravelling is so very satisfying - it’s hard to comment on it without giving too much away, so let’s just say that you’ve been played with for the whole book, but the ending is so satisfying that it’s all forgiven!

Last year, a breakout debut novel hit the scene, and everyone fell in love with the character Molly in Nita Prose’s “The Maid”. An excerpt from my review of that book explains who Molly Gray reminded me of…

“I absolutely loved the character of Molly Gray. There was once an episode of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ where Katy Perry guest-starred as someone they simply called “Honey” because she was so clueless. When she tells you about getting an email from a REAL Nigerian prince or how her landlord was so concerned about her safety that he installed a security camera in her shower, all you can do is shake your head and say “Oh, Honey…”. That’s what Molly reminded me of at many points in the book.”

This main character, Linda, reminds me a lot of Molly. It’s not said outright in either book, but both women seem to be on the autism spectrum, and both are meticulous about cleaning. Both completely misunderstand other peoples’ intentions, both are kind of clueless as to how others live their lives, and both are totally unaware of social cues.

The only reason I’m not giving this book five stars is because number one, I feel like I just read another book about Molly, and number two, Linda is a really exaggerated character. When “The Maid” came out, Molly was so endearing. When I read “Tidy Endings”, I became annoyed with Linda because nobody is THAT clueless, not even Molly. It feels like Linda is Molly on overdrive, and it really wasn’t necessary.

Other than that, I thought this was a fantastic book. It started slightly slow, but then quickly picked up and started giving “Single White Female” vibes. Linda is married to a boring slob, and her mother still helps run her life. When mail starts coming for a woman named Rebecca, Linda falls into a dream world where instead of being a woman who works at a thrift store, she lives a glamorous life like Rebecca must live, based on all the fancy catalogs received in her name.

Linda’s town is being terrorized by a serial killer; everyone is on edge and glued to the news of each new murder. Soon, she begins escaping into different worlds to avoid the anxiety, and starts making “friends” who don’t truly have her best interests at heart. The book goes back in time to the past, with the serial killer, and with Linda having a hard time fitting in with the world. The remainder of the book is written in the “now”, when someone is writing from a mental institution. I liked the two different timelines, especially at the end.

The ending raised this from a solid four stars, to a rounded-down 4.5 stars. I really enjoyed it, and didn’t see all of it coming. I really enjoyed everything in this book, except how exaggerated the main character’s cluelessness was. That and so many similarities to “The Maid” stopped this from being a five star book, but it was still an excellent story that I really enjoyed.

(Thank you to Scribner Books, Joanna Cannon, and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my review.)

Linda, the main character of Joanna Cannon's A Tidy Ending, may leave you sleeping with one eye open. There is great complexity in the simple and socially awkward Linda. She is constantly annoyed by her husband. The only excitement in her life comes when young women start turning up dead in her neighborhood and her husband has started coming and going at odd hours. But who is Linda, really?

This is a work of psychological fiction sprinkled with bits of humor equally as delicious as Linda's favorite Jaffa cakes. Cannon is a keen observer of human nature who keeps all the intricacies of her characters and plot moving in a perfect trajectory to its destination. Highly recommended.

DNF & had a hard time getting into it from the start. Not worth it to me to try to finish it. Too many books on my list to force myself to stick it out. Thank you for the advance copy.

This was a wild ride from start to finish and I loved every minute of it! It was an excellent read and I will definitely be looking for more books by this author.

“She was such a good girl, people said, until she got in with the wrong crowd, because you will always be judged by the landscape in which you stand, and being murdered doesn’t stop everyone running over your life with their own particular set of rules and regulations about how we should and shouldn’t all behave. In fact, they probably do it even more, because you can’t answer them back when you’re lying stone-cold dead in a mortuary drawer.”

Linda is concerned with everything. She has her finger in every pie, her spyglass and notebook ready to capture any indiscretion, her phone set to speed dial the police to report any nuisance or possible crime. She’s hyper-vigilant, obsessive and compulsive, strategic and manipulative.

This book was smart, witty, funny…Linda says things that you instinctively understand but the way she says them feels like a revelation. This is one of those books where it’s really best to go in almost blind so you can receive it at full force. The prose was an interesting mix of Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead and The Maid.

I loved this! Five big stars for this twisted tale.
A Tidy Ending perfects the creep factor. Linda is not quite right. She lives mostly in her mind, imagining other lives. She puts up with her nagging mother and her lackluster husband. But she has no friends, no life outside of taking care of her home and working at the charity shop. Meanwhile, the town is caught up in the murders of several young women.
The story is told in a then and now fashion. I don’t want to say too much about the plot because the beauty of this story is watching it slowly unfold. I found Linda to be an engaging character in her weird way. There’s a dark humor to the story, mostly thanks to Linda’s unique way of seeing the world. As the plot went on, I found myself chuckling more and more.
This isn’t a mystery per se, but there are several plot lines I couldn’t wait to see how they would play out. Who was the serial murderer? Why is Linda now in a mental ward?
My thanks to Netgalley and Scribner for an advance copy of this book.

I absolutely loved a tidy ending can't wait to get a physical copy on August 02 2022 it was creepy fun and sad Joanna cannon writing is so honest and enthralling