Blue Monday
Apr. 13th, 2026 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearBlue Monday by Nicci French is the first in their Frieda Klein series, about a psychotherapist who gets embroiled in a child abduction case when she gets weird vibes from one of her patients.
I really enjoyed another Nicci French book I read last year but unfortunately this one didn't live up to expectations.
The writing wasn't bad, and I quite liked some of the characters - and I was intrigued enough to keep reading to find out where it was all going. But I came up with a theory relatively early on that would have involved one pretty terrible cliche - and then the main twist ended up involved an even worse terrible cliche, so that was a bit disappointing. Some of the sections were really very unpleasant as well.
It also felt more like a mid-series book than an introduction to Frieda because it felt like we were dropped right into the middle of her life with very few explanations of anything.
But - the biggest issue I had with the book is as follows... It's called Blue Monday. The blurb on the back starts with the words: "Monday: five-year-old Matthew Faraday is abducted." But, in the book itself, it's mentioned categorically on several occasions that the little boy is abducted on a Friday...
I'm guessing the idea behind the title (the next in the series is called Tuesday's Gone and the rest of the series continues in kind) was potentially devised quite late in the day, or at least after the book's contents had been finalised. But still, somewhere along the way, I would have expected someone in the editorial team to have spotted that error, especially since the book was published by Penguin!
So, not really a success for me, I'm afraid.
I really enjoyed another Nicci French book I read last year but unfortunately this one didn't live up to expectations.
The writing wasn't bad, and I quite liked some of the characters - and I was intrigued enough to keep reading to find out where it was all going. But I came up with a theory relatively early on that would have involved one pretty terrible cliche - and then the main twist ended up involved an even worse terrible cliche, so that was a bit disappointing. Some of the sections were really very unpleasant as well.
It also felt more like a mid-series book than an introduction to Frieda because it felt like we were dropped right into the middle of her life with very few explanations of anything.
But - the biggest issue I had with the book is as follows... It's called Blue Monday. The blurb on the back starts with the words: "Monday: five-year-old Matthew Faraday is abducted." But, in the book itself, it's mentioned categorically on several occasions that the little boy is abducted on a Friday...
I'm guessing the idea behind the title (the next in the series is called Tuesday's Gone and the rest of the series continues in kind) was potentially devised quite late in the day, or at least after the book's contents had been finalised. But still, somewhere along the way, I would have expected someone in the editorial team to have spotted that error, especially since the book was published by Penguin!
So, not really a success for me, I'm afraid.
