Book: The Opposite of Murder by Sophie Hannah
Reviewed by Lalaisalwaysreading
Rating: 3/5
The premise of this book is one of the wildest I've come across in a mystery thriller. Jemma Stelling walks into a police station and confesses to a murder she hasn't committed yet, hoping the confession itself will stop her from going through with it. While she's there, the murder happens anyway, giving her an airtight alibi but raising a very uncomfortable question. That concept alone was enough to keep me reading through what was otherwise a pretty rocky start.
And I do mean rocky. There is no easing into this one. You're just thrown straight into it. By chapter six I had already counted sixteen different characters who had been introduced, mentioned, or briefly existed in the vicinity of the main character. I actually wrote them all down. It was a lot.
But I'm too curious for my own good and I kept going, and somewhere along the way I stopped being frustrated and started being genuinely invested. The red herrings are relentless, and the structure is deliberately maddening in a way that somehow works once you lean into it. I guessed wrong every single time I thought I had it figured out. The final reveal completely blindsided me.
It just needed to be trimmed. There is too much filler competing with what is actually a brilliant mystery, and the sheer number of characters makes it harder than it needs to be to care about any of them.