One of Good the Guys by Araminta Hall

If most men claim to be good, why are most women still afraid to walk home alone at night?

Desperate to escape the ghosts of his failed marriage, Cole upends his life. He leaves London behind for a remote stretch of coast, relishing the respite from the noise, drama, and relentless careerism that curdled his relationship and mental health. Leonora has made the same move for similar reasons. She’s living a short walk from Cole’s seaside cottage, preparing for her latest art exhibition. Although Cole still can’t figure out what went wrong with his marriage, and Leonora is having trouble acclimating to the hostile landscape, the pair forges a connection on the eroding bluff they call home.

Then two young female activists raising awareness about gendered violence disappear while passing through. Cole and Leonora suddenly find themselves in the middle of a police investigation–and the resulting media firestorm when the world learns of what happened. And as the tension escalates alongside the search for the missing women, they quickly realize that they don’t know each other that well after all.

Review

2.5 stars solely because it had entrancing writing and was fast-paced for the majority of the book.

One of the Good Guys is marketed as a mystery thriller, so of course I jumped at it when it was announced to be published. This was definitely not a mystery thriller at all.

Can we stop labelling books as mystery thrillers solely because there are deaths? And even then, this didn’t have a mystery or a death at all.

I have a lot of conflicting emotions about this book because I get the message about the complex relationship between genders, focusing especially on how men treat women, and I think it’s definitely an important one, but the way the majority of the female characters acted here was so extremist I just couldn’t root for anyone at all; I even found myself having sympathy for the “villain”!

I liked seeing the narration from Cole; it was interesting navigating the thought process of some men regarding their relationships (or lack of) with women.

There were lots of social media posts and news articles scattered between narrations, and they halted the suspense the author tried to create, and a lot of the comments in them made me roll my eyes a lot.

I really wanted to read a book where these social issues are dealt with properly, not with extremism from both sides.