The Bullet Trick Louise Welsh #inbetweeny

Going to be a quick one this one as I am 3 books behind on the blog front (shame!)

This was a random book my husband bought me as part of a random box of books one Christmas. I had never heard of it or Welsh but it sounded interesting and wasn't too thick.

The book was basically two stories (Berlin with its bullet trick and Glasgow with its murder) featuring one man (a magician) who wove the stories together into one ending. It was unusual in that both stories (including the bullet trick) didn't resolve themselves until right at the end so the reader knew something bad had happened but wasn't sure what for quite a long time.

I thought the murder element was weak - if the envelope implicated the copper and he was so desperate to recover the incriminating evidence then why try to blackmail someone with it in the first place?

The women in the book were interesting, it would have been so easy to make the lawyer a stuck up bitch, yet she wasn't at all. Sylvie and her 'uncle' were also characters to make you think - what was the uncle's back story? that could have been a book in itself but instead readers were left to their own devices to fill in the gaps.

I think overall it had potential but didn't really deliver. Maybe it was too short to really delve into two such different stories enough. The magician and Berlin elements were intriguing enough to make it 'ok', but no more, no less.

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Cramlington Book Club

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