The Suspect

The Suspect, by Fiona Barton, tells the story of two missing British girls on a Thailand gap-year adventure. When teenage Alex and Rosie don’t call home as scheduled to hear their exam results, both sets of parents know something’s wrong. Sure, they might just be hungover on a beach somewhere or exploring rural Thailand out of cell-phone range, but…  Journalist Kate Waters, who’s looking into the story,  also has a young adult son who wandered off to Thailand to find himself, and is very rarely in contact with his family.

The story covers an investigation in the UK and in Thailand, so if you’ve doing the PopSugar challenge, and looking for a book set in multiple countries, try The Suspect.  There are a few familiar characters from The Widow,  but I think new readers could pick this up and read it as a standalone. The story blends police-procedural sections, what leads the reporters are following, and flashback scenes of what actually happened in the Thai guesthouse.

I wasn’t as engaged with some of the police-station moments or the reporters all trying to get an edge, at times I was almost skimming to get back to the main story of what could possibly have happened to the young people in the shady guesthouse. And I found myself really envying the temples, cheap beer and exploration part of Alex’s backpacking trip. I felt this in The Beach too. Yes, yes, there’s a creeping horror from the realization that something shady was happening just slightly off-stage. There’s a very real danger, and it’s clear that there are no authorities around to sort it out. But I also miss traveling, and the descriptions of good weather, cheap drinks, and questionable guesthouses was such an aspirational setting for me.

One theme I enjoyed in this was the gap between social media and reality. While Alex is posting gorgeous travel-inspo photos and captions online, she’s really feeling stressed and annoyed in the hostel. It asks us to think about why she’d do that, especially while writing her real, uncensored feelings to her bestie back home. Are we all conditioned to post our filtered, cropped best? Or is she, like Jake, worried that a boring backpacking trip will make her look like a failure?  We also see how one photo from Jake’s Facebook takes on a life of its own, highlighting again this gap between reality and online persona.  This variance between what we can find out about someone with a social media search and what that person is actually doing adds confusion and realism to the investigation.

I liked this novel a lot, and I’d still suggest it for fans of thrillers, but I think I preferred The Widow, because I was more surprised by the twists in that one. (I guessed one of the twists in The Suspect a little too early, and I never like the feeling that the characters haven’t caught on yet.)  Also, after reading The Widow, I felt like the main theme was a sort of quiet complicity, a scary but realistic awareness that someone close had done something very, very wrong, but that, well, would anyone be brought back to life by bringing in the police? Let’s just never speak of this again. So I was slightly less moved this time when I felt like The Suspect led up to the same questions of complicity and loyalty.