Hidden Bodies
You Series Two
By Caroline Kepnes
Published in 2016
Genre: Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
My Rating: 3 stars
Let's just start at the cover shall we because it's so irrelevant it hurts. The front cover shows the series version and the characters in it. BUT in the book, Candice isn't even in the story! I know the book is only the "inspiration" for the series but this just annoyed me more than it probably should have.
The first and second books are pretty much completely different stories to the first and second TV series, which is fine. Two separate versions and I'm ok with that. It really annoyed me though how Candice is so clear on the cover but Love (who's actually in nearly the entire book) is blurred out. Maybe good for the series but it never needed to be the image for the book cover.
Because of this, the whole way through I kept wondering; 'When is Candice going to turn up?' even up until the last page and guess what, she never rocks up. Even if I hadn't already seen the TV version I'd be wondering who the girl was on the front cover of the book. Anyway, my irritation at the cover aside, my review follows below. As they say, never judge a book by it's cover. And apparently never assume the characters on the cover will feature in the actual story.
I've given Hidden Bodies 3 out of 5 stars. Really it could have better. I do like the way the book is written, you can almost hear Joe reading the lines for you and it gives you an insight as to how his mind works. It does get to a point though where you have to push yourself along a little bit as the mellow tone kind of goes numb on you.
In the book version there's more murder, it's not overly violent though. If you choose to pick this up just hear it from me now and know that it's nothing like the TV series and you should probably just forget everything you know about the characters now.
The hard thing with this book is that Joe, even though he's a psychopath serial killer, he's really likeable and relatable. Kepnes is very good at showing how Joe sees the world and you tend to hate all the other characters along with him. In the TV series I loved Love, in the book I hated her until near the end. If you're really into thrillers and suspense novels then I think Hidden Bodies would be a bit low key for you but it's a good one to use to break up other genres and try something different once in a while.
It seems that it was announced in January this year that there will be a book three coming out and maybe even a book four. (I thought there already was a book three though so I'm confused?) Not going to lie, even though I didn't rate this book particularly high as it was quite average, I'm still going to read the the rest of the series because I want to see how this pans out. That's just what us readers do! We can't help but knowing how things turn out.
As always, let me know how you get on and if you agree with any of the points I've made.
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