Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit

Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit
My rating: 2 of 5 stars


You'd die for your family. But would you kill for them?

Family is everything. So what if yours was being terrorised by a neighbour - a man who doesn't listen to reason, whose actions become more erratic and sinister with each passing day? And those you thought would help - the police, your lawyer - can't help you.

You become afraid to leave your family at home alone. But there's nothing more you can do to protect them.

Is there?

I didn't really gel with this book, perhaps something was lost in translation (German writer); it was so laboured and slow I had trouble remaining connected and found when I put it down I had to re-read some pages to get back into it.

It was so miserable and gloomy and the characters were unexplored and flat that I really didn't care about them or what was happening to them. It appeared to be a good psychological thriller from the blurb but was for me very disappointing and I really felt it was not worth my ploughing through it to the end.

Randolph is a weak man, selfish, quite arrogant and rather dull. His childhood experiences the person he has become and his shortfalls determine who he ends up being. The characters have no real personalities, they are not well developed. The neighbour who is causing all the trouble is not fleshed out enough to make him believable, we know so little about why he does what he does. It just doesn't have any realism and because of this trying to illicit any emotions from the reader is nearly impossible. The writer tells the story through Randolph and it's all his POV so that the reader has no opportunity to 'see' what is happening and form an opinion.

I ended up skim reading and skipped to the end skipping all the self-absorbed (and now boring) rhetoric. Even the ending where the writer put in a small twist was too little too late to save this novel. A very disappointing 2 stars is all I can give this one. I would like to thank the publisher for sending this in exchange for an honest review.