Yzabel / July 22, 2019

The July Girls by Phoebe Locke
My rating: [user 4]

Blurb:

Every year, on the same night in July, a woman is taken from the streets of London; snatched by a killer who moves through the city like a ghost.

Addie has a secret. On the morning of her tenth birthday, four bombs were detonated across the capital. That night her dad came home covered in blood. She thought he was hurt in the attacks – but then her sister Jessie found a missing woman’s purse hidden in his room.

Jessie says they mustn’t tell. She says there’s nothing to worry about. But when she takes a job looking after the woman’s baby daughter, Addie starts to realise that her big sister doesn’t always tell her the whole story. And that the secrets they’re keeping may start costing lives…

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Here’s a mystery about a killer, nicknamed “Magpie”, who every year, on July 7th, abducts and kills a woman. In this case, though, it’s not the police’s investigation we follow, but this story seen through the eyes of Abigail, a young girl born on July 7th as well: because on her 10th birthday, her father comes home covered in blood, and that’s when she starts questioning more and more what other secrets her family is hiding.

Just as much as a crime story—there is an investigation as well, after all—“The July Girls” is the story of a small family, specifically Addie and her big sister Jessie, who’s more a mother to her, since their mum has vanished abroad and never comes home. Their father is seldom around either, trying to make ends meet as an unlicensed cab driver, and it is clear from the beginning that Jessie loves Addie so much that she tries to shield her from basically everything, including their relatively bleak prospects in South London. And when things take a turn for the worst, we also get to see how the sisters’ life goes on, how Addie gets bullied at school because of her father, and how she tries to make sense of the events that unfolded until that point.

The novel spans about ten years in Addie’s life, which is good: it allows the readers to ‘see’ her voice mature, and her thoughts processes go from a girl’s to an adult’s. It’s also good in that it makes the killer’s arc into a slow-going investigation, as is definitely needed here, with the murders happening only once a year: if it had been solved in two years, it wouldn’t have been as suspenseful, for sure.

I kept guessing and guessing regarding who the killer might be, as there were a few valid options here. There were several twists and turns, and while a couple of them were slightly erring on the far-fetched side, I still found the novel as a whole a pretty good one, that kept me reading and interested until the end.