They Saw Too Much

For being so incredibly fast paced, this book is absolutely boring. Gibbons fails to create characters that are engaging, giving them zero personality and using their Life Problems as props to pretend to create one. The main characters, John and Ceri, witness a murder and are... on the run after witnessing a murder because... Oh, John makes bad choices.

Actually, you find out that the guy who was murdered knows his father and that his father is connected somehow, so John refuses to call the police because his father's involved. But you don't learn this for awhile because Gibbons just keeps trying to build the suspense around it, so you're sort of over John and his inability to do the Rational Thing while he just blurts out random nonsense that the vast majority of us would just punch him for.

Ceri maintains a logical head until she's written into a stereotypical Child In Foster Care who snaps under the pressure and hates everyone because everyone she ever loves leaves or dies. As someone who has worked with kids in foster care, I can objectively say that I'm really bored of this trope. There are so many kids in care systems who are so much more than "I've been abandoned by everyone and everything and I'm so sad" all of the time.

It also starts becoming a bit absurd when a) he starts writing it as if Jason Borne was a high school student? b) oh, we found the hippies again? c) the sudden family connections to Organised Crime and yawn.

Overwhelmingly, the only part of this book I actually enjoyed was Tilly Mint. And that's because the dog was the most interesting character in the book for maybe 10 pages of it.