Cover and title are quite awful (yes, I 100% judge a book by its cover), however I really enjoyed this.
In fact, the only reason I'm even writing this is so people understand that this isn't actually a book for bored housewives with a penchant for Mills & Boon and tar me with that brush on account of its cover.

Þessi bók byrjaði mjög hægt en þegar líða tók á hana kom mér hún sífellt á óvart. Góð lesning fyrir þá sem vilja spennu, drama, mörg plott og tvista.

Well I didn't see that coming! I'm afraid sometimes I'm guilty of judging a book by it's cover (and title) and when this was recommended to me (by the lovely Rachel from Rachel The Hat) I immediately thought romantic chick-lit. I bought it on Kindle and stored it away for when I was in the mood. Turned out I was in the mood whilst on holiday where I had a (virtual) pile of chick-lit on Kindle to meander through. Turns out this isn't chick-lit at all, turns out I was very, very wrong.

This is about Scott and Tami who have a wonderful marriage and two beautiful daughters. Their lives are ripped apart one evening when Scott is arrested. He doesn't resist so obviously knows what it's about, Tami, meanwhile knows nothing and is beyond shocked. The next few months are a roller-coaster of love, betrayal and murder.

The characters are skilfully written, and our emotions are toyed with when first we are on one person's side then get flipped to another. There are twists after twists, until the people I thought I knew near the start are so changed by the end that I don't recognise them.

If you liked to be surprised (pleasantly) by your reading and you like crime drama, this will be right up your street.

I'venot read any Dorothy Koomson novels before so can't judge this against her previous books but I have to say that following The Rose Petal Beach I'm really keen to see what her other books have to offer.

The story begins when Tamia Challey opens her front door and finds police officers coming to arrest her husband for a crime he doesn't seem surprised about. Suddenly her world goes into freefall and she's left questioning everything about her husband, their life together and her friends around her. As she tries to keep her family together things continue to spiral out of control to the point Tamia begins to question what she herself is capable of in order to protect her children.

This book gripped me from start to finish, it truly did keep you reading as the story is told not just from Tamia's perspective but from that of her friends Mirabelle and Beatrix and the stranger Fleur who arrives in Brighton and enters their lives unexpectedly. All this is wound around a story Mirabelle brings fromher past of the woman who searched a desert island for her lost love for so long that her feet bled, turning into rose petals on the sand until she gave up and joined him in death - "the rose petal beach" of the title.

Wonderful writing and a great read - very highly recommended.

Koomson at her best. A stunning tale of love, betrayal, friendship and family that is an absolute must read.

Dorothy Koomson is without a doubt my favorite contemporary author. This novel proved it once again. It's such a powerful tale of love and all its implications (friendship, denial, guilt, etc.). I don't know how she does it every time, but I loved it. It made me sad, because it is in many ways a very sad story. Yet, Koomson always writes it so beautifully and at the end you're left with at least a shred of hope. I can't wait for her to publish another novel.

Second book by Dorothy and from what I can tell, the pattern is set.

First, the husband. He's irrevocably weak and pathetic in some dramatic over the top way. This time, instead of the rich boy Prince, the guy in this is really a gutter rat pretending to be the Prince. Instead of simply being gullible and naive in a stupid but meant-to-be endearing way, Scott turns out to be an alley rapist.

Now, there's a story to be written about the decent woman married to the rapist, but it's hard to take it seriously when the wife is ready to burn him at the stake on the discovery of the guy's porn stash. There's a big long injection on the brutalising and dehumanising of all the young innocent girls of the world... What? Halfway through the soapboxing, I was asking myself, what is this woman going on about? Is the husband producing snuff porn or is she upset that she lives in a world where pornographic materials exist and is probably the most popular thing on the Internet? Of course, because everyone knows that this is how it works, from looking at a porn video from time to time, the husband gets addicted to "rape porn" and then becomes a real life rapist. Yes. He's also a cheating womaniser, just so you don't get confused about the level of sleaziness he's at.

Dorothy does not approve of men who patronise prostitutes or view porn material. I doubt there's a throng of people out there going "Yay hookers! Yay porn! Let's take out a full page endorsement in the papers!" But there's a big gap between disapproving of a thing and making an anvilicious declaration of denouncement over the entirety of your novel.

Porn will turn you into a rapist. Yes. Message received.

Second Problem. I don't know how or why, but the introduction of characters in the second act is grating. Mirabelle and Fleur. If you wanted to write a story about a runaway mum and her daughter, then do that from the get go. Misleading blurbs can get super annoying to even the most casual I Idont give a shit reader, I'm almost sure of that, that the percentage of people who like buying one thing and reading a whole other thing is fairly low. I do not like it at all. If i wanted to read about a wife and mother turned lesbian turned murder victim in a whodunit, I would have asked for that. Its completely irrelevant whether or not the whodunit is a better read than the melodrama of a to be divorced housewife, but that'swhat i had planned to read so deliver.

And what happened to Scott? Scott started off as a character and then got turned into a grabby molester. The novel could have used a POV from him. Instead, there's a whole heap of Fleur who contributes absolutely nothing to the main plot aside from helping to flesh out Mirabelle a bit, and really, who the fuck cares.

Tami and Mirabelle are two snowflake characters. The only people who disagree with them turn out to be rapists, murderers, or just all-round crazy and delusional rabbit-boilers. Beatrix gets cancer as divine punishment for man-stealing, but she repents and by touching the Tami's hem, she is healed. Scott also repents and puts himself in penitence just for the record.

Mirabelle's ex husband and father of Fleur... is the only one I guess, to simply be like "Bitch, please. Snowflake or not, fuck you." But then the daughter is enraged by this and he is in turned punished when the daughter replaces Mirabelle's Snowflake with the even superior Tami Snowflake. He did not count on Fleur getting swept up in the orbit of of a whole new snowflake...

All in all, the main problem I think is with the premise. The decisions that came before the actual plotting, things the author failed to consider. Like:

- Should I develop Scott as a real character or make him a dastardly and cartoonishly sinister rapist?
- Continue with the rape drama or escalate to murder drama
- Bring in Fleur in the second act when everyone is already invested in Scott and Tami.
- Make Mirabelle into a snowflake character to help the audience empathise with how bad her murder is
- Have a first person POV from Beatrix despite the fact that withholding the information that she is the one having an affair with Scott would be extremely gimmicky and unnatural

In the end, the whole thing had absolutely nothing to do with Tami and Scott. They're both pretty much bystanders in a murder "mystery" that no one really cares enough about to even deem it a mystery. In other news, some random woman was murdered. She had a daughter and a painting. Reports say she was the most beautiful woman a lot of people had ever seen. She was really raped, but her would-be rapist didn't give enough of a fuck to kill her. Leading suspect - someone who gave a fuck.

That line of suspense doesn't really generate a heap of interest. The shades guy in the series has an alibi. He can't get away from rape porn long enough to plan and carry out a homicide. The only other two people who cared were Fleur and Tami. The ex-husband and Bea weren't anywhere on that radar because they're like "Who?" Fleur was too estranged, and Tami is too snowflakey a character to ever be capable of murder. This is Sandra Dee, not Rizzo. By the time the reveal roled around, I was like "Wait, this is a thing I was supposed to be actively caring about? It matters?"

Tami figures it and the villain does the requisite monologue and it ends more or less. No agency. No urgency. Even with the murder solved, there's a big "And?" that follows that goes unanswered. All the characters become less and less important as the story goes on.

Wow. It gets two stars because somewhere very early in the story, there'd been potential.