Review: They All Fall Down

They All Fall Down by Rachel Howzell Hall
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

1.5 stars 

Best of an island is once you get there—you can’t go any further … you’ve come to the end of things. AGATHA CHRISTIE, AND THEN THERE WERE NONE 

This is supposed to be inspired by/reimagining of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, I've never read that book, so I can't speak to any of that. I can speak to my own likes and dislikes and I greatly disliked the style and structure of the writing and story. It's in first person pov, not my favorite but I can handle it, but what I couldn't handle was the stream of consciousness writing paired with an unreliable narrator. Both are styles and techniques that I struggle with, if you don't have the same dislike, your mileage would greatly vary and be better than mine with this book. 

We Have a Winner! 

Our pov character is Miriam and she is getting ready to take off to vacation on an island off Mexico, Mictlan Island. She won a vacation through her email and will be joining six other contestants on a reality tv show competition. The whole thing isn't quite clear and Miriam must not have watched as many horror movies as me because she doesn't see anything wrong with surprise free vacations to islands off Mexico. But, the author does set-up Miriam as a woman looking for an escape. It's murky in the beginning but Miriam is recently divorced (caught her husband cheating on her with their daughter's ballet teacher), just was found not guilty in a bullying case that involved a high school girl who was bullying her daughter, is an unreliable narrator to us, the reader, and in her own life, and has lost her job. Yeah, Miriam's life is a mess. 

A sick man. A country chick. A shaggy nurse. A cokehead cook. An uppity banker. And a mass shooter. My competition, ladies and gentlemen. 

We meet the other six contestants when she gets down to Mexico and they take the boat to the island that is 40miles away and has spotty wi-fi and phone service. The first 50% was all about getting Miriam to the island and introducing us to the characters but the stream of consciousness writing, Miriam having, quick, but annoying (to me, anyway), additive comments about their clothing or some such, her job was writing short fun copy for luxury items on second hand websites, made the first half feel chaotic and dragged out in pointlessness all at the same time. If you're looking for characters to like, root for, or even intriguing, I don't think you're going to find them here. The author even put in her acknowledgments that she wrote a story about awful people. I don't have a problem reading about awful characters but they all were that way and the story structure of personal dislikes didn't make up for it. 

Detective Giorgio Hurley had left me a voicemail: “Ms. Macy, hi. Just checking in with you. We need to talk, either at your home or here at the station. Sounds like there was some type of altercation last night? Sounds like folks were hurt, you included? Sounds like—” 

50% is when we get our first murder and from there on out its pretty fast paced, because of how slow the first half was, felt manic when bodies started dropping like flies. Miriam and the other six learn that the reality tv contest and lure of winning money was all a ruse and they were actually brought there by their lawyer. The lawyer got them all off on their cases but apparently had a come to Jesus moment on his deathbed and now wants to punish them for their crimes they committed that he got them off on. There's a diorama of the seven deadly sins in the house's foyer that they're staying on and as each person gets murdered, the statue of the sin that their crime corresponds with, disappears. It's a locked room mystery because of the island setting and with a storm keeping communication out to the outside world, they are on their own to survive. 

This is what you do: lie. Make up stories. Create something out of nothing. 

While the murders are going on, we have Miriam thinking about her own case, we get some flashbacks and reveals to what she did to the girl that was bullying her daughter but it's cloaked in Miriam's unreliable narrator, the constant alluding to her “cry wolf” personality, and at first she's taking Valium at a decent clip and drinking. There's some discussion of racism, Miriam being a black woman and the “angry black woman” stereotype but the author mostly (there's more social commentary on one of the other six who is a cop who killed a black man) stays away from higher social commentary as Miriam, yes, contorts instances in her own mind. There was also two components added in, the island being formerly owned by a notorious drug dealer and Miriam keeps seeing(?) the ghost of a young girl, that I guess are supposed to be red-herrings and add to mystery. All they did for me was help to the chaos feel of the story and how none of the ideas the author had seemed to be fully formed to gel together. 

I wanted her to lose. That’s all. To lose for once in her life. 

The last 80% was speedy and messy in giving the ending, at one point Miriam just takes a nap??? while on the run/hiding from a murderer. There's no one to cheer for or like in this, usually not a problem for me, but my personal dislikes and the messy storytelling structure made me not a fan of this. One thing I did like was that after someone was murdered, the next page had a newspaper clipping of their court case, what they were accused of and how they got off. I liked how their murders had a tie-ins with their crimes, a' la the movie Saw. As far as thriller, never felt on the edge of my seat, as far as mystery, meh-fairly easy to work out what is happening, and as far as ghost story, mostly a non-entity.

View all my reviews