Book Review
They All Fall Down
by Rachel Howzell Hall
Tom Doherty Associates © 2019
Summary:
Seven strangers have been invited to visit a luxurious house on an isolated island in Mexico. Each was lured to the island under false pretenses, and each has something to hide.
When the guests start to die under suspicious circumstances, each stranger is suspicious in their own way. Can they survive the dangers of the island until the next boat comes to their rescue?
My Thoughts:
Let me start by saying that I love Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Where Christie introduced her characters and slowly revealed the darkness within each character, Howzell Hall just throws the worst of each character out from the beginning. There is no subtlety or character progression at all.
Though this was a familiar story, I had a difficult time becoming engrossed in this book. The goal of the first 160 pages is simply to set up the premise of the story and introduce each of the characters. The problem? The individual characters are each horrible. The more I knew of them, the less sympathetic I became.
I believe each was supposed to be haunted by their own “sins”, but they did not seem haunted by their sins as much as they embraced and embodied their sins. When the twists and suspense of the story began, I was not invested in the characters enough to feel any of their fear; I simply did not care enough about any of them.
I was looking forward to this more modern take on a classic, but this just fell flat for me.