True Crime Story: The Times Number One Bestseller

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In the early hours of Saturday 17 December 2011, Zoe Nolan, a nineteen-year-old Manchester University student, walked out of a party taking place in the shared accommodation where she had been living for three months. Ultimately, that's why I didn't even attempt it at the time. I knew I wasn't a strong enough writer to deliver on that level of ambition, and maybe I'm still not, but after spending eight years writing my debut, then delivering a second and a third novel, I felt like it was time. I thought: 'Let's take a chance, let's break out of the noir sub-genre, and let's try to do something a little bit fresh in crime fiction.' I drank an awful lot, and I wrote like hell. I try to resist the deification [of missing girls], though. If I vanished tomorrow, the last thing I'd want anyone to think of me as is a saint or a victim. It's insulting and dehumanizing, in my opinion; people deserve better than that. Hazel Greenlee likes to throw stuff off Forge Bridge; the objects range from a cheap bracelet to what readers of Hello, Transcriberwill come to learn are items of greater significance. Hannah Morrissey's debut is a well-crafted thriller that splits its time between Hazel's professional and personal lives until they converge, a physical point of confluence being what she thinks of as the suicide bridge. Evie is currently doing research for her next book, one she hopes will balance the scales. It's definitely about the victim....a Manchester university student named Zoe Nolan who disappeared in 2011.

I liked this book. I am more than willing to try just about any audiobook that features a full cast. I just really enjoy the experience of listening to full cast bring a story to life. As soon as I heard about this book, I was more than ready to give it a listen and I found it to be quite entertaining. I have just finished reading True Crime Story. Gripping! It is set at Manchester University in Northern England, and starts innocuously enough with a student disappearance just before the Christmas holidays. Not necessarily a major crime, and the Police are informed, but this is not a standard police procedural, and the missing girl, Zoe Nolan, is not quite the ordinary student she seemed to be at first. She also has an identical twin, also a student at the Uni, which of course complicates things. This is what reading is all about! I can't recommend this audiobook enough. I desperately want the physical book to annotate but why would a physical book ever exist when it's a full cast dramatized narration?In 2011, Zoe Nolan walked out of her dormitory in Manchester and was never seen or heard from again. Her case went cold. Her story was sad, certainly, but hardly sensational, crime writer Joseph Knox thought. He wouldn't have given her any more thought were it not for his friend, Evelyn Mitchell. Another writer struggling to come up with a new idea, Evelyn was wondering just what happens to all the girls who go missing. What happens to the Zoe Nolans of the world? However I cannot honestly say that I got as much pleasure as I was hoping for reading this. I came to this as a fan of Joe Knox's Aidan Waits stories. However here the narrative style of hopping between contributors was not one I really liked. I also felt that the first third at least was fairly slow. Certainly the pace and tension improved significantly from around halfway through. This was a really hard one for me to review, it’s just so different from Knox’s Aidan Waits series, and I admit to being irritated and confused initially, I just found it difficult to grasp something that (for me) felt quite disjointed. However, slowly and gradually, Zoe’s story, (that is) the story presented to us by the aforementioned characters, pulled me in, and from then onwards, I found it a more compelling read. He said/she said/ they said - but what is the truth of it? I didn’t know who or what to believe, but I (eventually) enjoyed the journey.

The book progresses by means of a series of interviews with all her friends, fellow students, family, and staff, brilliantly edited and arranged to provoke doubts, and send the reader off in all directions. Gradually all the characters reveal themselves with their own words. Who knew what, and when. Will she ever turn up? In 2011, Zoe Nolan walked out of her dormitory in Manchester, England and was never seen or heard from again. Her case went cold. Her story was sad, certainly, but hardly sensational, crime writer Joseph Knox thought. He wouldn't have given her any more thought were it not for his friend, Evelyn Mitchell. Another writer struggling to come up with a new idea, Evelyn was wondering just what happens to all the girls who go missing. What happens to the Zoe Nolans of the world? True crime is everywhere, and yet your book stands out because it is, in fact, fiction masquerading as true crime. There's a hint of parody in that. What were you trying to experiment with, or perhaps to prove about the genre? Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer team up to exonerate a woman who’s already served five years for killing her ex-husband. I don't think I used any one young woman as inspiration--if only because I was more interested in the milieu of a murder/missing person. The press--good and bad--the grieving families and friends, and the ones who clearly see it as the start of their 15 minutes. There's a lot of opportunity attached to tragedy--a grotesque kind of fame--and I think that's what I was more interested in than anything.True Crime Story by Joseph Knox is an epic thriller everyone will want to put on their must read list! It was a bit of a toll to get through this, as I found it slow and taking too long to get to the point. Every now and then, a suspenseful moment would occur. I kept chugging along in hopes that the ending would be worth my while. It wasn’t. I would recommend this book to others. I thought that the mystery of what happened to Zoe was very intriguing and I loved that the story kept me guessing until the very end. I would definitely read more of this author’s work in the future.

Thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Expected Publication Date: 12/7/21. In a sense I thought this was quite a good story looking at it as a whole. There are numerous twists and turns in the narrative as aspects of Zoe and her friends' lives are gradually revealed. I confess that I thought I knew the answer to this but I was wrong! From that view point I think this is a good story. Cleverly blending the real and imagined worlds until the reader can't differentiate the two, Knox has created a twisty, turny thriller that cuts through the heart of the modern true crime fascination, all while keeping us enraptured by it." — BuzzFeed Relationships and dreams remain achingly familiar, even in the wildest futures, in the stories collected in Even Greater Mistakes by Charlie Jane Anders ( Never Say You Can't Survive). Greenfield's irreverent text demolishes the fourth wall, and Lowery's peppy pencil and digital-media renderings of his words have a vibe reminiscent of a child's journal, with doodle-style drawings accenting his dynamic renditions of Greenfield's words. For avid and reluctant readers alike, this tongue-in-cheek, metafictive send-up of reading as a chore is delightfully unlikely to live up to its title. -- Jaclyn Fulwood, youth experience manager, Dayton Metro LibraryGirard begins at the end, on November 7, 2016, when Cohen fell out of bed in his Los Angeles home: "Nobody heard me," he utters. "I am going to die here, all alone, like a dog." Rewind to Montreal, Cohen's birthplace, where he's a teen in 1947, desperately looking for his missing pooch, whose frozen corpse he finds under the neighbor's porch. "This is a rotten way to say goodbye," Cohen mourns. Farewells become a repetitive theme throughout his many decades, during which his achievements are often marred by drugs, alcohol and dysfunctional relationships--romantic, familial, professional. It does take a little while before all the pieces of the puzzle slide closely enough together for the reader to really develop a good sense of the big picture, but once that point is crossed the story relentlessly sinks its hooks in until the very end. While I do understand it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I do think it’s the type of flaw which deserves to be overlooked, especially since it ultimately doesn’t waste your time, setting up everything bound to happen down the line. Pure genius – all the things you want to a crime novel to be, also hilarious. I love it." — Jane Casey, author of the Maeve Kerrigan novels