#BlogTour-‘The Guilty Party’ by Mel McGrath

Welcome to my turn on the HQ stories blogtour for ‘The Guilty Party’ by Mel McGrath.

Published on 07/03/2019, it is available in hardback ,audiobook and Ebook.

About the book…

You did nothing. That doesn’t mean you’re innocent.

On a night out, four friends witness a stranger in trouble. They decide to do nothing to help.

Later, a body washes up on the banks of the Thames – and the group realises that ignoring the woman has left blood on their hands.

But why did each of them refuse to step in? Why did none of them want to be noticed that night? Who is really responsible?

And is it possible that the victim was not really a stranger at all?

I want to start this review by saying that this is entirely my personal opinion-I may have read this book completely wrong in terms of the author’s intention, but this is what I took away from ‘The Guilty Party’.

Mel McGrath has created a moral dilemma based book.4 people in their early 30’s, who have known each other since uni, decide to celebrate one of their birthdays by going to the Wapping Festival. Dex, Bo, Cassie and Anna become variously intoxicated, lost and entangled in the atmosphere and then seperated.

Each sees something in a churchyard, the same thing but from different angles, but it is something inherently wrong.

All of them decide, for their own purposes, to say nothing and do nothing. They walk away, and then the story moves forward to a holiday cottage on Portland Bay where in this closed off environment, each works through what they did, why they did it and it creates a pressure cooker of tension and regret because each is linked to this person who was later found dead in the Thames.

The four of them have at various times been lovers, and there is still this feeling that they are trapped in a sick, symbiotic, damaging dance where no one can come in and no one gets out. For example, it took me a while to realise that Anna was married as her husband has no impact or involvement with this group-it’s as if they took their massively privileged university education, and created a bubble from which they never emerged.

I genuinely was not sure whether the author intend them to be so toxic and unlikeable to the reader, which is why I added the bit at the beginning because they are so damn awful. They are twisted, vain, superficial and greedy for importance-they use other people in sexual games of one upmanship and consent, conquest and dominance are huge themes in ‘The Guilty Party.’

You keep on reading, hoping that one of them will be redeemed or realise just how unhealthy their entanglement is but the more you read the more horrified you are.

They think they are the bystanders in what they saw but we, the readers are the bystanders watching, open mouthed as they make one terrible decision after another.

Latane and Darley coined the term ‘bystander effect’ in the 1960’s after the murder of Kitty Genovese, a young woman who was murdered in New York where the risk her neighbours felt in intervening superceded their moral imperative to help.

‘The Guilty Party’ poses the question ‘what would you do?’ and my answer at the end of the book was exactly the same as it was at the beginning.

In this book, Mel McGrath has created a brilliant tour de force of psychological manipualtion, mind games and twisted values that kept me up all night and left me thinking for a long time after I finished. I would thoroughly recommend this challenging,  well written read!

About the Author…

Mel McGrath is an Essex girl, the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling family memoir ‘Silvertown’. She won the John Llewellyn-Rhys/Mail on Sunday award for Best Writer Under 35 for her first book, ‘Motel Nirvana’. She has published three Arctic mysteries featuring the Inuit detective Edie Kiglatuk under the name MJ McGrath, the first of which, ‘The Boy in the Snow’, was shortlisted for a CWA Gold Dagger.

In the last year she has been one of the founders and moving lights of the website Killer Women, which has rapidly established itself as one of the key forums for crime writing in the UK. This new standalone marks a change in direction.

Links-https://melaniemcgrath.com/

 http://killerwomen.org/

Twitter @HQstories

@mcgrathmj