Every Contact Leaves A Trace
Written by Elanor Dymott
Narrated by Simon Vance
3/5
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About this audiobook
“This is more than a murder mystery. It’s an examination of the subjectivity of accounts of truth. It’s a desperately moving love story about a lonely man who finds salvation in another only to have the idyll destroyed. Finally, it’s a tale of revenge, served cold and deadly.” —The Independent
Elanor Dymott’s gorgeous debut tells the story of Alex, a solitary lawyer who has finally found love in the form of his beautiful wife, Rachel. When Rachel is brutally murdered one midsummer night on the grounds of their alma mater, Worcester College, Oxford, Alex’s life as he knows it vanishes.
He returns to Oxford that winter, and, through the shroud of his shock and grief, tries to piece together the mystery surrounding his wife’s death. Playing host to Alex’s winter visit is Harry, Rachel’s former tutor and trusted mentor, who turns out to have been involved in almost every significant development of their relationship. Alex also turns to Evie, Rachel’s self-centered and difficult godmother, whose jealousy of her charge has waxed and waned over the years. And then there are her university friends, Anthony and Cissy, who shared with Rachel her taste for literature and for the illicit.
As he delves further into the mystery surrounding her death, Alex discovers in Rachel’s wake a tangled web of sex and jealousy, of would-be lovers and spiteful friends, of the poetry of Robert Browning, and of blackmail. Brilliantly written and suffused with eroticism, mystery, and a hint of menace, Every Contact Leaves A Trace introduces a stunning new voice in contemporary fiction.
Elanor Dymott
Elanor Dymott was born in Chingola, Zambia, in 1973. She studied literature at Worcester College, Oxford, later working as a commercial lawyer and legal reporter. She lives in London, where she plays jazz flute and is writing a new novel.
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Reviews for Every Contact Leaves A Trace
25 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5'If you were to ask me to tell you about my wife, I would have to warn you at the outset that I don't know a great deal about her. Or at least, not as much as I thought I did...' So speaks Alex, the narrator of this unforgettable literary thriller. Alex is in his thirties, a solitary man who has finally found love in the form of his beautiful and vivacious wife, Rachel. When Rachel is brutally murdered one Midsummer Night by the lake in the grounds of their alma mater, Worcester College, Oxford, Alex's life as he knew it vanishes. He returns to Oxford that winter, and through the shroud of his shock and grief, begins to try to piece together the mystery surrounding his wife's death. Playing host to Alex's winter visit is Harry, Rachel's former tutor and trusted mentor, who turns out to have been involved in some way in almost every significant development of their relationship throughout their undergraduate years.My Thoughts:At book group we were all given a copy of ‘We Love This Book’ and inside Linwood Barclay has written an article on ‘domestic thrillers’ He explore this genre saying what if the killer is not unknown but actually somebody we live with, are married too, and they are not who we thought they are. There are some book recommended within the genre of ‘domesctic thrillers’ one of which is the brilliant’Before I go to Sleep’ by S J Watson. I had a read about the other recommendations and this book was one of themThere has been some negative reviews on Amazon about this book, and I can see where they are coming from. The book is one long narrative and it does seem that nothing much happens and it could have been a lot shorter. It opens with the murder of rachel, wife of Alex and has he tries to determine what happened and why he uncovers some things about his wife that he really knew nothing about.I thought about this book and the character of Rachel reminds me in a roundabout way of Rebecca. However with Rebecca she only loved herself and was very selfish, Rachel did love Alex.Although the book was a little longwinded I did find something compelling about it and did want to finish it for the whys and why nots. I think in this genre there are better books out there like the SJ Watson one but I do feel that it was an OK read you just need to stick with it.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I enjoyed the first half of this book. The author creates some wonderful image - the protagonist, Alex, comparing himself, at a time of immense confusion, to a tapestry, held in a frame, with shuttles rattling above and below him, and threads running back and forth beneath his skin particularly sticks in my mind.
I liked the way the story gently unfolds, not in a completely chronological order, but as Alex remembers events, making the book feel almost like a conversation.
Unfortunately, this method can inevitably only tell half the story, and so it is that halfway through, rather than being the Alex's memories, we get the protagonist telling us a version of events that was described to him by someone else. This second half, as a result, feels somewhat laboured, and towards the end of the book, I found myself getting annoyed with the slow pace things seemed to move over the last 30-40 pages.
I also found myself getting annoyed with the characters, with whom I had no sympathy or empathy. We are given snippets of information about the central couple, Alex and Rachel, perhaps aimed at explaining the behaviours leading to the events in the story, but we are not told enough, we are left hanging. There are numerous references to a significant event in the Alex's childhood, but we never discover what actually happened. Do we need to know? Perhaps not, perhaps it is enough to know it, and other events, impacted on the Alex's emotional growth, but with so many references to the events, some further information would be better.