{"id":1869,"date":"2022-12-01T21:23:16","date_gmt":"2022-12-01T21:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=1869"},"modified":"2023-03-11T16:33:17","modified_gmt":"2023-03-11T16:33:17","slug":"speak-of-the-devil-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=1869","title":{"rendered":"Speak of the Devil"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jamie Spellman is dead and nobody\u2019s sorry. The women in his life are not only fine with the loss, we find eight of them sitting in a disused room above a Manchester pub with Jamie\u2019s head on the table before them, a smell of \u201crot and pennies\u201d in the air. One of them probably did the gruesome deed, but it\u2019s hard to tell who when the story of each woman\u2019s awful interactions with loathsome Jamie gets underway. It could have been his wife, Sadia; god knows he treated her badly enough. But Kaysha, the journalist investigating the story, knows that even though it\u2019s always the spouse, the other women had equally valid reasons to hasten Jamie\u2019s end. Another possibility is the teenager he was stringing along. Or maybe the mother who\u2019s lost a daughter thanks to Jamie. Everyone\u2019s got a story, and as they unspool, a lot is squeezed in, from infertility to alcoholism and from anger-fueled affairs to vicious gaslighting. It all comes together to link the women, whose stories converge in a way that will appeal to Kate Atkinson\u2019s readers, and to create an ending that brings us back to that head on the table, but in a twisting, unexpected way. <strong>This debut author is one to watch.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jamie Spellman is dead and nobody\u2019s sorry. The women in his life are not only fine with the loss, we find eight of them sitting in a disused room above&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1964,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[50,51],"class_list":["post-1869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-suspense","tag-thrillers"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Speak-of-the-Devil-1-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Speak-of-the-Devil-1-400x600.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}