Keeper

Sometimes you pick up a book and you don't know what you expected but it wasn't what you got. I feel a bit like that with Keeper. I had a vague sense of what to expect but I also knew that despite the storyline it didn't seem to be a typical crime novel.

Keeper is billed as a literary thriller. It's a book of two stories: Then and Now. One of the strands concentrates on the discovery of a young woman's body in a river. Katie worked at a women's refuge and whilst the police have no evidence to suggest her death was anything but a suicide, the women of the refuge think otherwise. We are given some background to each of the women's stories, reinforcing the fact that abuse and manipulation come in many different forms.

The other strand show more follows Katie before she worked at the refuge and what led her to be where she is now in her life. I'm going to keep schtum about the rest of her story. I feel the blurb is deliberately vague so as to let everything unfold gradually as we flit between the two elements of the story.

For quite a bit of the book the two strands seemed to be quite separate. They were obviously linked but they were following different trajectories and I couldn't quite see how they would become entwined. It's such a cleverly plotted book though and I'm so impressed at how Jessica Moor did gradually pull the threads together.

For me it was quite a gradual build up for the first two thirds of the book, still drawing me in but the pieces weren't slotting into place yet. And then in the last third it all came together. There was a hand over the mouth moment and I, quite unexpectedly, cried a lot. The overriding theme of control is both shocking and moving in equal measures.

Keeper is an incredibly hard-hitting book, and an important read for both men and women. Some of my favourite books are ones that surprise me and affect me emotionally. I can't pretend it's not an uncomfortable read and I feel like what happens to the women in it could happen to any one of us. This is a book that will stay with me for sure. show less

Set outside of Manchester, the debut thriller by Jessica Moor is a dark and atmospheric tale with an ending twist that surprised me. The book goes back and forth between when a young woman meets and begins a relationship with a seemingly nice young man and after her body has been pulled from the river as an apparent suicide, where there are just enough questions to warrant an investigation.

The story is cleverly constructed and while the signs add up in the story of Katie's relationship, it's because the reader is also following two detectives as they attempt to find out about her past. She was working in a shelter for battered women when she went missing, so finding out about her involves getting to know the group of women who are show more taking refuge there, from a teenage girl beaten to the point of needing to be hospitalized by her younger brother, to a seventy year old woman who took 49 years to leave her abusive husband. The two detectives, especially the older one, is dismissive and skeptical of the women's fears and both dislike the abrasive woman who runs the house.

A lot of this novel is disturbing to read, focusing as it does on a variety of ways women are abused by those they are closest to. It might have easily been ham-handed or preachy, but is saved by the way the two male detectives are drawn and in that startling but logical twist at the end. I'm eager to read Moor's next novel. show less

I thought this book would be a simple, mindless thriller, but it ended up affecting me deeply. The story is alternately heartbreaking, maddening, horrifying, and frustrating. The plot is structured well, and the twist at the end shocked me.

The author describes an abusive/coercive relationship so well that readers will feel the victim's initial ambivalence, growing unease, and ultimate terror. The police officers who are meant to serve and protect victims turn out to be patronizing, ignorant, incurious, prejudiced, and even worse. This story is a good reminder of why reformers advocate to defund the police: they are at best ineffectual and at worst actively working against justice. (I was reminded of ProPublica's investigations into the show more police forces in Alaska.) Recommended for all readers. show less

When a young woman’s drowned body is discovered, a lack of markings leads the police to believe their investigation will show she died by suicide. However Detective Whitworth’s curiosity is piqued when he first learns Katie Straw worked at a women’s refuge, and then that her name is an alias.

Keeper unfolds over two timelines, ‘Now’ - which follows the police investigation and in doing so explores the lives of the women in the refuge, and ‘Then’ - which reveals Katie’s history. The latter is an emotionally harrowing tale of a young woman drawn into a relationship with a frighteningly manipulative man.

Keeper centers around a very important topic - that of domestic/intimate partner violence in its many forms. I thought show more Moor’s portrayal of the issue’s complexity was nuanced and thought-provoking, and her diverse characters, including the detective, represent a spectrum of related perspectives and experiences.

Unfortunately though I didn’t find the execution compelling. The pace is slow, the tension is slight, and I really wasn’t surprised by the final twist designed to shock (though I think it’s likely I’ll be in the minority there). It’s also bleak, which is probably how it earned the literary tag.

In the end I’m a little torn, while I think Keeper is a socially valuable, and even interesting read, I just didn’t find entertaining show less

I was fortunate to win a copy of The Keeper via Goodreads. Thank you!
WOW! This book was, at times hard to read but only because Jessica Moor knew what she was writing about. This is a raw and sometimes dark look at manipulation and domestic violence. To see what women go through and sometimes go back to is heartbreaking. I have witnessed friends in these types of situations and, I have to admit, I never knew why they would stay in a toxic relationship....until I had one of my own. The smoothness of the narcissistic individual that 'weasels' his/her way into the life of someone, then gains control over everything they do is REAL! And Moor was able to capture this in The Keeper.

I am so happy to be the one starting this amazing blog tour for Keeper by Jessica Moor! Huge thank you to the team at Viking, for sending me a copy of the book, to read and provide an honest review.

Keeper by Jessica Moor is one of the most gripping thrillers I have read this year!

Synopsis:

When Katie Straw’s body is pulled from the waters of the local suicide spot, the police decide it’s an open-and-shut- case. A standard-issue female suicide.

But the residents of Widringham women’s refuge where Katie worked don’t agree. They say it’s murder.

Will you listen to them?

My Thoughts:

As soon as I started reading Keeper, I couldn’t put it down. The story is gripping from the very first moment, and the intensity keeps growing with show more each page.

Scenes from THEN and scenes from NOW give us a story of Katie’s life before, and the investigation of Katie’s death now. In the past, we get a detailed view of Katie’s life in her new relationship, and how it progresses from true love to something very unhealthy. In the current time, we meet a couple of refuge women, who all suffered domestic violence, as they are being interviewed by the detectives, in the hope to shine some light to Katie’s death.

There is no evidence to point out that Katie took her own life, but there is also no evidence to suggest that she has been killed. And the detectives now have to rely on small clues, to try and figure out what exactly happened that day. Some secrets that Katie kept also don’t help their investigation at all.

Even though this is Katie’s story, it is also the story of the refuge women. Even more so. Through their experiences, we can fully understand Katie’s perspective. And through their lives, we find out secrets hidden that should never have come to surface.

The main subject of the book is about domestic violence, both physical and psychological. This can be a trigger warning, as many scenes go into a lot of detail. We meet different characters that suffered in their relationships in different ways. And while they are in the refuge home, we see the aftermath that these relationships have on the women. Some women are unable to speak to men anymore. They are unable to trust people. Nothing is ever the same. And some decide to go back to that horrible environment, because it’s the only thing they know. On average, a woman tries to leave her partner seven times before she succeeds. This tells you all you need to know, of how hard it is to leave in the first place, and why it is so easy to also go back.

I loved the main mystery. The fact that we assume something happened to Katie, but we are not sure. It is not until the very end that we actually find out the truth. The plot twists in the end were very well done, and I really enjoyed that WOW factor. I have the urge to read the book again now, just to capture the secrets clues that were right in front of me, but I never saw them coming. I also loved the issue this book raises about domestic violence, the refuge centres, and how little help they are getting. Struggling for budgets and being ignored by large organisations is very a very common practice, and the women staying there can feel this, which results in them not feeling as safe as they should be, or not getting the help they really need.

Keeper is set in a very uncomfortable atmosphere. In each chapter, you can almost feel what these women are feeling, and even though I cannot relate to them, I could feel their pain and felt so anxious to help them. Jessica Moor was able to perfectly capture their fear, their anxiety, their struggle, and I could empathise with them.

Beautiful fast-paced thriller that you can’t put down, with amazing plot twists and topics so unfortunately common and infuriating! I definitely recommend it, you won’t be able to forget Keeper easily.

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Jessica Moor's debut is two books mashed together in a way that didn't work for me. The story of Katie, a young woman who escapes an abusive relationship to work in a women's refuge, took two thirds of the book to build.

Cutting between the Then of the abusive relationship and the Now of the police investigation into her death, the novel is peppered with half formed stereotypical characters whose lack of definition made them difficult to care about.

I was a quarter of the way from the end when I mentally told Moor to just get on with it.

There's a twist, of course, but you can see it coming a mile off.