Review: The Beresford, by Will Carver

Just outside the city – any city, every city – is a grand, spacious but affordable apartment building called The Beresford.

There’s a routine at The Beresford.

For Mrs May, every day’s the same: a cup of cold, black coffee in the morning, pruning roses, checking on her tenants, wine, prayer and an afternoon nap. She never leaves the building.

Abe Schwartz also lives at The Beresford. His housemate Smythe no longer does. Because Abe just killed him. In exactly sixty seconds, Blair Conroy will ring the doorbell to her new home and Abe will answer the door. They will become friends.

Perhaps lovers.

And, when the time comes for one of them to die, as is always the case at The Beresford, there will be sixty seconds to move the body before the next unknowing soul arrives at the door.

Because nothing changes at The Beresford, until the doorbell
rings…

My Review

Thanks to Karen at Orenda for one of the rare ARCs and to Anne for organising this blog tour. I have one of Will Carver’s other books although it’s still on my TBR pile even though I bought it at the Orenda On Tour event I went to last February before the world shut down. I’ve had a lot on.

It was fabulous to be asked to join this tour and to get a chance to read Will’s new book. I am still ill, however, so you’re going to have to accept I might not write the best review at the moment, and I might not have finished the book when I write it. At 322 pages, it isn’t the longest book I’ve read this week, but I only have a day to read it and write the review. Given my need to sleep all the time at the moment, it’s a miracle I’ve read it at all.

This book starts with a murder and just gets stranger. I had no idea what was going on for the first half a dozen chapters, nothing made sense. And then I realised it probably isn’t meant to, since the POV characters can’t really make sense of what is going on around them. Why did Abe murder his neighbour? How old is Mrs May, really? What on earth is going on at The Beresford?

The way it is described in the early chapters reminds me of the Hotel Cecil on Skid Row, L.A. – a place split between residential flats and a hotel, with separate doors for each area, where a serial killer took up residence during his killing spree (Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker), and where in the 2000s a young woman went missing and was found a couple of weeks alter on the roof without her clothes. It’s a pretty iconic reference point if you’re a true crime aficionado. I don’t know that Will Carver was definitely thinking of the Cecil when he described the layout of The Beresford, but it certainly set the tone for mad and bad going’s-on.

Update

It’s Thursday morning and the post is due to go live in an hour. I’m still coughing, my throat hurts, and my body is achy. I’m halfway through the novel. It’s taking a lot of effort to write, but I’m dosed up on Honey and Ginger Lemsip, so Rosie gonna give it a go.

I’m still not sure what’s going on at The Beresford, except murder and lots of desperate people needing a refuge. I am definitely enjoying the mystery and the writing is great. The characters of Abe and Mrs May are the strongest, while the transient characters of Blair, Gail and Sythe are less so, although still interesting.

The Gail backstory is really affecting, and highlights the complexities of domestic abuse and PTSD, whether in survivors or in perpetrators. The combat veteran with PTSD who actually goes to therapy must be a modern phenomena – none of mine did, and they really could have done with it. The dealing with stress and trauma by getting drunk, is however a perennial coping mechanism.

It’s a complex and fascinating novel, and I’m going to get it finished, because I really, really need to know what is going on!

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ABOUT WILL CARVER

Welcome back to the Carver-verse…
Rosemary’s Baby meets mayhem, in a startling, high-concept, nerve shredding standalone literary thriller by the critically acclaimed author of Nothing Important Happened Today and Hinton Hollow Death Trip.
Will Carver is the international bestselling author of the January David series.

He spent his early years in Germany, but returned to the UK at age eleven, when his sporting career took off. He turned down a professional rugby contract to study theatre and television at King Alfred’s, Winchester, where he set up a successful theatre company. He currently runs his own fitness and nutrition company, and lives in Reading with his two children. Will’s latest title published by Orenda Books, Hinton Hollow Death Trip was longlisted for the Not the Booker Prize, while Nothing Important Happened Today was longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year and for the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell. Good Samaritans was a book of the year in Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Express, and hit number one on the eBook charts.