Unfortunately I was persuaded to try this following many five star reviews - initially I found the dark humour quite funny but have to be honest and say after reaching 26% of the book, I have finally given up. I found that having listened to a quarter of this book I was no longer interested and felt that I had got this far and as of yet nothing had really happened very slow and dragged out and no longer held my interest.

Can you have a genuinely funny novel about a serial killer? The rave reviews for Joanna Cannon’s third novel would answer that with a resounding yes!!

We are in suburbia and murder is afoot. Enter Linda our narrator. This was an audiobook for me & Lissa Berry @melysbee had a very Cardiffian accent - indeed the author made Linda Welsh as a result of hearing an early reading by her!

Linda doesn’t have the happiest of lives. Always on the outside & craving friends - most reviewers love her. For me, to be honest, I wanted to shake her!! She is so positive in the face of so so many rejections. She was unlike the feisty Welsh women I know!!! But as a characterisation she is so well drawn … & wait for that ending!

What makes this book for me is the sublime writing:

To describe her evil mum: “the kind of person who had far more coasters than people she knew”
To describe her small life: “alone with the smell of a thousand other empty plates to come …. the washing machine spinning out the soundtrack of our lives”

With her writing @drjocannon spins out a creepy, claustrophobic suburbia that I’m not sure you’d want to live in. But it is so well described you can picture every detail, every minor cast member.

And what about that Tidy Ending? Well it is very tidy! Very clever - a book you want to go back through to comb your mind for all the signposts your first read sailed by 😊

An absolutely beautifully written and read novel, filled with the author's trademark insights, empathy and black humour. I love the way Joanna Cannon writes and here the narrator, Lissa Berry, magnificently brings Linda's world to life. The characterisation is so well done and the narrator really captures the strengths of the author's writing- the dialogue and the observations of daily life which really resonated with me and made me smile. The author's love for humanity once again shines through and the narrator portrays this perfectly.
One of my favourite listens of the year and I was sad when it ended. Highly recommended

An intriguing thriller with lots of twists and turns to keep you thinking throughout.

Narrated by seemingly downtrodden Linda who survived a traumatic event in her childhood and now seems to be living in the neighbourhood besieged by a serial killer. The tale introduces us to her boredom with her domestic situation; husband Terry who seems more interested in what's on TV than her and her attempts to make friends with firstly her boss, Tamsin, and then the woman who seems to have previously occupied her current home Rebecca.

Weaving multiple story lines into a reveling ending, this is a great story of revenge and plotting with multiple well-crafted red herrings and possibilities. Leaving you possibly with a few questions towards the end, this is a great book which reminds you that things aren't always what they seem.

This book is told from the point of view of Linda, a 42 year old, part-time charity shop worker, and a splendid housewife who loves to clean. She is married to Terry, but their marriage is somewhat stale, it is clear that she finds her husband a bit annoying.

Linda is socially awkward, she doesn’t fit in but she desperately wants to – she is a good observer of how others react in certain situations and she tries to copy that behaviour.

In her local area, two women have been murdered and the press reckon the cases are connected. Linda listens to the news with huge interest, as opposed to her husband Terry who according to his wife ‘doesn’t like the news’. Terry seems to keep strange hours at work, disappearing in his van for ages, and one day whilst unpacking donations at work, Linda discovers a leather jacket that looks just like Terry’s. Upon closer inspection, she realises it is her husband’s jacket… Why would he donate goods to a charity shop behind Linda’s back? Has he something to hide?

One day, a shopping catalogue comes through the letterbox and Linda immediately opens it without realising it was addressed to someone else, a woman called Rebecca Finch. As Linda and Terry recently moved into their house, she quickly realises that Rebecca must have been the previous occupant. Linda is desperate to find more information on Rebecca… Is it verging on obsession?

You’ll have to read this book for yourselves to find out. I loved Linda as a character, and Lissa Berry’s narration has brought the character alive for me.

The book is told entirely from Linda’s perspective: we get to find out her sad childhood which she and her mother tried desperately to leave behind in Wales. We find out that Linda wants more from her life, she wants to be liked, she wants to be just like Rebecca.

I found Rebecca’s behaviour towards Linda appalling, some of the comments she made to her were cruel. There was some dark humour thrown in, as Linda tried to explain her new friend’s behaviour to herself.

I also liked Linda’s mother – she was such a force, a formidable woman, and yet a bit oppressive and very critical towards Linda. As she didn’t have any siblings, Linda and her mother are very close, their bond is clearly distinct.

I was listening to this audiobook each spare minute I had, it was so addictive. I wanted to find out what would happen to Linda and Rebecca, and whether the killer would be uncovered.

Just when I thought I had it all figured out, Cannon threw in a few twists along the way, which made me gasp. Let me just say that the title is extremely apt!

I definitely recommend this book. This was my first one by Joanna Cannon, but it won’t be my last. I plan to read her previous books.

Thank you to Harper Collins for approving my NetGalley request to listen to this audiobook. It’s hugely appreciated.

I enjoyed the story and the narrator of this book but it didn’t grab my attention. The story itself started slow but was easy to drop in and out of.

The addition of the q&a with the author and narrator was a good touch though.

I liked the narration of this book. It added to the charm.
The story itself is quite old-fashioned but not in a bad way. It is what I think of as a gentle crime book. In fact the actual murders that occur throughout the book appear very much as background noise, playing a supporting role to what is occurring in Linda's life.
The character of Linda is hilarious. She is a real eyebrow raiser of a woman who both frustrated me and made me spit out my tea in amusement.
Oh, and the end is sublime.

A Tidy Ending is a story of under-estimating people at your peril and written with deadpan humour. Linda becomes completely obsessed with tracking down the mysterious Rebecca, completely unaware of how this will damage her life as she knows it. The unreliable narrator makes this book a complete enigma and I don't think I'd believe what we were told if i read it ten times. It has definately made me want to read the rest of Joanna Cannons books and if you like a perplexing mystery this is perfect. #netgalley #ATidyEnding

Normally I can be a bit apprehensive of flash-forwards, but the use of the 2 timelines slowly converging was really good at creating suspense and moving the story forward.

The way Linda was written was excellent and empathetic, it made you understand how she thinks about things, whilst as the same time realising it’s very different to how most people would process the events she encounters. I did feel very protective of Linda as time went on and she seemed to be taken advantage of at every turn when all she really wanted was some friends.

It was an interesting style of book and ending has some great twists, I would definitely read more by this author and recommend this to any crime fiction lovers!

Thank you so much to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for a chance to listen to this audiobook!

Despite this book being over 10 hours long, I finished it in less than 3 days…. Which possibly says all that you need to know.

This story is told from the perspective of Linda, who is socially awkward, and lacks the close friendships that she craves. Her relationship with her husband isn’t quite the perfect scenario either. She’s escaped Wales and her childhood to live in a small neighbourhood elsewhere, but can she ever escape her past fully?

When a series of murders begin in her local community, Joanna Cannon keeps us guessing till the very end.

This book was interesting, however, it didn't really hold my full attention.

Linda and Terry are married and living a mundane life, with her working in a charity shop and him working in a factory. Linda has unusual and quirky traits, which reminded me a bit of Eleanor Oliphant. She is socially awkward and she has fixations, one being Rebecca who used to live in her house. The police question Linda as Terry has been acting strange, and they want to find out what he has been up to. Some people have been murdered where they live, and the police are trying to find out who the murderer is. Linda seems to be confused at what is happening, and she ends up having a lot to contend with.

The audiobook narrator had an accent which was perfect for the story, and she definitely sounded as I imagined Linda to be.

Many thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Darkly hilarious and so many twists and turns, you could be headed down a country lane! This is certainly an original story, that follows Linda - one of life's misfits. Despite her troubled past and her husband's fishy behaviour, she continues to try and find the best in things...

I love an unreliable/ slightly off base narrative perspective and this character driven tale is utterly compelling.

CW for references to suicide, with allusions to allegations of child abuse. Nothing explicit, so could be recommended to mature students, Yr 11+

Fresh, original, poignant and laugh out loud funny. This is a belter of a book and it really took my by surprise. The narrative is from the perspective of Linda, one of life’s misfits. She’s had a troubled past, is married, overweight and goes about her mundane life largely unseen by others. Husband Terry uses her as a doormat and her mother is opinionated and off kilter too. There’s a dual timeline, which explores past events involving her father and explains some of the reasons for Linda being ostracised and then developing some compulsive behaviours. But Linda is not as she first seems.

She’s the absolute star of this story, a strong plot driven exploration of people and what makes them tick. There’s a plot tying it all together, but I was more interested in Linda and those whose lives she touched in various ways. She’s shrewd and as the story unfolded, my sympathy for her grew. I wanted her to realise she was a person in her own right and didn’t need to aspire to be someone different. I sensed her desperation to make friends and her fortitude in the face of every adversity through the story was at times almost heartbreaking.

Joanna Cannon has captured, to perfection, the common human condition. There are so many brilliant one liners that sum up the sadness and betrayals. It’s an ordinary tale of diverse people and their motivations. It’s told in an extraordinary way; I was desperate to find out what happened and the twists were jaw dropping. The narration throughout was perfect. Measured and haunting as Linda went about her daily life.

This book has been a totally unexpected pleasure. Ideal for book club discussion but a story which I’ll return to in hard copy to relish again. And that’s something I rarely do.

My thanks to the publisher for a review copy via Netgalley.

Thoroughly enjoyed this listen. Linda's character developed very nicely, becoming more and more interesting up until the end. This was my first book from Joanna Cannon but I will now look into other books from this author.
An easy, funny and interesting read, that I definitely recommend!
Thanks for the opportunity to listen to this ARC.

In a Nutshell: Outlier review alert! Strongly mixed feelings, but the ending was too farfetched for me to relish the overall book. I started off with 4.5 stars and my rating kept steadily dipping as I progressed through the book.

Story:
Linda has a dark secret connected to her childhood in Wales. Now she lives in a quiet suburban neighbourhood with her husband Terry. While she goes about her routine work, she wonders if there’s more to life, as she can see in the glossy magazines that keep coming to her house, but addressed to the earlier owner Rebecca Finch. Linda decides that the best way for her to have the lifestyle she wants is to track down Rebecca and emulate her. While all this is happening, there are some young girls murdered in the neighbourhood and Terry is suddenly acting fishy. If there any connection between all of these happenings? You’ll need to read the book and find out.
The story is written in the first person perspective of Linda and comes from two timelines – 'Now' and what I suppose is 'Then'.

The story has four broad tracks – Linda’s dark past, the girls’ murders, Terry’s fishy behaviour, and Lind’s obsession with Rebecca Finch. While there is an underlying thread connecting everything, it doesn’t become apparent until the final 10% or so. So it is a long, slow-drawn-out book where the middle seems very repetitive. (Having the audiobook helped somewhat with the slow pacing.)

On the positive side, there is plenty of dark humour in the book. There are plenty of quotable quotes. The two timelines generate enough of a curiosity to know what’s happening (though this doesn’t work very well in the audiobook.)

Linda’s character is what will make or break the book for you. She is too sure of herself and her capability to judge people and situations, but it is very clear to us that she always jumps to the wrong conclusions. For most of the book, she comes out as likeable but overly naïve. Her fondness for her father despite the dark secret and her complicated relationship with her toxic mother make her more vulnerable in our eyes. But then comes the big reveal in the climax and it feels like we have been taken for a ride. This was where the book failed me. An unreliable narrator needs to be written very carefully in order to be convincing at the end, all the more so if the narration is in first person. A sudden turnaround doesn’t make any sense. Moreover, a character being unreliable unknowingly is very different from one acting unreliable deliberately. The latter style never works for me.

Most of the characters aren’t layered. None of the characters are likeable. Linda comes close to being pitied but even that disappears as the story progresses and she turns quite annoying. Hardly anything happens till the first 80% and then there’s a surge of activity. Linda’s character is stuck on repeat ‘duh’ mode until the surprise climax. There’s loads of rambling as well, a disappointing side-effect of the unreliable first person pov. I would have still rated this book a 3.5 had it had a better ending. But it was too farfetched for my liking and came out of nowhere. I always prefer endings to be gradually built up from the plot. (Such an irony that I hated the ending of a book named “A Tidy Ending”!)

The audiobook, clocking at almost 11 hours, is narrated by Lissa Berry. She does a good job of narrating Linda and has a lovely, honey-smooth voice but I somehow kept tuning off from her narration due to the way Linda’s character was written. It took me 3-4 tries to get into the audiobook and stay focussed. I think I might have liked this somewhat more if I had read it instead of trying the audio version.

Lately, there have been too many books on dysfunctional characters with mental health issues, so a book needs to have something special to make it stand out. This one didn’t do anything for me. I feel that I might have liked this book slightly more if I had read it, but I doubt it would have been a 5 star read for me even then. It was more tedious than tidy for me.

Then again, this is an outlier opinion. So please check out the other reviews before you make up your mind. Note that Goodreads is showing this book to be a mystery. There’s hardly any edge-of-the-seat kind of suspense in the story. Most of it reads like contemporary drama. So keep your expectations in accordance with this. This will work very well for book club discussions.

2 stars.

My thanks to HarperCollins UK Audio and NetGalley for the ALC of “A Tidy Ending”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook. Sorry this didn’t work out so well.

Oh Joanna, you got me!

My first Cannon, though I've tried her others and couldn't find the hook to keep me going. This time, that wasn't a problem. I loved the audio version with Linda's lilting Welsh accent, and her 'is she or is she not quite reliable?' narration.

I thought I was getting myself immersed inside a story about a woman with delusional tendencies - Linda is jaded, bored, frustrated within a tedious marriage. When post belonging to her new home's previous owner starts turning up, post that shows 'Rebecca' might be the glamorous, exciting and aspirational figure Linda wants to be herself, Linda determines to find the woman she sees as her future best friend.

But while this is going on, Linda's husband Terry is also behaving unusually. The locale is exploding with rumours and worries over a growing series of murders of young women. Linda's mother is playing detective and still finding time to criticise her daughter. And Linda also starts revealing details of her own family tragedy and father.

There are moments of crushing discomfort and 'cringe', there are some that are humorous. Watching Linda 'aspire', make excuses, delude herself, interact with her mother - this feels like real life with an authorial lens focused in sharp, pinpointing moments of note in even the most mundane-seeming lives. And Linda herself is far more complex than the opening chapters might make you confidently feel.

I started this feeling Rebecca might become a Mrs De Winter character, and there were moments of this, but this turns into much more of a very dark black comedy, with a murder investigation coming ever closer to Our Linda's street.

The ending absolutely got me, I was very impressed with the author's ability to pull everything together and keep so much from us.

Only one thing I wanted more of, and that was the last few strands and moments of Linda's father's story, not everything there was fully explained to my satisfaction. But Linda? She's not going to be your Heroine, maybe, but her voice is in my head now, and I certainly found myself compelled to listen longer and longer to get to the end.

Brilliant storytelling, and I loved the interview with the author at the end, some great insights.

With thanks to Netgalley for providing a sample audio copy.

Wow! I don’t know where to start with this one. What an unexpected journey this one was. There’s a content warning/potential spoiler that some readers might want to be aware of - check out at the end for more detail.

So this takes you to dual timelines as you follow our main character, Linda - before (where you spend most of the time) and the now. Cannon is great at pulling the reader along as little snippets are revealed slowly, slowly ever so slowly - she really had me hooked.

Linda is a hard character to inhabit - she’s a simple soul with a desire for everything to be just so, shes quite particular. But she’s also socially awkward and all this leads to some people taking advantage as she tries to fit in.

But as the pieces of the puzzle slowly falls into place, the big reveal hit me like a sucker punch. I did not see that coming at all! Such a cleverly plotted story and Berry dies a fantastic job on narration duties

Thanks to NetGalley, the team at Harper Collins UK Audio, and the author for the opportunity to listen to this review copy.


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⚠️Content warning/potential spoilers: there’s reference to suicide and the effect on the bereaved ⚠️

I particularly enjoyed the narration. The narrator narrated the book beautifully, and I loved the depictions of the different characters. Such a wonderful book. Utterly unique, exquisitely crafted and quietly powerful.

Narrator 5 stars
Fantastic narrator, such a soothing voice

Story 5 stars
I went into this story blind without really reading what is was about and I'm so glad I did.
It was so unique and quirky. Loved it!

A Tidy Ending is another fantastic novel from Joanna Cannon who has the ability to write the most amazing darkly comical novels full of plot twists and intriguing characters. Linda is married to Terry and works in a local charity shop. She has her own unique way of looking at the world and is very interested in what’s going on around her. When several women are murdered in her neighbourhood, suspicion falls on several people and brings back memories of her childhood and accusations against her father.
Linda is an amazing character and is so well written with her individual quirks and autistic traits. The people who are dismissive of her do so at their own cost.
This audiobook comes highly recommended and has one of the best narrators I’ve listened to in some time.