It’d been awhile since I read a new thriller, so I was pretty excited when Beautiful Bad arrived from the library. Before you get too excited, though, you should know that this book ended up on the DNF pile. *Womp womp*
Apart from it sounding like a good thriller, I was originally drawn to Beautiful Bad because of the exotic locations in which part of the story is set. While the novel starts with a present-day crime scene, a lot of the first 100 pages or so are devoted to backstory taking place in Bulgaria, where narrator Maddie is a professor/travel journalist, and in Macedonia, where Maddie’s best friend Joanna works as a kind of human rights volunteer.
Bulgaria and Macedonia aren’t usual places for stories to be set – at least, not for most American literature – so I loved seeing these foreign countries through Maddie’s appreciative eyes. Author Annie Ward does a wonderful job of conveying the rustic beauty of the landscapes, the culture of the people, and the delicious local delicacies the girls encounter during their travels. Ward also takes care not to mask the harsh conditions under which people in both countries live, with Macedonia obviously being the worse off of the two. You see the best these locales have to offer, all while seeing the worst, too. These detailed, almost reverent descriptions are what I enjoyed most about Beautiful Bad, and they’re admittedly what kept me going for as long as I did (about 150 pages).
The teaser for Beautiful Bad on the cover is “The perfect marriage leads to the perfect crime” – but from what I was reading in the never-ending backstory, the love affair between Maddie and her husband, Ian, was far from perfect. Honestly, I’m shocked it ever got off the ground, at the rate it was going.
You go into Beautiful Bad knowing that present-day Maddie has suffered a severe accident and that her husband is possibly to blame; then, you’re hit with the backstory of how they met and ended up together. While wading through their days of romance past, I honestly didn’t feel the magic that supposedly drew Maddie and Ian to each other. Perhaps if I had felt a deeper connection between the characters, I would have cared more about whether Ian decided to bludgeon his wife or not.
Interestingly, the Beautiful Bad story set-up reminded me a lot of Gone Girl (which I also never finished reading, but I’ve seen the movie): the seemingly perfect husband is revealed as a possible suspect, then the reader is flooded with courtship flashbacks to either plant the seed of doubt, or remove it all together, about the husband’s self-professed innocence.
I gave up reading Beautiful Bad for the same reason I stopped reading The Witch Elm – I thought I was being handed a thriller, or at least a suspenseful novel. But, apart from a few peeks at a murky crime scene and a mentally imbalanced, present-day Maddie, there just wasn’t any real action taking place. There is just a lot of backstory – mostly about Maddie and Joanna’s relationship, which also weirdly involves Ian. Present-day Maddie grapples with the loss of Joanna’s friendship, so you know something went very wrong between their long, girly visits in Macedonia and Maddie’s accident. However, much like Maddie and Ian’s relationship, I didn’t really understand what drew these two “friends” together in the first place. You’re aware that Maddie really valued Joanna’s friendship because of how she mourns its loss in the present day, but, based on what’s revealed in the backstory, I couldn’t figure out why.
All this relationship drama, both platonic and romantic, in the story would have been okay, again, if I hadn’t been expecting a little (a lot) more action. I realize the author is probably setting the reader up (very slowly) for what comes after the introductory crime scene she dangled in front of us, but… it just takes too damn long to get there. I want murder! I want action! I want someone thrown in jail! Or, at least, hauled off to the police station based on some very strong suspicions and circumstantial evidence.
With disappointed hopes, I closed Beautiful Bad and sent it back to my library. It wasn’t all for naught, though, since I did get a book-inspired recipe out of it. Maddie’s detailed descriptions of the delicious food she and Joanna share in Macedonia made my mouth water, so stay tuned for my Chickpea Shepherd’s Salad!
Thanks for the book review. I like thriller novels and the backstory, but if it drags on I am not interested either. Have you read any of the Lisa Gardner novels? I am into that right now since it is an easy read.
Glad I’m not the only impatient one. 😁 And, no, I haven’t read anything by Gardner, but I just looked her up and her stuff looks good!